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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperTechnical (Moderator: ThemsAllTook)Adobe Air for Android - how does it work?
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petertos
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« on: October 25, 2014, 03:10:52 AM »

Hi everyone,

I'm not used to post stuff in the "Technical" side of TIGSource, but there always has to be a first time.

I'm from Spain and I've managed to put an animated mini-series on a well-known Spanish VOD portal. This has been a great success for me. Now I'm about to place another animated mini-series on a better Spanish VOD portal; although I think I will manage to do so, the contract hasn't been yet signed so I'm not saying I've made it right now.

To promote these series, which will fall on the "absurd humor" genre, I'm planning to make an Android game about the series. This will be hard work if I want to make it on Java for Android because I've already made a couple games with those programming languages and it's certainly painful.

What I'm thinking is to make it on AIR or Flash + AIR, which is way easier because I've been designing games in Flash for ages and all the assets of the series are in Flash, so making the game would be just pretty straightforward.

My question: Does AIR for Android plus a game work IN THE REAL WORLD? I mean, do people develop games using this technology and most important, do people download the AIR stuff to make a couple of games work? Also, do you know any Big Android titles who run on AIR for Android?

Thanks a lot peers, this will really help me out  Smiley Smiley

Just in case you want to know a bit more about my developed games, I show you here the same game made in Java for Android (Smileys Invasion 2) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pliski.smileysinvasion2&hl=en and in Flash for the web: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/470123
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InfiniteStateMachine
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« Reply #1 on: October 25, 2014, 11:15:57 AM »

Is the issue that you feel more comfortable using actionscript? If so I've had a lot of success using Haxe/OpenFL on android. I was very surprised how well it worked.
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petertos
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« Reply #2 on: October 25, 2014, 10:57:23 PM »

Thanks for the information, I think it's worth having a look at it, I have checked it out roughly and will take a deeper look at it later.

I have three options:

1.- AIR for Android. Pros: Developing is easy and cheap (I got the Flash license bought for some time). Cons: You have to download AIR when downloading the game.

2.- HTML5 game for the web. Pros: Today it's ubiquitous. Cons: ASSETS Theft (not code). For a quick online game this would be great but I'm afraid someone will just download the whole stuff with all the assets (animations, SOUNDS, MUSIC, etc). They would be in low resolution but...

3.- Flash for the web. Pros. Developing is easy and cheap. Cons: Today, distributing a flash game is a pain, even more when the game is in Spanish.

So anyone would come up with a brilliant idea to help me take the cool path?Huh?Durr...? Durr...?
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Dacke
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« Reply #3 on: October 26, 2014, 01:27:02 AM »

I'm afraid someone will just download the whole stuff with all the assets (animations, SOUNDS, MUSIC, etc). They would be in low resolution but...

Why would this be a problem? You would still own the copyright. Best case scenario: someone uses it to create fanart. Worst case scenario... someone doesn't create fanart?
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pwg
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« Reply #4 on: November 05, 2014, 08:40:51 AM »

1.- AIR for Android. Pros: Developing is easy and cheap (I got the Flash license bought for some time). Cons: You have to download AIR when downloading the game.
Surely you nee AIR, but you could use the captive runtime option to pack your app, so there is no need to install the AIR app from Adobe.

2.- HTML5 game for the web. Pros: Today it's ubiquitous. Cons: ASSETS Theft (not code). For a quick online game this would be great but I'm afraid someone will just download the whole stuff with all the assets (animations, SOUNDS, MUSIC, etc). They would be in low resolution but...
Also true for Flash, Silverlight, Unity and every other kind of client side online game. If you download a '.swf', you can simply extract all embedded symbols, MovieClip classes etc. Even decompile the code (Flash Decompiler Trillix). So there is nearly no way to protect your assets, only a way to make it "harder"

3.- Flash for the web. Pros. Developing is easy and cheap. Cons: Today, distributing a flash game is a pain, even more when the game is in Spanish.
Almost every Flash web game is free-to-play and uses advertising as business model. If you want to charge a onetime price for a single game you better use AIR and distribute your game as digital download. Via Steam Greenlight for example.
As alternative you need your own server infrastructure and design you game as free-to-play (without saving), and if the user want to save his game, he has to pay for a premium membership (Digital License). Payment Service could be Paypal or Amazon.
« Last Edit: November 05, 2014, 08:48:13 AM by pwg » Logged
InfiniteStateMachine
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« Reply #5 on: November 05, 2014, 11:04:01 AM »

I would recommend Haxe even more considering your issues

1) Haxe compiles to NDK code (IIRC, it might possibly be JDK, either way performance is great) so you can make an app and not require the air runtime

2) Haxe also exports to HTML5. Now the caveat for this is it's not wonderful yet but they are working on it. Personally I haven't had any showstoppers but there were enough small issues that I don't use Haxe for HTML5 yet.

3) Haxe compiles to native flash files.

So you can use the same codebase for android and flash and the language is basically like a really improved as3.

Edit: The flash interface for haxe is called openFL http://www.openfl.org/
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Rarykos
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« Reply #6 on: November 18, 2014, 12:53:10 PM »

AIR on android works, the only downside is that the .apk file is 10 MB larger because you add AIR runtime in there. But it doesn't really matter nowadays , you know your tools and they do their job so focus on the game, not on searching for the perfect tool.

If you want an audience then a flash version at least gets more than 5000 installs your AIR game would get. But it's not really profitable. If you want profits you have to make a good mobile AIR version.
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