I love Flash. I love ActionScript. It comes to me as easily as the Welsh accent comes to Tom Jones. I know AS2 very well and I am starting to get my head around AS3 without too much of a problem. My plan this year was to do as much work in Flash as possible to make it as easy for myself as possible.
For our gaming module, Orrin and I have decided to make an interactive and immersive mobile game using binaural audio. We have done some test recordings using binaural and they worked out very well. However, the next stage for me, whilst Orrin is working on a plot and the game mechanics is to do some ‘tech tests’ to try and deduce what technologies we use to make the game.
Our initial plan was to use Flash, which would make the game more universal. This would work fantastically, as Orrins phone (the HTC Hero) supports the full-fat Flash 9.0 rather than the semi-skimmed Flash Lite, which has limited capabilities with regards to graphics, sound and animation – the key ingredients in our project! However, the current version of Flash (9.0) doesn’t include support for mobile APIs such as GPS, compasses, accelerometers and audio input.
Unfortunately, there is a new version of Flash coming out (10.0) which will support just about everything we need from the mobile API access side of things, but it will be coming out “later this year” which is just a tad too late for us. The other 3 options are iPhone (Objective-C based XCode), Android (Google-based Java libraries and Eclipse) and Java/JavaME.
I have not yet looked into the iPhone SDK, despite being one of the first to download it. It has been left dorment in my Developer folder for quite some time for fear of it being just to difficult. However, according to that ever-reliable resource Wikipedia, the learning curve for the iPhone SDK is not that bad at all, much better than Java (which I semi-mastered in the second year) and the ever-so-slightly-different Android Java, which gives me the push to go and learn XCode for the iPhone. Plus, you never know what else I could build!
