Marmalade Quick has arrived this month as a new Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool from cross-platform framework development company Marmalade. Built upon open source components including Cocos2d-x and Box2D, the new offering is positioned as a fast build route for 2D games and a variety of applications.
Now making use of the Lua scripting language to create Marmalade Quick, the development team behind this new product has laid down plans to release its Signal to the Stars game across a number of platforms shortly in 2013.
Marmalade CTO Tim Closs admitted that his firm's toolset has been mainly used by C++ programmers up until now, as he bids to produce a product with wider appeal. "With Marmalade Quick, we're excited to be bringing our powerful cross-platform toolset to an even wider range of developers," he said.
Closs continued, "Marmalade aims to give developers the choice to work however they want, so adding Lua to our existing support for C++ and HTML5 adds even more flexibility to our toolset."
Marmalade Quick is available from GitHub as OpenQuick, and this download is said to operate "entirely independently" from the Marmalade SDK. No knowledge of platform-specific languages, APIs, or tools is required.
The entire Quick engine is also made available under the open source MIT licence, allowing developers to modify and extend it at will.
Developers can use Marmalade Quick in a Windows or Mac environment, leverage Marmalade's existing desktop simulators and package for device testing and app store publishing with a single click. Marmalade Quick also comes pre-integrated with the "ZeroBrane Studio" IDE, enabling easy authoring and debugging of Lua code.