Eternal Bubbles is out now on Android!

[tomsamson]

Bummer regarding the HTC. Yeah, that's one of the slight downsides with Android, so many hardware/ driver differences then making some stuff not work on some devices despite it should. I'll look into it =)
I'm glad it works well on your other device =) (also works fine on my galaxy tab 10.1, transformer prime, kindle fire and all other Android test devices i have here )
Regarding the game itself: Yeah, Hasufel, Motto and me worked on that ages ago (around 2004 or 2005 i think =) ).
Hasufel had worked on a Puzzle Bobble port before and then we teamed up to make that version and well, after all those years i just thought it would be a good candidate to try out flash/scaleform stuff in unity and deploying that to mobile devices =)

regarding Scaleform in Unity? Benefits? Disadvantages?
Unity and Flash are like bizarro world versions of each other, for many things where one shines the other is weak and the other way round. So while one can totally make 2D games in unity (and i've made a few of those with it next to some 3d ones, too) it is very focussed on making 3d games, all editor tools it comes with (if one ignored guitexture and guitext since those are very limited) are made for that. One can get packages from the unity asset store which are handy for making 2D stuff, one can make own tools and frameworks for making 2D stuff and yeah, the unity fellas are working on nice 2D toolset additions and improvements, too, but really, when making a 2D game that's still way easier and quicker to do with flash right now.

Now some of the bummer sides with flash are that it doesn't have any good tools for making 3D stuff or combining 2D and 3D stuff that nicely and yeah, also flash deployed to mobile devices sucks in performance.
One can get stuff done and perform, but it is nowhere near comparable in performance to many other options out there.
Also one can't deploy AS1/2 stuff to mobile using the flash air deploy way either.

So now there regarding all such downsides Scaleform comes into play.
It can run flash content in accelerated way so that in many cases it performs a lot better than in Adobe's flash player (as usual shame on you bigtime Adobe for not getting something like that going). It allows to deploy AS1,2 and 3 stuff as app to iOS/Android. It allows to use the flash content display either on its own or in combination with other 3d view stuff in unity (by using it as rendertexture).

And yeah, there are many plugins and packages for unity allowing to easily use many of the features of the mobile devices easily so since scaleform in unity allows the flash (movie) and the unity content sides to communicate, trigger methods, pass params etc between each other one can that way use the strengths of the flash and unity sides together.

Now all that sounds great, sadly it isn't perfect yet by any means. The deploy to iPhone with it is way more cumbersome right now than the deploy to android since for the deploy to iPhone one has to manually edit the xcode project by hand afterwards.
It also has some bugs related to not running some bitmapdata stuff and other things fine then in scaleform unity.
(That's a pretty big bummer since of course usually one does a lot of bitmapdata stuff in many flash games).

The scaleform guys are working on these issues though so it has potential and could get closer to reaching that potential soon.


Where i see it as good candidate right now is if one has an existing flash game and wants to release that on mobile (and that is a game that runs with it since as i said there are still some api features of flash not supported/ buggily supported right now so one has to try it per game). It can also be useful to add an intro or menu to unity games or use other flash features in a unity game.

When making a new game in unity from the ground up though i'd probably not use it since it requires per deploy platform licenses, doesn't support all platforms unity supports and besides that i just prefer working in one ide/ engine to make a game rather than having that much forth and back between two middleware packages like that.