Over the last year, we’ve seen a 7x increase in the availability of Adobe AIR apps in mobile marketplaces, including the Apple AppStore, with no signs of slowing down. With AIR, game developers and publishers can deliver their apps across 6 platforms on more than 500 million smartphones and tablets with stunning graphics and intricate gameplay. Creating amazingly detailed games like Machinarium, which claimed the spot as the #1 iPad app in 12 countries last year, is becoming easier than ever.
Just as Machinarium first debuted as a desktop game, publishers and developers today are looking to easily take their games and deliver them to app stores on a host of mobile devices across the globe. With the availability of AIR 3.2, we’re excited to help users push the envelope of mobile game development with new hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics rendering (Stage 3D) to enable significant performance gains in mobile gaming apps. Hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics will help ring in a new class of social and casual games running at 60 frames per second on mobile devices and tablets. Developers can download a release candidate of AIR 3.2 today and start packaging up apps for delivery to mobile marketplaces immediately, with general availability of AIR 3.2 and Flash Player 11.2 in March.
Hardware accelerated 2D and 3D support, released in Flash Player 11 last year, spurred a new class of features for existing games, including Rovio’s Angry Birds for Facebook, now available with special power up features and enhanced graphics. The global gaming community has shown great adoption of this new technology, boasting a host of titles from Renren, Gamegoo and Disney, and we anticipate that many existing PC games will be ported to mobile using AIR 3.2 in the coming months. Falanxia’s Spaced Away as well as Pamakids Tech’s Winter on Whale Island will be some of the first. Also, we recently learned that the top 9 Flash based games in China generate more than $70 million per month! Now that shows rapid adoption.
All of these innovative developments (with more to come soon!) demonstrate our focus on creating value for our gaming customers. By delivering new features to advance gameplay, increase fun and provide added support for productized features within the runtimes, gaming at Adobe will continue to grow by leaps and bounds. The future has never looked brighter.
Check out some of the great new features that are available with Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2.
Read why our partners are excited about 2D and 3D hardware acceleration with AIR 3.2:
“Earlier this month, Rovio launched the first ever version of Angry Birds for Facebook to huge fanfare using Adobe 2D accelerated graphics,” said Andrew Stalbow, GM of Rovio North America. “Building a game that runs smoothly at 60 frames per second with five times more particles in our explosions and special effects is critical for delivering the most brilliant gaming experiences to our customers. We’re excited to see how Stage 3D accelerated graphics with Adobe AIR 3.2 will take these features to mobile devices and hopefully we can take advantage of this capability down the road.”
“We are thrilled to be the first mobile gaming company to take advantage of the AIR 3.2 release candidate to deliver AIR versions of our social games to our users,” said Masaki Fujimoto, CTO, GREE, Inc. ”Flash Player and AIR help us push the limit of what can be created across the web and delivered as standalone apps on mobile devices. As we expand into global markets, Adobe technology is helping us take advantage of our market leadership in Japan to build success around the world.”
“As Flash based game developers, we are excited to use AIR 3.2 to make our visually appealing games stand out even more with the tools we already know,” said Jakub Svoboda, Game Producer, Falanxia. “Adobe helps us to bring our award winning games, like Spaced Away, to more iOS gamers than ever before. Good job Adobe!”
“Flare3D Studio is leveraging the enhanced features in AIR 3.2 to create a very powerful Stage 3D IDE,” said Adrian Simonovich, CEO, Flare3D. “Adobe AIR has been, and will continue to be, a very important and powerful tool to bring hardware accelerated 3D support for mobile devices and allow Flare3D’s developers to create amazing 3D accelerated experiences and reach a much larger audience.”
“Since investing in AIR, we no longer have to worry about weighing different platforms and developer tools to reach our audience,” said Yifei Xu, CEO, Pamakids Tech. “AIR is the tool we rely on to avoid the clutter and just laser focus on what really matters – delivering the best games and apps to kids and parents.”
“We have chosen to develop with Flash because it is widely used, does not require installations, and games can be played instantly by simply clicking on a link,” said Filip Kuna, CEO, CUKETA. “Thanks to Adobe AIR, we were able to port our game, Age of Defenders, to different devices including Android tablets and iPad2 which allows us to appeal to a wider range of customers at a minimal cost.”
“NVIDIA’s been working closely with Adobe to bring increasing amounts of GPU acceleration to several generations of Flash Player and AIR,” said Neil Trevett, Vice President, Mobile Content at NVIDIA. “Now, Stage 3D in Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2 can fully exploit the power of GPU acceleration to enable rich, real-time 3D games and content that is portable across multiple desktop and mobile platforms. NVIDIA is committed to ensuring that Stage 3D continues to be highly optimized for multi-core Tegra-based mobile devices.”
As someone who is passionate about film and enjoys games, I’m delighted to announce that Adobe is working with the producers of Indie Game: The Movie, Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky, to bring screenings of this award winning film to a city near you! We’ve scheduled seven dates so far in the U.S and Canada and are adding more every week, including Seattle, WA on March 23, and Portland, OR on March 28.
Indie Game: The Movie is a feature-length documentary, and follows the compelling, personal stories of independent video game designers as they create and release their unique and very individual works to the world. Coming off their recent win for Best Editing in World Documentary Cinema at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Lisanne and James are thrilled to finally share this film with so many audiences, and are excited that Adobe is helping take the film to indie game developers and fans on such a large scale. Community support for this movie has been outstanding, and part of the funding was secured through Kickstarter, where the producers raised their initial funding goal in just 48 hours.
The first public screening will be held at the Rio in Santa Cruz, CA on Friday, March 2 at 7pm. For those of you attending GDC, the second and third screenings will be held at the Embarcadero in San Francisco, CA, on Tuesday, March 6th at 7pm and 9:30pm.
At each venue, members of the Adobe Gaming Solutions team will be on hand to give out prizes and talk one on one. Additionally, Indie Game: The Movie’s filmmakers will hold a panel to discuss the film and answer questions from attendees at each screening. Edmund McMillen, who was featured in the documentary will be a special guest at the Santa Cruz, CA screening, and will join the panel. Edmund is a Flash game developer and co-CEO of Team Meat that produced the successful Super Meat Boy game for Xbox 360, Windows PC, Mac OS X and Linux. Super Meat Boy has sold more than one million copies to date.
Like Edmund McMillen, game developers working with Adobe technology can reach 98 percent of Internet connected PCs and up to 500 million tablets and phones with their creations. Adobe will be demonstrating some great Flash based games at GDC March 5-9 in San Francisco, both for mobile and desktop. In the meantime, learn more about Adobe & Gaming at http://www.adobe.com/solutions/gaming.html, grab your tickets for a great show, and keep your eyes open for more news coming soon!
Today, Rovio launched Angry Birds for Facebook using Flash Player 11 with support for 3D graphics. The most social version of Angry Birds yet takes advantage of hardware accelerated graphics in Flash Player to bring a silky smooth gaming experience to a wider audience than ever before. More than 130 million people play Angry Birds every day – now with Flash Player, hundreds of millions of Facebook users can do the same. New, enhanced special effects like lighting, smoke and explosions running smoothly at 60 frames per second bring the game to a whole new level and allow players to have a more connected and engaging experience. As we showed you at Adobe MAX in the fall, Rovio’s general manager of North America, Andrew Stalbow provided a sneak peek of this new hardware accelerated version of Angry Birds built on Flash Player 11:
Angry Birds on Facebook game makes it even more exciting to play with friends, offering amazing new power-ups like Sling Scope, Birdquake, King Sling and Super Seed to extend players’ gratifying arsenals. And with new accelerated graphics, the feathery antics have never been more fun to more people. For more information about how to power-up your games using Flash and AIR, please visit the Adobe Gaming Solutions site.
We recently caught up with esDot Studio’s owner Shawn Blais to learn about some of his recent projects using Flash and AIR for game and app development. Check out the Q&A below to see what Shawn is creating, monetizing and having fun doing what loves. Enjoy!
What is your name, company, title?
Shawn Blais, owner/coder/marketer of esDot Studio, Inc. esDot is a company I started for the sole purpose of developing cool, polished AIR apps to mobile platforms. I started serious mobile development in late 2010, since then I’ve created 5 apps and am hard at work on the 6th. I code primarily on evenings and weekends, by day I’m lucky enough to work with a fantastic team at gskinner.com here in Edmonton. Without the experience and opportunities gained there I certainly would not be where I am today.
Where are you located?
Edmonton, AB.
Why did you use Flash/AIR to develop this app?
Two reasons really, efficiency and reach. Flash is so incredibly efficient at churning out high quality interactive apps, that you can literally code entire apps in a matter of 2 or 3 weeks, for me this is huge. I can use my skillset, and existing workflow to literally just fly through these apps.
In terms of reach, AIR allows me to take those 2 or 3 week apps, and deploy them to iOS, Android, BlackBerry PlayBook, Amazon Appstore and NOOK Color. That’s pretty crazy. And since there are two new markets opening up next year, Windows Metro and BlackBerry10, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to deliver my apps to those, too.
Diversifying my income across all these different app stores has really been a key part of my success. It’s been interesting to watch how different apps sell in different markets, SnowBomber for example took off pretty big on BlackBerry PlayBook, and Amazon Appstore, but was quiet everywhere else. TouchUp on the other hand, sells best on iOS. So it’s always different depending on the market, and it’s hard to predict, so it pays to just be in them all.
I looked hard at options like Corona, and Appcelerator, but I couldn’t get over the lack of strong typing in the languages, and the hit to my overall efficiency would have been massive. Also, the hard truth about HTML apps is that testing costs are massive, you really need to test on devices, on different versions of OS etc, and debugging is pretty hard, so it ends up being this monumental time drain. With AIR testing on a new device is usually just a couple hours, or even no time at all, and you get live debugging with breakpoints, so it’s usually pretty easy. That’s not to say there isn’t the odd issue that will drive you nuts, but it’s fairly rare!
How easy was it to deliver your app across multiple channels?
Signing up for the various portals, and passing approval is a pretty tedious process, but once you’re all setup it’s really a breeze. The fact I can build and install an iOS app, using a Windows box, is pretty awesome. Most other development paths would force me to buy a Mac to code on (I actually did end up buying a cheap mac for $500 off eBay, in order to do the final upload to iTunes).
Are you monetizing this app currently? If not, do you have plans to do so in the future?
Currently I’m monetizing ColorUp Pro, TouchUp Pro, SkyTunes, SnowBomber and RedditSolitaire across various markets. Most of my apps have free and paid versions, and TouchUp Pro and SnowBomber also have In App Purchase support on iOS, using an ANE.
Adding In App Purchase, and releasing a free version TouchUp Pro was a great experiment. It nearly doubled my sales on iOS, and I now get an even split between In App Purchase, and Paid Installs.
How many people are currently using the app?
With TouchUp Pro, there are about 12,000 daily users across all platforms. SnowBomber sees about 3000-4000 players a day, most of those on PlayBook or Kindle [is this Kindle Fire?]. Across all my apps, I see about 5,000-10,000 installs a day, with around 5% of those being paid.
What drives you to create these apps/games?
Primarily it was financial, new baby, new house, so something had to give and I saw this as the road to success. Plus, I’m just a complete gadget freak, so I was incredibly passionate about mobile devices, and bringing cool new UI’s to them.
Do you have anything else up your sleeve?
I have a new Photo Editor coming out very soon which will be stunning, it’s running at 60fps and the graphics are based on Android 4.0 UI. Then it looks like we might be teaming up with the awesome artists over at Cherry Sauce (http://cherrysauce.squarespace.com/contact/) to do some fun stuff. Stay tuned!
What do you want developers to know about creating apps with AIR/Flash?
Well, if you haven’t tried it lately, go for it. The performance is really great these days and the workflow is solid, it’s really improved a lot over the earlier AIR 2.7 SDK.
In terms of making money, from my experience the money is in productivity apps. Just make something really nice, really simple, that everyone needs, and you’ll do well. It doesn’t really matter if there’s good competitors in the space, because users love having choices. As long as that space is not completely oversaturated … the most saturated markets seem to be Games and Music, so maybe look elsewhere…
Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
Check out my blog for some tips and tricks on how to achieve fast rendering in AIR for mobile: http://esdot.ca/site/category/blog
Happy New Year! We’re excited to start 2012, and the holidays have brought a bushel of new games and apps, including the first version of those famously Angry Birds using Flash Player 11 and Stage3D. If you’re all revved up and looking to build something new in the coming year, see how you can publish a car visualizer to Flash in 90 seconds with Flare3D Studio Workflow.
As we announced last year, we are investing in our Flash technologies to support the kind of innovative 3D and 2D games that developers and publishers want to deliver both in browsers and through mobile apps. To give developers access to high-performance C/C++ code, we told you we’re creating an improved, paid, fully supported release of Alchemy for production development. This new addition will be available later this year and will allow developers to publish content leveraging Alchemy technology in Flash Player 11 or AIR 3 and beyond. Meanwhile, a few months ago we introduced full GPU-accelerated graphics rendering with Stage3D, which provides 1000x faster rendering performance over the previous versions of Flash Player and AIR on the desktop. Stage3D in Flash Player already enables fluid, hardware accelerated graphics for more people in more browsers than any other web technology. And we’re now seeing exciting previews of Stage3D hardware acceleration coming for mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, and Android smartphones and tablets.
See for yourself what’s happening with the latest updates to Flash Player and AIR for gaming, and jump in on the fun by checking out the beta release of Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2!
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