Hello seasoned Corona devs,

I am in the midst of making my first game using Corona and some advice from the developers that have already created and published apps. Would it be beneficial enough to pay the enrollment fee from Apple to be able to test my app while in the early stages of development? Have many of you had many issues doing straight testing on the simulator and then testing on your device after it was complete? Any advice or knowledge shared is much appreciated.

Oh trust me, you don't want to develop only with the simulator. There are so many reasons that I don't even know where to start. But here's a few ones:

1) Performance on your computer is a lot better than on an actual device. So it may perform super smooth on your PC/Mac and lag like hell on the device

2) The Corona Simulator is not accurate enough. I've had many problems with stupid bugs that would prevent the game to work in the real iOS simulator (the one in the Apple SDK) / iPhone

3) The simulator doesn't support multitouch. You can't test it and if your game relies on pinch-to-zoom or any other multitouch related thingy, you're out of luck

4) I've changed many visual aspect of my game based on what I saw on the device VS in the simulator.

I could go on but trust me when I say it is absolutely necessary to test on the device in early stage.

+1 million on this! YES, it's a necessity for countless reasons why you must test on a device... multiple devices if possible. This is even more crucial if you're a beginner with Corona. Perhaps you have developed for mobile devices using other languages and understand the memory limitations, texture memory constraints, etc. Even if you have, it's still necessary to see how Corona does certain things.

oh my god I hate this forum

I wrote several paragraphs, hit "Save" and then got "Internal Server Error"

So sorry you're just going to get the abridged version: seth's point number 1 is very important. An example is tiling performance; first time I tried a tile map it worked great in the simulator but practically froze on device.

Testing on a device is a definite must. Seth's points are very true, and there are many other tangible bonuses from starting your testing at an early stage on a device. You might change the feel/function of your code, ui, and gameplay in completely un-anticipated ways once you get your hands on it and start "feeling" the experience.

The sim is great, and the Corona one doubly so because of its on-the-fly rapid prototyping/testing ability. It is still very much a "first pass" stage of constructing your project. You will need to do device testing for sure before submitting to the app store, so don't feel like you are wasting money by signing up a dev account ahead of time.

Dan
http://www.digitapp.com
http://twitter.com/digitapp

Guys, your advice has probably saved me many hours of future work. I appreciate your wisdom and thank you for being so willing to share your experience. I just completed my application for the developer program. Thanks again!