Developing For Android Using Flash

One of the great things about using a tool like Flash to develop games is that I can take those games to new platforms, ones that didn’t even exist when the game was created. I made Gold Strike in 2003, using Flash 5 or MX. But now it is on the iPhone, and soon Android phones as well.
Adobe, who has continued to expand the Flash playback engine into new arenas, will be bringing Flash to Android phones in the form of AIR for Android. It is just in the beta test phase, and I’m thankful that I’ve been allowed to test it and then given permission to blog about it.
Here is a video of Gold Strike running on a Nexus One.

I’m excited about this because I hear that the Android Marketplace can actually be pretty decent. There are fewer Android phones out there, and fewer people with them buy apps, I’m sure. But there is also less competition.
I’m impressed at how well Flash performs. The game runs at top speed — as opposed to the slow speeds on the original iPhone and 3G. So the processor in the Nexus One seems to be equivalent to the iPhone 3GS or iPad. Or, maybe Adobe was able to do other things to speed up Flash.
The screen, of course, is another issue. The Nexus One has a 800×480 screen. This is interesting as it could make it possible to build some games that need more pixels than the iPhone screen has available at 480×320.