Speed and learning curve

teo77

Hello everybody.
I always have been interested in programming, due to my curious nature (when i see something i like i always try to understand how it's been made\work....from pc to furnitures, cars, houses...).
I never managed to make anything serious, just tinkering as a hobby.
I read and tried a bit of C, and various basic powered languages.
Whit one of those i managed to write different bits of code, from pathfinders to movement, loading files and read values to make objecs etc etc.
The max i managed, gamewise, was to have a top down shoot-em up with different enemies, power ups, waves, scrolling backgrounds, tilemaps...just a simple 1 level demo.
To be honest it wasn't that difficult to learn, just the maths behind it took a little bit of effort.

So i thought that it would be cool to have my little app on my phone, just to show i can do it.
I was wondering how difficult it would be to start from scratch again with Gideros and Lua.
After browsing and getting info for days, i came to the conclusion that the above sound like a good combination for quick development on Android.
How long do you think it will take me to learn lua enough to make something like a simple shoot em up?
I know it's a difficult answer, but its just so i can decide if i really want to go ahead with it or not.
I will probably be able to dedicate 10 hours a week into it.
What do you think?

ar2rsawseen

@teo77
I'd suggest you just jump in and try creating it, and you will learn in the progress.

Start from small tasks, adding images, positioning them, moving them, etc. And then progress,

And for shooting game you probably can use Box2d physics engine, which basically means that a lot of calculations will be not needed, engine will do them for you, so maybe it will be even easier then your first try

teo77

thanks for your suggestions.
So far i managed to install everything correctly.
running few examples and i think the syntax isn't too difficult.
managed to compile and install the .apk on an android device.
i started to look more into the examples trying to modify them and...i found that finding a description of the various commands is a bit complicated (maybe it's me).
example: i can't find an explanation of the stage system, after 10 minutes of browsing i found a manual where i could find what "stage.addchild" does...
is documentation a feature of the paid version or is it me thats looking in the wrong places?

ar2rsawseen

@teo77 unfortunately there might be a lack of more thorough documentation, because team is spending all it's time on development, but that will change in future.

For now you can check the list of user contributed tutorials as:
http://giderostutorials.com/

Couple of official docs here:
http://www.giderosmobile.com/gideros-academy/

And Ultimate Guide which is a work in progress:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=149g_P1YlE4_6v_hHbFx3YAaYpdU0HoM70XJSLTE38ww