Flash 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.
