Corona: tvOS and Apple TV (Alpha)

10 November 2015

Corona: tvOS and Apple TV (Alpha)

Today, we’re happy to announce that an alpha version of tvOS (Apple TV) is available, starting in daily build 2015.2765.

Alpha vs Beta

Corona’s support for tvOS is currently in an alpha state. In a nutshell, this means we have proven that Corona can work on tvOS. Concretely, the ‘PewPew’ demo sample works, but almost no testing has been done beyond that.

We’ve learned it’s generally a bad idea to release things too early. As a result, we normally choose to delay things until they reach Beta-level maturity.

However, we felt it was important to give you an opportunity to play with tvOS/Apple TV — mainly because we think you’ll want the extra time to think about how you can migrate your existing titles to this platform.

New Interaction Model

While tvOS shares its heritage with iOS, there are many fundamental differences beyond just a much larger screen size. The biggest difference is touch. Unlike iOS, there is no touch interaction in tvOS.

Instead, the primary interaction model with Apple TV (and other TV platforms, for that matter) is via a remote. In the case of Apple TV’s remote, the remote can also act as a mini-game controller (Apple calls this a microgamepad).

In most cases, you will likely have to rethink how your users will interact with your games.

Road to Beta

When will this get to Beta?

It depends. Right now, our priority is bringing Mac App and Win32 App support from Beta to 1.0 quality. Because of that, tvOS sits at a lower priority.

While it may look like the Alpha is pretty far along, it’s not battle-ready in the way that our support for iOS and Android are.

In other words, we took all the low-hanging fruit to quickly put together enough pieces so you can play with AppleTV; however, we estimate a significant amount of work remains, especially in terms of features, polish, and quality.

Therefore, it’s fair to say you should not expect frequent of regular updates until we bring our other projects across the finish line.

Resources

In spite of the low priority and lack of completeness, we think this alpha will be useful for you. You will need time to re-think your games for a much larger screen and a pure game controller-based interaction model. And we will want feedback to help prioritize our tvOS efforts post-Mac/Win32 app.

• Corona: AppleTV and tvOS (Alpha) Guide
• Forums: Apple TV and tvOS Testing Forum
• The PewPew sample in /Applications/CoronaSDK-2765/SampleCode/Demos