Play Monster Ball on Kongregate and NewGrounds

Who knows what will happen to the Flash iPhone packager in the future (I hope it survives), but for now Monster Ball, the game I made for iPhone is still available on iTunes for free.

True to the write-once, deploy anywhere spirit of Flash, you can now also play it free online at:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/dulldudegames/monster-ball

or

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/533663

Adobe has invited me to the AIR Android beta: unfortunately I don't have an Android phone to test on, but I'm pretty certain it would just package and run without any changes. Besides, you should soon be able to play it in-browser on your Android anyway, yay!

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.

My thoughts on Flash for iPhone

Keith over at bit-101 just published a very thoughtful post on the newly announced Flash to iPhone publishing. I wrote a reasonably long comment, so I thought I'd just do a quick republish here. These are my thoughts:

I was definitely in the “this is neat” camp when I heard the announcement – and here’s the reason: I’m maxed out. I have a list of over 40 ideas for new Flash games, plus probably another 40 old engines that I just need to reskin and launch. This is in addition to all my client work. Then there’s Unity3D which I have been investigating as a route into 3D games, which also requires that I brush up on my 3DS Max skills and C#. On top of all that there’s keeping up with Flash, updating my blog, giving talks etc, and that’s before I even consider my family life and anything resembling a social life. So really learning real iPhone development for the sake of joining the gold rush isn’t even an option or choice for me. But I do have the time to resize the odd game and test it for iPhone, and that’s what I’m going to do. Apple haven’t lost any business from me.