About
I am a nearly retired actuary who has mostly worked with spreadsheets for the past 20 years, but I’ve loved programming all my life. Nearly all my experience has been in Visual Basic or its Excel cousin, VBA, plus a little Javascript. I’ve never done any animation programming before Codea.
If you have any problems, get stuck, have suggestions, whatever, please leave a comment or contact me via the Codea forum (my name there is ignatz).
But now, let’s have some fun with Codea.
coolcodea 
I retired in 2003 and I have been enjoying myself ever since. Having the time to focus on what is important to you is just bliss. I see you have added to your explanations, thanks.
Yes, I’m enjoying retirement enormously at the moment!
Great tutorials, really loving codea. I’m learning a lot of new tips and tricks. Thank you!
Hello Ignatz, your e-book “Codea for beginners” really helped me out, and this blog is a small
treasure, at least for me as a beginner.
Enjoy,
Catalin
Thank, you Catalin, I really appreciate that.
As I’ve said before, I really love your blog and your replies on the forum. At one time I saw a tutorial you did where you essentially created a flip book animation but going back through your blogs I can’t seem to find it. I was hoping you could point me to it. Thanks again for everything you post.
Thanks for that. Perhaps what you’re thinking of is when I made some magazines with Flipboard (free iPad app), just open it and search for ignatz_mouse.
You can make your own “magazines” with it, it is really cool
Hi, Thank you so much for sharing all of this.
I am a complete beginner with Codea, but have a background in very basic self taught VBA, VBE and HTML – I spent my first night with Codea and your blog last night, and I love it! lost myself for hours playing! I can’t wait to get back to it tonight. Your blog is fantastic, don’t know what I would do without it!
Thank you again.
Rachel.
It’s a pleasure, Rachel.
I come from exactly the same background (self taught Excel VBA and some Javascript/HTML), and I just loved Codea from the beginning. It’s beautiful. And the people in the Codea forum are super friendly and helpful, so be sure to register and ask questions if you need to. I am ignatz on there.
I suggest you start with my ebook on Lua, then the ebook on Codea, and my blog posts. That way, you will get a basic grasp of the language before trying to draw anything. Also have a rummage through the other stuff on the wiki and the forum and look at other people’s code. The usual advice.
And don’t be afraid to try anything and everything. If I was able to understand and write about it (well, maybe excluding horrible things called quaternions!), so can you. Even things like shaders, which look very scary, but are just big pussycats when you get up close.
So welcome, make yourself at home, and enjoy!
Thanks for the advice – had a look for your ebooks via this site and the wiki, but the Dropbox link didn’t work – am I looking in the wrong place?
Try this link
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mr2yzp07vffskxt/AACqVnmzpAKOkNDWENPmN4psa
hello,dont know whether this is the correct place,but if not point me in correct direction. Basically as a novice have nearly finished adding all my items-writings-plugins-etc using wpress.It needs to have everything linked now–like gallery layout-slider features-footer etc finished to a professional standard and i just dont want to mess with this because it will be my money making venture as i have everything tied up in my store,so can anybody help me please? tried embedding a code and messed up,so have tried,which i could do frontend but wix-although brilliant is too slow and drove me nut’s.thanks Andrea
hi, im working on a game based on flappy bird, i alrrady have the tubes appearing randomly on the screen, i got the score, sounds,and allof that, i just want to know how to make the sprite collide with the tubes and if he does, then it will be game over,
hope anybody can help me.
I suggest you join the Codea forum and post this question there. The people there are friendly and helpful.
234. Angry Birds – a whole level
Il have a problems
Help me
Main:5: attempt to call a nil value (global ‘Settings’)
stack traceback:
Main:5: in function ‘setup’
Main:30: bad argument #1 to ‘pairs’ (table expected, got nil)
stack traceback:
[C]: in function ‘pairs’
Main:30: in function ‘DrawScene’
Main:13: in function ‘draw’