Flash is Adobe's browser plug in player which plays
.swf files.
Flash is a good choice because:
A great authoring tool for interactive content.
Flash is everywhere. For the web version of a game, 96% of the
audience won’t need to download anything.
More importantly, many people won’t install ActiveX controls
or Silverlight, or use a Java plug-in, whereas Flash is
preinstalled with Windows even on corporate machines.
Cost is essentially free – there is a small cost for the Flash
IDE, but it’s nearly free to distribute (just some minor
licensing things to worry about that don’t cost anything).
Royalty-free licenses for decoders such as MP3 and Sorensen
Spark are included.
The hierarchical visual object model in Flash is the main
reason for its fast prototyping ability. It’s difficult to
describe how powerful it is without showing a demo, but here’s
an attempt. Take for example any graphical object that can
have multiple states, such as:
A toolbar that, based
on mouse proximity, may slide on or off the screen, or alpha
in and out. |
|
A Flash animation can have many different skins, and can be
changed easily.
An object that, if the player destroys it, breaks into
fragments and explodes with an effect.
Multiple-state graphics are easily created. Each object can
have multiple states, such as ticking, not ticking, lit, not
lit, alive, and dead. Each of those states may be animated,
and there may be animated transitions from one state to
another.
Special navigation and functionality effects such as an
auto-hiding toolbar.
Flash allows for visually sequencing behaviors. Objects can be
made deeper, more complex, more interactive, in a clear and
intuitive way, without breaking any code that was working with
a higher level of hierarchy. Our Flash artists can go into an
assets file in this way and add effects or animations to
objects without requiring an engineer.
The key advantage of using Flash, though, is that it’s simply
well-suited to the task of making interactivity, motion and
different motion effects.
There is also a gigantic community of Flash support.
|