[iPimp] Zap

Our first iPhone game has been out a couple of weeks now, and I thought it would be rude not to pimp it here.

http://blog.gamingyourway.com/conten...creenShot2.jpg

Before I get a load of "This is Flashkit" flames, the game was written using CS5.

The main reason I'm mentioning this here is 'cause I've just posted up a primer on iPhone development using CS5 on the blog, here.
I figured it would be better to back this pimp up with something useful rather than just trying to sell everyone an app they don't want ( Which by the way you can preview here ).

I think that's it really, I've written more than enough words about it on the blog. Feel free to fire off any questions either here or there, and so long as they don't get me in NDA trouble I'll answer what I can.

Squize.

PS. If you're thinking of buying the game, for a mere $0.99, and don't have a 3GS or 3rd gen ipod, to put it simply, don't bother, save your cash for something else.

Looks very retro, very interesting art design. Nice to see anything different these days, and I will be sure to check out that primer. I am out of date, living in the CS4 world (and just barely that!)

I like the retro game boy feel a lot and the gameplay of the flash version is nice, too but i haven´t bought the iPhone game when seeing that one review in the US store saying the game wouldn´t run on his iPhone 3g.
That´s also my problem with your blog post there, also wrote it there, i find it quite a bad idea to write about CS5 in any way if you´re worried of writing anything "wrong" for NDA reasons.
Its nice you give performance tips, but really, its almost like selling it wrong when not directly saying how it performs (though at least with your PS line here you gave a rough idea that the newest devices are needed to run the game).

Thanks Alluvian. The look & feel was chosen for a number of reasons.
It looks GameBoy cool ;) , I already had most of the assets done, and the missing ones I could do myself ( I couldn't offer an artist a revenue share when I had no concept of the market, so I had to do it myself ) and by using that low res style none of the images needed alpha blending, internally they're all 8bit pngs, which helps with both filesize and performance ( I wanted to keep it under the 10meg limit, which ironically was raised to 20meg just the other day ).

Tom I replied to your comment at the blog ( Which turned out to be a huge reply, I think it's bigger than the actual post :) ).
Performance on older devices is an issue, it's indicated on the App Store page for the game, unfortunately not before the review, so I could have saved that purchaser some money if I'd done it in a more timely manner, which I regret.

Regards my PS, I didn't post the game here to try and sell copies, this isn't the place for that. I have to give it a cheeky pimp, it's just the way I am, and if someone has a 3GS machine and they're interested to see how it performs, then I'm not going to turn the sale away ( See, I'm doing it now :) ).

But the reason I posted here about it was because I'd finally found the time to do a write up about it ( Zap actually came out a day after Ionic, so I could quite easily have done a "Buy my game please" post using the momentum of the other game, but to me that goes against the spirit of the board and is borderline spam ).
Hopefully by presenting it this way it's of some use to the community, as I'm sure people are interested in the whole CS5 / iPhone thing, and I've tried to give a primer whilst staying within the NDA guidelines.

Squize.

Yeah, replied back to you there, man, its weird to have a conversation on the same topic at two places :D
So yeah, i like your post for what it is: giving tips to people who buy CS5.
Maybe its more an issue of me also expecting a sort of buying or avoiding it advice for something not out yet when someone talks about it who has a look at it before release, but yeah, i understand it that you´re not into doing that and i like your honesty on the pre 3gs performance and your blog post was mostly neutral, which is way more appropriate than some blog posts on the topic i´ve seen elsewhere which talk of none of the downsides and just hype the thing up as if it would be next coming.

Yep, it's good, but it's not quite the second coming :)

I'm sure nearer the time lots of reviews will appear everywhere, better written and more in-depth than I can ever face trying to do, and with that lots of benchmarks and comparisons.
I don't think we've ever done a review on the blog, it's not really our thing. I don't think our views would sway anyone to buy ( Or not ) a product so it's pointless us trying to do it.

Hopefully with the primer we're at least showing that it's not going to be a case of opening up any old fla, selecting publish to iPhone and then putting it on the store and wait for the money to come rolling in.
I've tried to manage expectations and show the reality of getting a Flash game onto the App Store and that people shouldn't really be overly worried about it being awash with crap Flash games done by script kiddies, because like I said it's not like putting a game on to newgrounds.

Squize.

Yeah, i never expected it to lead to a flood of script kiddies dropping their things onto it though since that is automatically avoided by not supporting any other language (version) other than AS3. What i think is more a likely scenario is that advertising agencies would maybe care less about the performance and stability of the content or think about it after investing into CS5 and telling their clients they can port over flash projects using CS5 easily and those could flood the app store easily.
Then there are also some who blindly hype up any Adobe tech without ever considering other alternatives because there are books to write and conference presentations to do on it. Just want us to paint a broader picture =)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Squize

Yep, it's good, but it's not quite the second coming :)

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Maybe we should talk about that again when we can say more about the pros and cons when its released :)

I'm a script kiddie... :(

Personally, I've lost faith in the Flash IDE ever since I started using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK...It seemed to me that they were strapping on features and features on a slow, unstable car. With CS4, there was 3D, and now there's iPhone dev, which like has been mentioned, is extremely slow compared to other technologies that we have a choice to use (Unity being one of them).

I mean, I know this might all come back to the "Why don't they concentrate on performance rather than on other features" type of thing, but if they're releasing support for a whole new platform...wouldn't it be in their best interest to do it right the first time??? They've waited, and are still waiting on performance for the web player, now they'll have 2 groups of developers, one begging for performance on the web, and the other on the iPhone.

Phew...that all being said, I still think it's a cool feature :) Just riles me up when Adobe can't make anything that runs faster than a turtle...

Good and thorough blog post also! I have indeed been wondering about the iPhone export function, and it certainly answered a few of my questions...Like I said before, when developing an application, I'd hate following a performance guidelines list that long!

P.

"i never expected it to lead to a flood of script kiddies...by not supporting any other language (version) other than AS3."

A lot of script kiddies have made there way over to as3 now, it's quite surprising. There are lots of tuts out there now that allow for easy reskinning.

As to your point about adver-gaming, yeah totally, I expect to do some myself in all honesty, although there's always been good and bad adver-games.
99% of them on there will sink without a trace and they'll mostly be vanity projects for clients.

"which like has been mentioned, is extremely slow compared to other technologies"

I've not said it's extremely slow, so I'm not sure where that's come from, all I've said is my game is not suitable for older devices due to performance reasons, but there is a massive gulf in terms of power between the more recent devices and the older ones.
A 3GS is roughly on par with a PSP in terms of gaming power, the Unreal engine runs on it.

"wouldn't it be in their best interest to do it right the first time???"

You're implying they've not done it right, without actually testing it first hand.
Remember that Adobe like everyone else work to deadlines and budgets. The CS5 suite is exactly that, a suite. All the designers waiting for Photoshop or Illustrator etc. won't want their chance to upgrade delayed just so more time can be spent on just one aspect of Flash ( Flash CS5 isn't just iPhone export ).

Without hopefully sounding like another Adobe fan boy, they have done an amazing thing with the iPhone publishing. What other mass market middleware will allow you to publish to the iPhone on Windows with an almost zero learning curve ? Flash on the iPhone isn't Flash lite or some cut down AS2.5, it's Flash.
It's not perfect, and no one knows that more than the people working on it, and who will continue working on it after launch.

Unity iPhone isn't as powerful as Unity on the web, yet for some reason people seem to expect Flash on an iPhone to run exactly like it would on their 4gig quad core PC's.

When there is no choice in tech then you target your game to the tech, as we do now with Flash, when there is a choice in tech such as on the iPhone ( There is a lot of middleware for it already, it's not just Unity ) then you target the tech to your game, it's that simple. Sometime Flash will be a perfect fit, other times it won't and you should look to use something else.

Squize.

Man, that post is off on so many ends, come on, are you serious?

First of all that an iPhone is not a highend pc is common sense and that a 3gs has considerably more power under the hood than an Iphone 3g or the even older devices is pretty known by now by many,too.
All direct and indirect/ middleware based app creation options have to face those same limitations.
So it was already a foul argument that its due device limitations when i heard it several times by Adobe people when trying to defend the poor performance many moaned about since the very first flash exporter made apps hit the app store.
If there are many options for creating intense 2D and 3D content on ANY iPhone/ iPod touch generation it totally makes sense to say if anything close to that can´t be achieved with the flash solution then the flash solution is of course extremely slow compared to the competing technologies.
Not to downtalk your game but i´m sure i don´t have to tell you that when made in other ways/technologies a game like that could easily run at great performance and stability even on the first iPhone and iPod touch.
In fact i´m testing all my unity 2D and 3D games on first gen iPod touch next to an iPhone 3g.
Sure i can add more bells and wistles to games when they run on a 3gs and sure one can also do more involved specific stuff not possible on a 3g or older device when optimizing for the higher hardware capabilities of a 3gs or even iPad.
But i have to resist heavily to not get angry when someone tries to tell people performance doesn´t suck when basic 2D things don´t run (well) with their solution when tried on anything else than the latest devices.
When there are already 10s of thousands of slick 2D apps running fine on the oldest devices don´t tell people its due to device limitations when the same can´t be achieved easily with your solution.
Next up you explain why Adobe releases things in the state it does, because, as you said, they sell a suite and that´s a good explanation for the why.
Its no explanation for: Why should anyone besides Adobe stakeholders care?
Why should the possible buyer of said suite or apps care when expectations are maybe not met because Adobe thinks its a good idea to release the suite earlier and all apps together?



"
Without hopefully sounding like another Adobe fan boy, they have done an amazing thing with the iPhone publishing. What other mass market middleware will allow you to publish to the iPhone on Windows with an almost zero learning curve ? Flash on the iPhone isn't Flash lite or some cut down AS2.5, it's Flash.
"

Man, that could have been taken 1:1 out of Adobe´s PR department.
What should that statement even be, its really totally out of wack.
"mass market middleware".. How come you entitle flash to that when many of the top ten ranked titles on the app store are made with other middleware and Adobe is actually trying to get into the iPhone middleware market as total newcomer more than two years late to the party?
On a sidentoe its easy to talk about the deploy on pc side as big plus but that is really leaving out half the truth: The flash solution does not create xcode projects and therefore it does not allow any of the advantages of other middleware allowing that.
Things like directly or indirectly being able to use the entire iPhone sdk api, with Adobe´s solution people will be stuck with using those features which Adobe has implemented themselves.
Or things like using great testing and debugging tools and many others.
Next up you talk about zero learning curve with the flash solution.
On what is that statement based?
Surely not the point that the majority of the flash designer and developer base still does not use AS3 and the flash exporter only supports content done in AS3, which automatically means many have to (re)learn a lot to use it at all.
Your zero learning curve statement surely is also weird when reading something like the list of things to keep in mind when developing content for the iPhone using the flash exporter (on your blog).
As summary of that list: forget about using most or all of anything that gives reasoning for using flash in first place. Don´t expect even basic 2D games to run nicely on all device gens out of the box without lots of testing and changing.
Another sidenote: The Adobe solution of course does also not support the simulator or many other testing and debugging tools making it easier to test and debug content before actually deploying it to the device.

"Flash on the iPhone isn't Flash lite or some cut down AS2.5, it's Flash."

Let´s see, flashlite allowed to create content in AS1 (flash 4 and flash mx syntax) and AS2, not just AS3, the iPhone exporter only allows deploying AS3 content.
Regarding your list and other"performance tips" posted even by Adobe employes its clear that one shouldn´t make use of many things one would use in every usual web flash project. So again, how come you say "it's Flash"
Its: In theory you got the AS3 portion of flash at least but hey, you know, think twice about what of it you actually can get running at all.
How come you can say a solution that doesn´t support deploying the huge majority of content and the both dominant language versions is like the real deal?





Adobe resisted making propper full on use of hardware acceleration for all graphical operations for web deploy for many, many years now. It was more understandable a few years ago, now their arguments are less and less sound.
One of the arguments that still holds some weight is the huge variety of hardware setups with pcs and macs and due to that it being very difficult to ensure that content runs/looks well and close enough on different setups.
So there i understand it when they hesitate to do it (even if other tech providers much smaller than Adobe seem to be able to take good leaps there and its lame Adobe doesn´t).

But when Adobe doesn´t make propper full on automatic use of the gpu on a platform like iPhone where they have this handful few different machine types and then Adobe tries to convince customers who moan about performance and stability that its due to device limitations, ..
well, that´s weak.

Tom, I know this is an emotive subject for you, I've read you blog and saw your posts at the pre-release forum ( That makes me sound a little bit like a stalker doesn't it ? :) It's not that at all, I think you can only get a rounded view of something by reading both good and bad views on a subject ).

It's not an emotive subject for me. I'm not hyping up CS5 or dissing it. I'm not saying it's the best thing ever, nor am I saying it sucks, as neither is true.

All I care about is that it's an easy way for me, and others, to develop for another platform. I've got a game from untitled.fla to something people can buy in 4 weeks. That to me is pretty good. A web version of the same game would have taken under a week, but I was dealing with a new device, with a different interface and beta software, so it's still not bad.
Also I got to use my existing workflow with the only real glitch in that being the time it takes to test on the actual device ( Which Adobe have constantly said they're working on to improve. Even during the different beta build it's improved a lot ).
By planning a little ahead most of the development can be done away from the IDE like a normal project.

I called Flash "Mass Market middleware" 'cause I'm guessing within a month of CS5's release more copies will have been sold than any other iPhone middleware ( I was referring to Flash itself being mass market, rather than meaning it in an iPhone specific way. It's ubiquitous ).

"Surely not the point that the majority of the flash designer and developer base still does not use AS3"

http://www.flashgamelicense.com/blog...nd-statistics/

Check out about half way down the page. The majority of games on FGL are now AS3.
I know that's only a snap shot of one part of the indie scene, but it would be strange if that wasn't reflected elsewhere. That figure will also never decrease, the percentage of developers using AS3 will only increase.

AS3 has been out for years, it's the default coding language of Flash. If people don't or can't learn it, then not only do they not get access to all the excellent 3rd party libraries then they don't get to use the iPhone exporter.
Why should I care about those people ? I hated learning AS3, but I did because it's my job. If it's other people's job then they have to stay on top of advances or fall behind.
If it's people's hobby, well then their level of commitment is solely down to them.

"Your zero learning curve statement surely is also weird when reading something like the list of things to keep in mind when developing content for the iPhone using the flash exporter (on your blog). "

I wrote "with an almost zero learning curve". Compared to learning coccos2D, Unity, Corona etc. then for Flash developers there is an almost zero learning curve.
Lot's of Flash apps which don't need peak performance have been released on the App Store without following all or even any of the tips I posted ( There's a link on the blog to Iain's experience with his game. He didn't use any of the things I did and turned that game around in 3 days, it took him longer to submit it and get it approved than it did to code. Again it needs a 3GS device, but it runs fine on that and he didn't jump through hoops to get it running well. My tips are what I've found to be the best way to get the most performance, not what you have to do a 100% to get anything running ).

There are obviously going to be some changes to the way people code to achieve maximum performance and not everyone uses object pooling or blitting already.
For those that do, then there's not a huge amount of change.
Most of the things I recommended on the blog are things I do anyway, so developers who are used to working on projects where performance is really important aren't going to have to change their style so much.

"Not to downtalk your game but i´m sure i don´t have to tell you that when made in other ways/technologies a game like that could easily run at great performance and stability even on the first iPhone and iPod touch."

Yeah I totally agree. But how much would that cost me ? Let's say I went the Unity route, as given the time I'd love to hit that bad boy.
I'd have to get the license + iPhone license. I'd then have the learning curve to get my head around it, and then start to make the game.
That's a lot of cost, both actual cash money and time.

As you know mate, the App Store isn't this magical pot of gold that everyone has been lead to believe. The number of games released on there every day is about the same as newgrounds, it's an unbelievable amount.

Personally I can't afford the risk at the moment to invest all that time and money on an iPhone game which at the end of the day may sell a 100 copies, even if it opens the game up to pre 3GS users.
That's why I can say that Flash is more suitable for some projects.

Squize.

hey man,
with facebook, blogs and twitter we all turn into public broadcasters and stalkers of each other, so that´s fine =)
Its good to get not overly emotional, have a broad view on things and use every technology for what its god for and don´t overhype things.
I understand the problematic state as flash focussed developer: There´s this new theoretical option to deploy to iPhone using the tech and there would be many clients who would like that next to getting the exposure by Adobe for being there with stuff they can use to hype it up.
I´d find it totally ok to use it for what its usable for, but when the performance and features are so limited that even for some basic 2D content the result only runs (acceptable) on the latest devices which least iDevice users have, well, there it gets problematic.
Whether AS3 is used by most based on a FGL study is irrevelant, first FGL surely is only catering to a minority among the flash designer and devloper base, second no matter if it is or not once one can´t use AS1 and 2 and has to avoid using many things one would use in every normal flash project its just a wrong statement to say anything in the vein of it being the full flash thing now possible to be deployed to iPhone.
It just isn´t.

Again, your statement of it having an "almost zero learning curve" is a highly subjective view at best, many others would tell you that being able to code in many other languages which are closer to AS1,2 or 3 and then no matter what one does one gets way better resulting performance would be way closer to zero learning curve than being restricted to use a single language, having to cut down most things due to heavier performance restrictions and then also have worse and way less testing options for the content.

Regarding the cost side there are even free options for creating iPhone content so even if one buys a different dev tool with a mac next to it, the cheapest mac option, could even be a used one from ebay to be even cheaper, that would be way more affordable moneywise than what CS5 will cost.
You shouldn´t compare the cost of getting something for free due to being in abeta with the cost ofhaving to buy other tools for the money they cost when giving a general pricing statement.






With your previous blog and forum posts on the topic i also had the feeling that you were still staying halfway true to that, giving a not overhyping but more informative view on the ups and downs, what with also tweeting about having to cancel your first flash to iPhone project because it didn´t run and then also writing about that you could finish your second project but now that one only runs fine on the latest devices.
But then you wrote things like these:
"
they have done an amazing thing with the iPhone publishing. What other mass market middleware will allow you to publish to the iPhone on Windows with an almost zero learning curve ? Flash on the iPhone isn't Flash lite or some cut down AS2.5, it's Flash.
"
And well, if that´s not overhyping it, then i dunno what is.


You say some things that are right like the App Store for most isn´t the big honey pot anymore, its likely that most won´t make a lot of money with a game they release.
But then your bottom line to me doesn´t fit at all to that:
When sales for many already aren´t huge when deploying things people with all device types can run on their devices, how can it then be a good idea at all to narrow down the possible audience way further by creating content in a way in which then it only runs for a small subset of the audience, people with the latest devices?

I´d like it like the next guy when Adobe would release something good enough that i can deploy all my flash games to iPhone and they would run well on any of the devices, also do projects for clients using it and also getting the hype of being one of the apps featured by Adobe evangelists at conferences.
I tried to make my peace with it and talk less about it until it gets released and i see if they improved it a lot compared to the performance and stability of apps so far out on the app store made with betas.
I just fall back into arguing again when i see posts that are written like being differentiated views but then at the end promote what seems very off to sell to me at this point.

"Whether AS3 is used by most based on a FGL study is irrevelant, first FGL surely is only catering to a minority among the flash designer and devloper base, second no matter if it is or not once one can´t use AS1 and 2 and has to avoid using many things one would use in every normal flash project its just a wrong statement to say anything in the vein of it being the full flash thing now possible to be deployed to iPhone.
It just isn´t."

Tom, show me some figures, some stats that show that as3 is still a minority language in Flash development now.
Saying that it's not complete Flash because it doesn't support two versions of AS which the minority of people still use isn't really a valid argument.
With regard FGL, it's a very good snapshot of game developers, which are going to be a large percentage of iPhone developers.

Anyway we're slipping into the old as3 discussion again, which is pretty fruitless.

"Regarding the cost side there are even free options for creating iPhone content so even if one buys a different dev tool with a mac next to it, the cheapest mac option, could even be a used one from ebay to be even cheaper, that would be way more affordable moneywise than what CS5 will cost."

Tom, all of us here are Flash developers. This isn't a "Best way to make iPhone games" debate, this is the best way for existing Flash developers to get content on to the iPhone.
If you were going to target iPhone games then yeah a mac mini and a Unity license would be the way to go, but that means turning your back on Flash.
I've written a primer about how to develop Flash games using CS5 for the iPhone, not comparing various tech to each other and putting costs together.

So the majority of people will be sticking with Flash for their day to day work, getting all the additional software / hardware they need to target iPhone development with a more robust middleware is additional cost on top of the price of CS5 ( If they chose to upgrade ).

That was my point about cost in my last post, I'd still need to get CS5 'cause I'm a Flash developer and I can't justify spending a lot extra for iPhone dev unless it's a market I'm really targeting.

"And well, if that´s not overhyping it, then i dunno what is."

I personally think getting Flash 10.1 to run as a native app on the iPhone is an amazing achievement. That I can set up a motion tween on the stage, hit publish and then sync it with the iPhone and have it running exactly the same is very impressive imho.
I've never said it's perfect, but it is very impressive.

"I just fall back into arguing again when i see posts that are written like being differentiated views but then at the end promote what seems very off to sell to me at this point."

Tom I'm not disagreeing with all the things you've said. Time and again I've been as honest as I can about performance without directly mentioning it, as I said I would due to the NDA.
I think you've set your expectations too high. CS5 isn't perfect, but no version of Flash ever has been. If people think Adobe have done enough with it then they'll upgrade, if they don't think it's value for money then they won't.

I can only speak from personal experience with getting a Flash game onto the App Store. I found it at times challenging to get the performance I wanted, as I've said it increased my development time.
But in saying that, the advantages of working in a familiar environment far outweighed any issues with beta bugs or a slight change how I make a game, and it's not anything I didn't expect when targeting a totally new platform.

Squize.

There are too many older iPhone devices at this point for me to think of something as an iPhone dev product unless it at least works well on the 3g. I don't see a lot of first gen iphones anymore because what they do best is somewhat painful on the edge network.

So if you can make a good product that runs on the 3g then I would see that as feasible.

Otherwise, I am thinking of the CS5 iPhone devtool more as a CS5 iPad devtool. From what I understand, the iPad processor is actually pretty beefy and should well outperform any of the existing iPhone/iTouch capabilities. This would also mean you could get in on the ground floor of the hardware and not have to deal with older devices, you just have the one, and can pretty safely assume future versions will only get more powerful.

What we don't know is how well the iPad will catch on. Early surveys seem very promising (which baffles me, as I am underwhelmed), with far more people being interested, or planning on purchasing the iPad than people were interested in the iPhone at the same point before it's initial launch (I don't recall the source, but read a post about it on gizmodo). These surveys may or may not pan out though.

I do know when/if I get around to finishing my current project I am going to start making a proof of concept for my idea in AS3 (will be my first time using an as3 physics tool, probably box2d, in the past I only used as2 flade, and that I had to modify for my as2 versions of these mockups).

Do we know if things like box2d will usable for this iphone cs5 thingy? Or is that all still heavily NDA?

The game I abandoned was using the alchemy port of Box2D and at that time it wasn't working.

I raised a bug and I'm sure I read on the forums there it was working now, but I can't really say for sure, I've not had chance ( Or the desire ) to go back to it.

But yeah the iPad is a valid destination for Flash content. I'm sure it's going to have it's own section in the App Store too, which will help if you get in there with a good app early.

Squize.

Squize, on your previous post:
I see it as totally valid to call it not the full flash when the exporter doesn´t support two of the three language versions and then on top even when using AS3 and optimizing things quite a bit still doesn´t achieve acceptable performance for halfway involved 2D content on the majority of devices out there.
Maybe, yes maybe my expectations were too high when expecting that when Adobe gets into the game more than two years late that they then at least deliver something competitive.
Its of course up to everyone to decide whether its competitive enough and a good choice or not and whether they see it as better or worse workflow, we´ll see with time what the majority thinks.
I´d like to use it for what its good for, too, though in the cases where its a good choice in my eyes are very limited obviously regarding what is publicly known so far.
Squize, i think we had a good argument on this and both made our views clear, so yeah, since we probably won´t convince the other, i´ll leave it at that now =)



to Alluvian: I agree with most of your post, besides the being good for iPad use side:
We can´t tell for sure of course before having the new devices in our hands, but when being happy about the faster cpu one should also consider that the screen is bigger/ has higher res and therefore one has to fill way more pixels.
When you can´t make full on use of the gpu, well, a good portion of it falls back on the cpu again, so yeah, let´s see if things run considerably faster on the new device when using the flash exporter as it is.

"Squize, i think we had a good argument on this and both made our views clear, so yeah, since we probably won´t convince the other, i´ll leave it at that now =)"

Totally agree :) Hopefully it's been interesting for other forum members seeing different views about it.

Squize.

Quote:

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Totally agree Hopefully it's been interesting for other forum members seeing different views about it.

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fisticuffs followed by bruising make-up sex would have been 'interesting'. This was just mildly diverting

Hey Squize, I didn't get a chance to read this whole thread but I was wondering if you would have used another dev kit (Unity, Xcode etc) next time around or still use cs5 to develop for future iPhone projects?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Squize

Totally agree :) Hopefully it's been interesting for other forum members seeing different views about it.

Squize.

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yeah =)
And Mentuat is right, our bruising make-up sex is long overdue. At your place or mine or right here in this dark corner? :yarr: :hug:
Let´s turn it into group activity while at it :hubba: :grouphug: :yikes: :shhh:



I´m starting to like this tell a story with smileys thing.. :)

That was beautiful tom

mentuat just has to bring it down to it's base level. Ok, it's a great idea, but still...

hooligan to answer your question and move it slightly away from the board orgy for a second, it really depends on the project.
I know that sounds vague, but it really is on a per project basis. I'll def. use Flash again for iPhone games, it's just so convenient and it's like all things, once the first time is out the way it just gets easier.

That reminds me, now about this board orgy...

Squize.

:)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Squize

Tom, all of us here are Flash developers. This isn't a "Best way to make iPhone games" debate, this is the best way for existing Flash developers to get content on to the iPhone.

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Why put a limit on yourself ?I mean, being a flash dev means thats the only thing i can be?Once uppon a time we were not even that

Nice game, by the way

My feeling is if you want to read / talk about other technologies there's the whole internet to go and do so.

The point of the blog post was about Flash, not the iPhone specifically. It wasn't a comparison piece, it was a heads up about what to expect.

Glad you liked the game though, I assume you bought it and rated it 5 rather than just watched the video ;)

Squize.

My rant's aside, I think that CS5 will be awesome for iPhone games as long as you focus on something less real-time...In fact, I've had a turn-based strategy game in mind...*goes and looks for CS5 downloads* Damn private Beta.

Yeah exactly, you've just got to play to it's strengths, like we've all being doing with Flash for years.

Squize.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Squize

My feeling is if you want to read / talk about other technologies there's the whole internet to go and do so.

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Thats true but i though your blog was about anything game related, not just flash.

Our blog is about anything we want, but FlashKit isn't.

The debate on here started to go towards other tech to develop iPhone games with, which wasn't the point of that one specific blog post.

It's impossible for me to do a comparison 'cause:
a) Under the beta NDA there's very little I can say. I imagine I could read through it all, see what is already in the public domain and make a more detailed blog post about the CS5 exporter features, but that wasn't the point of the blog post and not something I wanted to do.
That means I can't openly speak about features or performance, which makes doing a comparison pretty impossible.
b) Spending a week or two messing with Unity doesn't make me an expert on Unity iPhone performance. Nor do I know anything worth writing about any of the other middleware packages that are available, so I can't even compare them to each other never mind Flash.

So with that in mind, and the fact that the blog post was just some tips to try and help people when CS5 does come out, that is why I feel this thread should be pretty limited to Flash rather than an all out round up of the best way to make iPhone games ( Which like I said, I'm sure there are lots of sites that compare the available middleware ).

Honestly it's little wonder why there are so few constructive threads on here anymore, I can't help but feel half this thread is me having to defend a blog post which was meant to help the community.
A good debate is one thing but having to justify why I've not talked about non-Flash development on Flashkit seems to be pushing it a little far.

Squize.

Hey. I'm not reading those novels, Thank you.

Just wanted to show Jobe Makar's videos on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/jobemakar#p/u

He has video of a puzzle game. The frame rate's pretty good for that kind of game.

Hey Ray, thanks for not reading my thread and then promoting someone else's game, cheers.

;)

Squize.

Yeah Ray you know how Squize feels about his Pimps.

Is Squize going to have to choke a B***h