dustin andrew

With Adobe's recent announcement to no longer developer the Flash Player for mobile, there has been a lot of confusion about if this was the end of the Flash Player or not.  So just to clairify:

This is what Adobe will support:

1. Desktop: Flash Player as a browser plug-in
2. Mobile Browser: Flash Player 11.1 will be available on Android and Blackberry. Adobe is committed to creating great tools and technologies for HTML5 experiences and server-side technologies to deliver HTML5 video (Ex. FMS 4.5 streaming to iOS).
3. Mobile Apps: Flash based apps packaged with AIR which can be distributed via all of the major app stores, including Apple’s App Store, Android Market, Amazon’s App Store etc.
4. TV apps: Ability to embed Flash video in native HTML apps as well as Flash based apps packaged with AIR

This is what Adobe will not support:

1. Future versions of Flash as a mobile browser plug-in. Increasingly, mobile OS manufacturers are excluding browser plug-ins, limiting our ability to use Flash to solve mobile browser fragmentation
2. Browsing on a TV. We believe the apps, not browsing to a website, will be the primary way viewers access premium video and games on TVs and peripherals. Specifically, we will not ensure that, for example, 10 year-old websites will render flawlessly on TVs because most people are not browsing 10 year-old websites on TVs.

With Flash Player 11, which will introduce full 3D to Flash, set to come out this sometime this year, Unity has been working with Adobe to create a Unity to Flash publish option.  Unity has released a sneak peak showing how easy it will be to publish Unity projects to Flash. Check it out.

Several weeks ago, I started prototyping an idea for a game in Unity.  And even after using Unity for three years, I'm still amazed at how fast I can take something from an idea to playable.

The basic concept of the game, is that you're a space miner, mining asteroid minerals.  With limited air and shields, you must gather as much minerals as you can, while traversing dangerous and unstable terrain.  The faster you harvest the minerals the more they are worth, as they degrade over time once mined.  You cash in the minerals for credits, which you use to buy/upgrade weapons and gear.  I plan to add enemies, all kinds of weapons and gear like a grappling hook, rockets, etc...  AND even a level builder where you can create and share your own levels.

I'm working on a simple story line with a side character who pilots the ship that takes you from galaxy to galaxy.

For now, the levels you see here are just placeholders I'm using for testing the different game mechanics.  But as you can see, I went with a simple grid based system.  I think this forces the player to make careful movements in certain areas, as well as making the level builder a lot more feasible.  I'm thinking about making it so you could walk off an edge and the level would rotate, almost like you had gravity boots on.  This would make the levels not seem so flat and create some interesting game play.

Lerpz, from the Unity tutorials, is standing in for the main character until I'm finished with him. 

So, theres still a lot of work to do, but its coming together quickly.  I wish I could work on this all day long, but currently my non-gamedev day job pays the bills.  Maybe someday, just maybe.

I've collected some great articles and links on #gamedev over the last several weeks that I wanted to share.

#AltDevBlogADay

Big Bang Technology - Why we don't work overtime

Soren Johnson's Game Design Journal - Sid's Rules

GameDev.net - Motivations in Games

List of Game Development Blogs

DevMag.org.za - Top Skills to become a game developer

Wolffire Games - Linear algebra for game developers

Derek Yu - Finishing a Game

By day I'm a Flash developer, and by night I'm a Unity developer.  Today, both of my worlds collided.  At the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco this weekend, Adobe announced the public availability of a beta version of the Flash Player 11, which includes the new 3D APIs codenamed Molehill.  Molehill exposes a very low-level shader-based interface to the graphics hardware, which allows for GPU-accelerated 3D in the Flash Player.  As if this wasn't enough, Unity Technologies announced that over the past few months, their engineers have been investigating the possibility of adding a Flash Player exporting option to Unity.  And they are now moving into full production!

Molehill exposes a very low-level shader-based interface to the graphics hardware.  Adobe has decided to focus on that low-level part, and do that really well. The molehill pre-release will not be shipping with a 3D engine, scene building tools, model and animation importers / exporters, physics, lighting or lightmap creation tools, etc.

Hmmm….does that list sound familiar? It sounds a lot like what you all love Unity for!

In the past few months, our engineers have been investigating the possibility of adding a Flash Player exporting option to Unity. That investigation has gone very well, and we’re moving into full production.

So, what does this mean?  Well, for Unity developers, you will now have another platform to target when exporting your projects.  And for Flash developers, you will now have the power of Unity when creating 3D content in Flash.

This is big news!  One of the main concerns I've had with 3D in Flash was the lack of a pure 3D development environment.  I've used Papervision3D alot in the past and it can be very frustrating trying to create 3D content from just pure code.  Away3D, another 3D engine for Flash, posted some previews of their latest engine taking advantage of the Molehill API.

I think performance wise, Unity is far ahead of Flash, but I'm still excited to see where this take us. Being able to use the best of both worlds will create some amazing 3D experiences.  This is a win-win for both Flash and Unity developers.