Monster Ball: a free iPhone game made with Flash CS5 beta and AS3

A short while ago I joined the Flash CS5 beta program and started work on my first iPhone game, and just a short while later it is finished and Monster Ball is live on the AppStore! It's a pretty simple game - you swing a ball and bop some monsters. Anyway, it's free, so please go download it. Here's some notes:

• The game took only a few days to develop, including submission to the AppStore.
• Joining the iPhone developer program and getting my head around the Apple submission process took as long as designing and building the game.
• I actually had to send Apple a fax at one point.
• ...but once you've signed up and learned all the steps you can get a second app out very easily.
• I developed and published the whole game on Windows, without any use a of Mac.
• This meant using OpenSSL to "sign" it, which is not the easiest thing in the world, but Adobe and other beta users provided lots of guidance. Hopefully they will have streamlined this process further by the time CS5 is released.
• You do, of course, need an iPhone or iPod Touch for testing.
• Getting your first code running on the iPhone is scarily easy!
• It's coded in AS3 and I didn't need to use any iPhone specific or even FlashPlayer 10.1 specific APIs.
• There are a lot of different options around rendering, using GPU and some special new APIs, but as I say, I didn't use them.
• So my game also works great on the web and I'm currently looking for a sponsor for the web version over at FlashGameLicense.com.
• This also means that you could very easily use a free web version to promote and sell the paid iPhone version (a la Canabalt).
• But I decided to give this game away for free so everyone can have a look at what CS5 can do.
• This is also the first release of a game under my games company name, Dull Dude.

Update: A note on performance

• A few people have contacted me to say they are getting slow performance on their older-model iPhones and iPods. I suspected this would happen so I already give a warning in the description on iTunes that iPhone 3GS or equivalent is required. The problem is that while developing I didn't have access to an older model iPhone or iPod, only my iPhone 3GS. Without something to test against, it was impossible for me to make the right optimisations for these older devices. As I have written above, Flash CS5 has many graphics rendering options, but I am not utilizing them in my game - I don't want anyone to think this is the best performance that Flash can do. I expect among the many beta testers of Flash CS5 there are some examples with much better performance.