October 7th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 10 Comments »
Captains Log: Friday 6th October 2006
Today I have seen the light – it’s called Flash Lite!.
J2ME is fast coming to a close for personally after developing around 10 games over the last year and while there is money in it still, I am looking to newer platforms now given my late entry as a developer into J2ME in 2005 – and basically I don’t want to make the same mistake!
Both Flash Lite (FL) and XNA are on the development cards for me now but this day by day diary is intended to relate to FL only from here on inwards and how the transition will be made to incorporate FL into my day to day life as developer.
1.1 Step into the Lite:
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OK I have had a cigar, mulled it all over several times and looked at a load of FL games and demos to get a feel for the level of quality currently on offer and have decided to jump into the pool of lite.
I want to make money from this down the line as an ongoing business so it’s not just for fun. As I have written games for most of my life this has to be an exercise in quick learning and fast production of titles if I am to make anything useful happen. This time next year the market (like j2me) will already be flooded with FL content so it’s now or never!
1.2 The first day:
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OK some of what I might say from here onwards you may not like to hear, but it is the ramblings of a developer starting from 100% nothing with FL from day 1 and how I went about it.
First I do my homework and spend about 4hrs looking at other peoples FL stuff and related blogs on the net. I’m like a giant sponge sucking in all the info I can get into my brain and at one point have about 15 windows of ‘cack’ open on my dual screen setup – that is a lot of information! Eventually I get most of it into my head and feel like the Neo in the Matrix when he states ‘I know Jujitsu!’
After looking at various FL games and titles I quickly come to the conclusion that this is not a lot like j2me, in fact all the content I have seen so far is homebrew generated FL – some of it not bad and some of it graphically really bad.
The first thing I need to get is the FL SDK so I sign up with Adobe and get the required files and bit and bobs. I also open up a few torrents on the net to get what I want but it comes down the wire as German SDK so that’s no good to me.
Eventually I get the entire SDK (Trial) for FL 1.1 and 2.0 and am left looking at a hefty price to pay for the Flash 8 Pro IDE when the 30 days expire
I still stand at my point: if it’s this easy to create things, it will simply flood the market with crappy stuff, even more so as happened with j2me.
j2me is now settling down and alot of crap is filtered out, flash will start things all over again and not in a good way I’m afraight.
but a nice diary! 🙂 Will be following things and see if I’m wrong about it 😉
Ciao Adrian,
really interesting. I would like to get in contact with you, biskero at gmail
Alessandro
Flash Lite Diary by Adrian
From Mobile Game Blog, Adrian Cummings is posting about his adventure on becoming a Flash Lite developer: Flash Lite Diary. Really interesting to follow how a J2ME developer is looking at Flash Lite development.
Adrian, if you are reading please contac…
Do you get the same “qualities” as Flash on a PC: anti-aliased vector fonts, sub-pixel positioning and manipulation of bit images, vector graphics anti-aliasing etc?
Would be interesting with a follow-up on pros and cons, and whether Flash Lite is also applicable to more professional tasks like PIM applications and stuff.
Thanks for the note.
Woa,
Is that you on the picture? Woa, you have pretty nice legs, but that phone model is really outdated.
errr… it’s “i know kung-fu” 😛
Thanks for the correction regards Neo’s comment in the Matrix and I was’nt 100% sure
if it was one or the other without watching the thru film again, but I guess both whoop ass anyway so no great biggy 🙂
Sad bugger post No.1
OK I can see why I got it wrong but hey give me some cred eh 🙂
—>
Tank smiles as he sits down in his operator’s chair, flipping through several disks. He picks one, and puts it into his computer. Neo looks at the screen.
Neo : Jujitsu? I’m going to learn…_Jujitsu_?
smiling, Tank presses the ‘Load’ button.
Neo’s body jumps against the harness as his eyes clamp shut. The monitors kick wildly as his heart pounds, adrenaline surges, and his brain sizzles. An instant later his eyes snap open.
Neo : Holy sh*t!
Tank grins
Tank : Hey Mikey, I think he likes it! How about some more?
Neo : Hell yeah..oh yeah.
Hours later, Morpheus walks in. Tank is blinking, trying to keep his eyes in focus.
Morpheus : How is he….?
Tank : Ten hours straight…he’s a _machine!_
Neo’s training finishes, and he opens his eyes, breathing hard.
Neo : *gasp* I know…Kung Fu!
I work at a company that develops high profile mobile games. Although we have looked at Flash Lite, I don’t think we will *ever* use it. Put simply, its way too heavy and doesn’t run on most of the phones on the market (its even worse when customers have to purchase the player first!).
Check out Richmotion instead – its a lightweight app, that allows easy content creation – and generates J2ME (MIDP2) applications that run on every MIDP2 compliant phone. Not quite as powerful, but much more sensible from a business point of view.
myNumbers is developed in Flash Lite 2.1. It displays the number and waits for kid/children to press that number.
Download URL:
http://www.ajsoftpk.com/flash_lite/myNumbers.zip