Adobe made some controversial decisions regarding Flash last year. The company ceased development of Flash for Android, and instead made Adobe AIR the de facto development platform for mobile devices. Some developers may have resented that choice, but Adobe is here today to tell you that it’s not that bad.
In a case study published on Thursday, Adobe looks to Buffalo Studios, developer of popular Facebook game Bingo Blitz, and how the studio was able to use Flash in conjunction with AIR to provide a solid gaming experience across both Web and mobile.
It’s important to understand first that Buffalo Studios comes from a background in native mobile development. That means the studio made their iOS titles in Objective-C and ported the game to Java for Android. It’s less than ideal, and can be frustrating at times.
For Bingo Blitz, the team did a little something different. They took a game built for the Web in Adobe Flash and ported it to mobile using Adobe AIR. The studio’s director for Flash Development, Lorenzo Nuvoletta, said that “having one Adobe Flash content pipeline and using Adobe AIR to rapidly port to all devices cut our development cycle in half.”
Now, every usage case is not going to be the same. Buffalo Studios may have had the right people at the right time, but it still stands to reason that developing with tools that are platform agnostic is much better than developing a native application in some cases. It’s especially true for games, but others could benefit from it.
As for the future of Buffalo Studios’ games, SVP of Technology, Barry Sohl, says that Adobe’s products are the future:
We are basing all our current and future titles on Adobe Game Developer Tools. It’s very cool to be able to simultaneously release all our platforms every week, which is extremely difficult for one team to do without Adobe AIR.
Adobe’s products aren’t the only development tools that can achieve these kinds of results either. Unity, another popular game development toolset, boasts that developers can create games using its toolset and port to any number of platforms, including mobile devices.
Until HTML5 becomes the go to platform for mobile Web development, Adobe, Unity and other similar programs will be the go to platforms for developing applications across multiple devices and platforms. Users demand that applications be the same across the Web and mobile, and developers must be ready to answer that call.