SpriteDeck for Corona was officially launched this morning. It's a rapid game design and development tool designed from the ground up for Corona.

Grab the latest build from here, http://www.spritedeck.com/download/

Here is an introductory tutorial to get you started, http://vimeo.com/19156399

And here is a tutorial on how to build comic book apps, http://vimeo.com/19156678

SpriteDeck is subscription based similar to Corona SDK. While still in beta, it's $10 USD/month. Sign up now and get beta pricing for life.

If you have any questions for comments, you can always reach me at zee@spritedeck.com

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Cheers,
Zee

Hey, that's really cool! Cooler than my tool!

You have spoken on Twitter and I have listened. We are scrapping the subscription model.

SpriteDeck now offers one-time, perpetual license for all. Take advantage of our beta pricing and get it for $49 USD. https://sites.fastspring.com/citrify/instant/spritedeckbeta

Cheers,
Zee

Damn. Too bad it requires Adobe Air. I was about to try it out and that stopped me in my tracks. I don't want Adobe Air littering my OSX system. And it looks like a really useful app too. doggone.

That's too bad, Tokyodan. I hope you would keep an open mind and give it a try. Adobe AIR runtime only comes up when you are using SpriteDeck. It does not take up system resource when SpriteDeck is off.

SpriteDeck was built by a very small team - one full time and one part time developer. Using AIR was the only way we could support rapid development on both Mac and Windows.

We were very careful with optimizing SpriteDeck on AIR - the cpu usage is less than 1% on idle and memory usage usually doesn't go over 80mb, unless you are loaded with a lot of heavy graphics.

Well, SpriteDeck looks so useful that I'm almost read to break down and install AIR

You can always uninstall AIR. Just run /Applications/Utilities/Adobe AIR Uninstall

Apparently there's a known bug installing Adobe AIR when you have previously installed the CS5 Trial (which I suspect many developers have).

Anyhow here's the fix:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/3272498#3272498
It's a script that fixes the problems with permissions and folder names that prevented the program from installing correctly. It might help other people that find themselves in the same situation.

As for program itself, it's extremely interesting. It's perfect for designing games with multiple levels! Too bad I'm not working on any like that at the moment (mainly because doing them all by hand didn't sound much fun). I might make it my next project though.

I was a bit disappointed that I found no way to incorporate spritesheets (maybe I missed it?). I've made it a habit to use spritesheets for all my animations, so that's sort of a deal breaker for me at the moment. Hopefully this gets added soon.

Thank you very much, Ignaciolturra! I was just dealing with the AIR 25 installer bug yesterday.

Spritesheet support is coming next week! SpriteDeck will automatically combine sprites into a spritesheet on export. I already have a prototype that does optimal sprite packing like TexturePacker.

Sweet! Automatically packing spritesheet would make SpriteDeck a terrific value. But what about already made Spritesheets? I'm really not looking forward to remaking them again for my existing projects. Ideally I just like to drop the sheet on the screen and that the program show the first frame (much like it does for animation right now).

Also an option to set them as evenly spaced would be nice when they are made by the program. If they're not evenly spaced it takes a lot more work to support different sheets for retina displays (if the program somehow did that work for us would be amazing, but I don't expect it).

Maybe an importer that slices sheets back to individual pieces, because the animation editor lets you re-arrange, add, or remove frames. I want to keep that consistent. but that's for later.

What do you mean by evenly spacing sprites?

That's exactly what I meant, that would rock.

By evenly spaced I mean that the frames are all the same size.

To support spritesheets on iphone 4 you have to load the double sized one and then scale it in half. That causes all sorts of shifting issues if they're not evenly spaced. I don't know of a way to fix them, but it could very well exist. In the dynamic resolution post in the blog today it's hinted that you need to mess with the data file, but nothing else is explained.

zeeyang,

I just sent you an email (sales@spritedeck.com) about SpriteDeck. The subject is something that I don't want to post here.

Looks quite interesting. I'm gonna check out the vids:)

Looks like it could be really useful for certain apps, such as the comic book editor, that was pretty cool.

Glad you dropped the subscription model. Paying monthly isn't very appealing, but getting rid of it all together and having a full one-time purchase license sounds pretty cool!

Hi,

Maybe you could add some basic information on your site. For example I'm missing an explanation on the difference between the trial and the licensed version.

Cheers

Agree with Tally. But can't wait to try this out tonight.

I agree that the site lacks a lot of detail in regards to product capability and a laundry list (even bullets) would go a long way in assisting in making a purchasing decision.

I tried the trial but other than moving the objects around and playing with the properties it seems somewhat limited (since you can't save or export code, obviously).

Otherwise it looks like a great tool and I am really happy that you ditched the quarterly billing model because it definitely isn't at a stage or have the functionality to warrant $120 USD a year.

Would love to see this tool grow.

Thanks for all the feedback. I just updated the site with some FAQ. http://www.spritedeck.com/learn/

In trial mode, you can export to Corona. The only thing you cannot do it saving the project (".deck") file.

Zee

We just got our sub-forum. Please redirect future posts in there. Thanks.

http://developer.anscamobile.com/forums/spritedeck

Zee

Hey I'm new to Corona and used to use GS. I use SpriteDeck and it's very useful especially for a visual person like me. When I run the game in the simulator, things look great. However, if I build it to my phone, the game looks distorted/small and pics are all diff sizes than in the simulator. Does anybody know why this is?

@cbistudios, can you send me the generated code and I'll take a look. zee@spritedeck.com.

SpriteDeck just got its sub-forum. Please post future questions here. http://developer.anscamobile.com/forums/spritedeck

Zee

I'm curious cbistudios, I seemed to have a similar problem. I made a game and when I opened the app on my phone the entire app was like on 1/4 of the iPhone portrait screen.

I did just download the new Corona SDK, I should try running it on the older (243) version and see if that has anything to do with it.

Yeah Zee is checking out my generated code. He like immediately responded lol talk about customer service. I'll let you know what happens.

It seems like you're running the game on an iphone 4 without a proper config.lua.

If that's the case look at the docs for proper settings or look at the Universal Builds forum, for a thread I made with decent settings that work with every iOS device.

My apologizes, my previous reply is posted in the wrong thread. I get email notifications of every time someone replies and I thought I was viewing another thread. Sorry about that.