I've learned more and more about programming in Lua, Tiled, and playing with the Corona game engine. I'm pretty amazed at how easy everything has been SO FAR. The physics engine works pretty well with a map created in Tiled, and now we just need to figure out how to spawn some AI units to walk around and interact with the physical limitations of the map.

I've also started reading "The Art of Game Design: a book of lenses", and one of the quotes I read last night is really motivating me to work hard to continue my work: "Your first 10 games will suck, so get them out of the way, fast!"

Game Design, like everything else, improves with experience. And that right now is what I need the most before I can expect myself to make a blockbuster hit - to just DO DO DO and LEARN LEARN LEARN.

Coming from a OOP background, one of the first things I've started looking for is to be able to define reusable classes in our project. I've just started reading about frameworks like this:

http://developer.anscamobile.com/code/object-oriented-sample-game-framework

and it looks rather promising.

Organizationally, I want to be able to minimize hard-coded objects in our games. This means that I want for our classes to be able to read data and generate instances of that data. For example, I want to be able to create a base Enemy class, and give it attributes such as HP, speed, size, weight, and make it easy to be able to define and change in the future by changing a separate data file (instead of going back to change the code). And I'd like to be able to do this as much as possible with all our objects (weapons, enemies, map).

As many ideas as I have, I plan on sitting down to write a more complete game design document with more details after our proof-of-concept prototype is done!