Wednesday 9 January 2013

Why flash developers won't go extinct!

I always wanted to work as a games developer. I have created some little games in the past for clients or for myself but always my time has been utterly consumed by my own portfolio websites maker: Electrofolio

In 2010, I made a remake of an old game which was running really well in Flash Player 9 (AS3). 
Later on (late 2010), when I realized that I was the only one excited about my game (playability was amazing),  I decided to add a twist improving graphics adding real animated images instead Tron looking vectorial pictures. Play at the newer version.

Animations were running slower now and FP struggled to move the game at 50FPS plus I couldn't add a parallax scroll effect with bitmaps so I got well disappointed with Flash performance.

In 2011, after Flash beeing totally destroyed by Steve Jobbs, Adobe released a GPU 3D accelerated Flash version called molehill.

I saw several 3D demos and differences with performance were so huge that I decided that I had to go with this new way and stop working with time lines and classic Flash, completely.
I realized that I would take longer to develop apps but this is the way forward.

With the release of Starling 0.8, a friend and I decided to have a go and got involved creating a kaleidoscope game using textures and stage3D. I liked the way it was running. It was pretty fast!

It was a real shame seeing everyday Flash was dieing slowly with so much power on its hands!
Flash was almost dead and Flash-haters where everywhere making so much noise that even myself had really deep thoughts of leaving the technology.
 
I had a go making trying to develop a slide-show with HTML5 that worked everywhere.... Hey! that's what HTML5 is all about, right? Well it's WRONG. It worked in some devices and some didn't execute the JavaScript / CSS combination right....  I was trapped between a dyeing technology and a really over-hyped technology.

In that moment, beginning of 2012, Flash saw its end in phones and tablets. It was one of the worst stages for Flash developers but there was still hope to use our actionscript good skills, an exit, developing AIR apps instead of web apps. That was a great idea! Sadly, my phone (Samsung Galaxy ACE 1) didn't support AIR... I got really down and kept working on Electrofolio (Flash, PHP, mySQL, HTML, JS, CSS, blablabla) for almost a year until I read a very positive post of making money with AIR and iOS+Android.
http://www.esdot.ca/site/2012/journey-of-an-air-developer

Now, I have decided that this has been dragged for too long, This time I'm decided to invest real time in making games. I got a newer phone (Samsung Galaxy S3 mini) which supports AIR and I right away I started developing for Android. I got registered in play.google.com for 25 US$ and adapted an old flash 9 recycling game I made in the past using normal timeline - AS3.

It was very simple drag and drop game and turned out that works pretty well...
Get the game for Android (updated in 2013)

Compare it with the Flash version:
Flash Version (made in 2010)

I think there is big potential being able to release games to several devices with just one click and monetize visits.

I took a look at adMob,  and set up an account, it took me almost a whole day to implement it all:

I got a free AIR native extension that works OK and now I am monetizing my first project. It's hardly any money but if I keep creating games they will all add up making my develop time more monetized.

I see a brighter future, this is is how continues. I will post more about this.