Goodbye Flash, Hello OpenFL:Next Generation Cross-Platform Game Development

Craig RobinsonVP Mobile Games

FlowPlay

About FlowPlay

Why?

First Apple said no iOS Safari support

http://shirt.woot.com/offers/poison-apple

"Flash is a spaghetti-ball piece of technology that has lousy performance and really bad security problems.” – Steve Jobs

Native apps with Adobe AIR, FTW!

Desktop browsers turn against

Et tu, Google?

Player approval required to run

Player approval required to run

Flash is (not quite) dead, but…•Web games still have an audience•We also need to be able to serve a mobile audience•And, we want to use a single codebase

• Furthermore, we’ve got• About a million lines of existing as3 code• A team of as3 developers• An asset pipeline designed to work with Flash

We’ve got a serious problem!

We’ve got a serious problem!

Haxe and OpenFl to the rescue!

Haxe

OpenF

L

AS3 Haxe

Flash API OpenFL

What is ?• Modern, high-level, strictly typed programming language• Open source• Cross-platform compiler and standard library• Provides access to native platform capabilities• Supports many targets

What is ?• Haxe library mimicking the Flash

API• Open source• Works well with Adobe Animate

(Formerly Flash) and other Adobe tools• Supports hardware accelerated

rendering• Goes where Flash can’t

Hello, OpenFL!openfl test flashopenfl test html5openfl test macopenfl test windowsopenfl test iosopenfl test androidopenfl test linuxopenfl test ...

Vegas World Slots• Written from scratch in Haxe and

OpenFL• Hand ported some of our AS3 libs• Built a number of Haxe Extensions• Targets:

• SWF – internal testing• HTML5 (Windows Universal)• iOS• Android (Google Play & Kindle)

Vegas World• Port in progress• ~1 million lines of as3 code• Using as3hx to mechanically

translate from as3 to Haxe• Speeds process dramatically, but

requires manual cleanup

• Will target SWF, HTML5, iOS and Android

Some things we’ve learned…Advantages• It works!• Performance is quite good• Easy for as3 programmers to get

up to speed• Easy to port from as3 code• Works well with our existing asset

pipeline• Community is quite responsive

Some things we’ve learned…Advantages• It works!• Performance is quite good• Easy for as3 programmers to get

up to speed• Easy to port from as3 code• Works well with our existing asset

pipeline• Community is quite responsive

Gotchas• Native extensions can be a pain

and hard for new devs to learn• Native debugging is doable, but

not straightforward• Documentation/example code is

sparse compared to as3

We’re all in

• FlowPlay is throwing its support behind Haxe/OpenFL in a big way• Joshua Granick, founder and managing director of OpenFL is now

Scientist in Residence at FlowPlay• Hosting local OpenFL meetups in Seattle• Promoting the platform at trade shows• We contributed code including our port of DragonBones to Haxe• Will soon contribute a number of native extensions for analytics

and monetization SDKs

Resources

http://www.haxe.orghttp://github.com/haxeFoundation

http://www.openfl.orghttp://github.com/openfl