A while after i bumped into Doomed Online, i decided to investigate the pipeline for making Flash 9 games.
Compared to a few years ago, it seems like an increasingly lucrative game development platform. Pretty much everything you would need to implement for a game is possible with Flash 9, including such things as 3D Rendering. In a way it’s comparable to the late-90’s PC gaming scene. I have no doubt that you could probably make something as sophisticated as, say, Tomb Raider with Flash 9.
However my big problem with Flash is that it is still a closed platform. I have yet to find any open source re-implementation of the Flash runtime that fully runs Flash 7 files, let alone Flash 9. And whilst the Flash 9 compiler is supposedly going to be open source’d by Adobe, i have yet to see any indication that this is really going to happen.
Thankfully, i found a solution : HaXe. It is essentially a fully featured programming language that can output to one of three formats:
- Adobe Flash (7, 8, or 9)
- Neko VM (runs as a standalone app or a web app or perhaps embedded elsewhere)
- JavaScript (though sadly doesn’t have a nice RIA toolkit which writes all the HTML like, say, OpenLaszlo)
So in essence, with HaXe i can bypass my “closed platform” nag point and instead make a version of my game or app that works in Neko or perhaps just in a bog standard Web Browser. In addition i can consolidate my web development into one cool programming language. Great!
