Below, a good chat with Raimondo, from Italy, developer of The Comet, one of my favorites apps made with Kwik (the app is available in English and Italian). It has a beautiful story, gorgeous illustrations, a nice sound track and several “added by hand” features, which shows the potential of Kwik with a few lines of code…
Tell a little bit about you and your company
My name is Raimondo Della Calce, I’m the founder and creative director of artFive animation studio (www.artfive.co.uk ) which creates 3D animation for tv series, commercials and short films, and co-founder of the new company called bitLuna (www.bitluna.com ), which creates apps for kids. We have much experience with tv series and products for children, so we were looking forward to producing apps for mobile devices.
What is The Comet about?
THE COMET is the first story of the series KIDS2KIDS. It is an interactive application which deals with the psychological rights of children in a fun and creative way.
- The right to make mistakes
- The right to their own privacy
- The right to be listened to
- The right to be accepted for who they are
- THE COMET talks about THE RIGHTS KIDS HAVE TO FREE TIME.
A comet star is drawing near to the village of Sourapple, a place where everyone is always busy and rushed off their feet dashing around all day. The arrival of the comet provokes an electromagnetic storm causing all electrical and mechanical appliances to malfunction, resulting in them being temporarily out of order. What on earth will everyone do without their televisions, computers and cars? And what will the children do to pass the time?
How did Kwik help you to build it? Any favorite features?
Kwik was fundamental for the development of ‘The Comet’. We have little programming experience, we talked a lot about creating apps for mobile devices but thought we didn’t have the right skills to do it. Then we discovered Kwik and Corona SDK, a cheap and very easy way to create exactly what we wanted to accomplish, an interactive book with multiple pages, animations, sounds, music, multiple languages. I love Kwik because you can create a complete app without writing a single line of code, but at the same time you can code if you want, if you learn a bit of Lua script language you can export from Kwik and add some lines of code manually, as we did, and create something very special.
What is your overall experience with us (product and services)?
Kwik is a great product, it’s cheap and easy to use, and support is perfect. During the production of the app we had some problems, Alex answered to our questions and solved the problems instantly. I can say the code exported from Kwik is really well done, we paid attention to clean the code very well, following suggestions on Corona blog and forums (clean the tweens, delete all the listeners, etc.), we used Corona Profiler (a third party software to test the memory consumption of your app) and in the end we discovered that Kwik already does everything is needed perfectly.
What is next for you and your company?
The Comet is the first of five interactive apps of the kids2kids series, we are already working on the second one. At the same time we are creating the first of the “Five colored clouds” series, apps to teach kids to mix colors and paint having fun. Our goal would be to create an app every month (or two at the most!).
Isn’t it gorgeous?