ADOBE FLASH_game industry

solarSailor

More and more I notice that if you want to be an employable artist these days, your pressured to know more about Flash and Illustrator since more games are leaning towards social media.
Does anyone notice the same thing?

Kurt Russell Fan Club

All games studios I've worked in have used flash. Aside from 2d games and animations and animatics for visualisation, often it's the way user interfaces are made.

Flash animations and scripting can be loaded into games using custom code or using middleware like scaleform.

Justin Meisse

I haven't noticed it but I've never really focused on mobile/social studios. It can't hurt knowing it since a lot of game interfaces are built in flash.

Mambo4

The realms of 3d games and casual flash games are merging.

the release of Adobe Stage 3D (aka molehill) allows flash to utilize the GPU;
The game I am currently working on uses an open source engine to drive flash Stage 3D.
Unity is incorporating Flash stage 3D support , Unreal Ed will probably do so pretty soon if they haven't yet.
Adobe Starling is another flash API that uses the GPU for 2D stuff.

The upshot is this forces flash developers to adopt a methodology closer to PC/ Console game development. In my experience, the old-school Flash studios, used to Flash's browser-friendly, vector based, nested movie clip paradigm are experiencing serious growing pains when faced with the limitations of non- browser platforms (mobile, tablets) that clients are now demanding. What they need is artist who know both the 3D pipeline and the limits of the old-school Flash pipeline.

fatihG_

I was just wondering.. isn't Flash slowly being phased out by html5 and what not? I mean apple doesn't support it.

So how important would Flash be in the future?

I am going to guess that Flash for web will be mostly taken over by html5, while Flash as a game design tool will still exist.

Anyway I know next to nothing about flash (other than basic animation) so I could be, probably am, talking total crap.

passerby

bb0x yes in hte web it is being phased out but it still has a a good amount of time even there, since html5 isnt catching on that quick.

but in games it is used with scaleform a lot for building UI's even more so in the last few years where all major engines support scaleform+flash now.

JustColorado

I plan to set up a new Studio this year. And I have been asking myself the same question for quite a while. My conclusion is the fact that Flash was dropped from Apple doesn't mean it is dead. And for better or worse, I am placing my development bets on Flash. I love the fact that people can just land on a page and play.

HTML5 still has a long way to go. HTML5 supposedly offers the promise of the ultimate in cross platform development. But I have heard a lot of complaints that it doesn't even work as expected in different browsers. So you still have to 4 versions to get it to work in all 4 major browsers. Maybe it will some day crush flash but there is no evidence I can find in 2013 showing that this is starting to happen.

And even if it gets to the point where you can seamlessly code on all platforms, do you really want to write the exact same game for a phone with limited resources that you would for a new computer with a larger screen and better graphics capabilities?

The arguments supporting Flash: Zynga will make over 1 billion dollars this year with very low quality ISO3d games. And they are not even the biggest Facebook game publisher anymore. There is also another industry of arcade sites like Kongregate, and MiniClip. These are both extremely high growth sections of the gaming industry. And so far none of them are migrating to HTML5. There is talk of it but all the action is still in flash.


Also the latest version of Flash Player has full 3d capability and some extremely powerful new features, like using the GPU of the machine instead of putting all the burden on the browser. UDK did a fantastic demo with Citadel http://www.unrealengine.com/flash/ that shows just how far you can take Flash.

Is there risk of it being a dying platform, yes of course. But that can be said about any technology platform. And all I can see right now is profits and growth.

Angry Beaver

Just Colorado is right, but I'm going to add some clarification

Flash used to be used for everything, now HTML5 exists Flash is used for the higher end stuff. Simple transitions of animated adverts are slowly moving towards HTML5 but there's a veritable mountain of features Flash has that HTML5 can't even dream of touching for at least 5 years. This shrinking of Flashes market share combined with PR attacks and Blunders give people the impression it's dying but it's not, it just shed some weight.

bbox:
Flash inside of your mobile phone browser is dead, Flash on your mobile phone (including iPhone) is not. AIR is a way of repacking Flash content so it runs like an app, this is quite common and may be true for more apps and games than you realize.

sprunghunt

Flash is also used in console games. If a team is using scaleform to make the UI then they're using flash to make the art for it.

http://gameware.autodesk.com/scaleform

EDIT: someone already mentioned this...