It's a shame he used Corona. We made that mistake for our first two games. Don't get me wrong, I really like LUA, but Corona, to me is a scam. And here is why: LUA allows you to quite straightforward plug in 3rd party libs (DLLs/SOs), but they intentionally crippled this in Corona; it's not possible with the 'normal version' (you pay 100s of $ for; http://www.anscamobile.com/pricing/). You need to buy an enterprise support 'thing' (it's not a license, it's a one-off) which costs, and I kid you not, $40.000 per 'feature' you need added. So we started porting our games as this kind of crippling, to me, is just lock-in-and-steal. If you wrote a significantly large game in Corona and you need something from iOS/Android which is not in there yet, you are going to pony up $40k (multiple times maybe).
And yes, we could've known this upfront obviously. But I think quite a lot of Indie guys skip over this point at first.
I did not need to include any 3d party lib into my projects yet, so I was quite lucky with the quick results and ease of use. But its still a shame if corona works that way, from an ideologiocal point of view.
I am always keeping an eye on other frameworks and decide before every new project if corona still fits my needs or if its better to invest some time and learn something new. So maybe I might switch to monkey code / unity / stencyl / whatever in the near future.
Which framework do you recommend? I know of Unity, Marmalade, Corona and Cocos2d-x. (I once tried porting an SDL application to Android and gave up, after many many hours sunk.)
We currently ported all parts of the Corona API we use to Monkey (http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/) and I created a LUA2Monkey script which does ~80% of the translation (at least for us ;). When done I'll release that stuff in Github.
And yes, we could've known this upfront obviously. But I think quite a lot of Indie guys skip over this point at first.