The Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards-nominated Corona game engine has been open-sourced.

Corona Labs product manager Vlad Sherban said the move had been in the works since it was acquired by ad mediation outfit Appodeal in 2017.

The aim, he said, is to take make the engine development process more transparent and to bring the community on board in shaping the future of the toolset.

Most of the engine’s code will be open-sourced, except for certain plugins, the Corona Marketplace and the build infrastructure.

Licence options

Corona will now be available under both open source and commercial licences.

Developers that use the open source licence must distribute their games and apps under the GPLv3 licence. Corona said examples include non-commercial games, for education purposes or to contribute to the engine.

The commercial licence meanwhile will let companies build commercial products off the Corona source code.

“Corona Labs will continue to have a dedicated team and infrastructure to support our flourishing plugin ecosystem and infrastructure, as well as to keep up to date with the ever-changing requirements and updates coming from applications stores,” said Corona Labs product manager Vlad Sherban.

“Powered by the new open source model and supported by the development of new features and bug fixes will make Corona more community driven - but not without our help and guidance.

“Ultimately, going open source will provide confidence in the future of the engine and an opportunity to grow community involvement in engine development.”

You can find further details about Corona going open source here. You can also find the source code on GitHub.