Building Games with Adobe AIR
July 16th, 2007 by Ryan StewartFlash games are hugely popular. Digg has an entire category for them and the people behind one of the most popular, Desktop Tower Defense, recently announced that they’re planning a startup based around Flash games. I’ve been thinking a lot about how Adobe AIR can appeal to that market and I think it’s going to be a very compelling platform for game developers who are already using Flash.
One thing to be aware of is that you won’t really be able to use Flash 8 inside of AIR. You can access the code in your Flash 8 SWF from AIR with LocalConnection but you won’t be able to take advantage of the APIs, which is one of the major reasons to use Adobe AIR. As a game developer, you have a lot inside of AIR that can help you create more feature rich games. By taking your Flash work outside of the browser and bringing it to the desktop, it becomes just like native OS games which can really boost both popularity and monetization.
One of the most obvious benefits is to be able to run the Flash games offline so users can play them whenever they want. But it’s more than that. With Adobe AIR you have access to the hard drive and the full system. You could create a multiplayer client that runs in the background and pops up a system notification when someone challenges you. You can enable the ability to save a game on the hard drive and have it synchronize to the web so that your users have access to their saved games wherever they are whether that’s on an airplane or a computer at school. By breaking out of the browser you can also do more with the game. You can create a transparent background, create a custom user interface/window, run it with command line arguments and give it a custom icon and put it in the games menu with all of the other games.
There are going to be a lot of cool uses for Adobe AIR, but one of the ones I’m most looking forward to are games. I can’t wait to see what you cook up.
I’m working on an AIR based RPG: http://limitlessquest.com It’s going to take a while to get it feature complete, but it’s going to take full advantage of Adobe AIR features such as offline play, web sync, etc.
It’s an area I’m definitely planning to do stuff with. Definitely some cool benefits there.
[...] more @ http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2007/07/16/building-games-with-adobe-air/ [...]
I wrote an AIR game - ChipWits II - http://chipwits.com - which just got a nice mention in your blog.
One of my concerns about making money from ChipWits is that the big game portals (Big Fish Game, PlayFirst) don’t handle games based on Flash. I think AIR would become a hugely popular game platform if Adobe could work with the portals on making them comfortable with AIR.
And the faster blitting in the next Flash Player will help AIR as a serious game platform.
How well does AIR do 3d? Will it have a 3d api? I’ve been looking over google to find out if it will, but haven’t been able to find anything meaningful.
I have just released a shareware game built on AIR. The game is Tongits, a 3 player card game similar to gin rummy, it has AI, betting, stats, game saving, and other cool stuff. You can find more info at the site: http://www.tongits.net. I guess Tongits is just the 2nd AIR game to be developed and released as shareware, next to ChipWits. I’m currently working on an internet play upgrade to take advantage of AIR’s powerful connectivity features.