[casual_games] Market Penetration of Flash 7?

[Morbus Iff]

> If anything, your game will run better on PC!  We use OSX and Linux 
> also, but we keep a PC (necessary evil) to test.

Heh, heh. I've always been a fan of "develop on the oddest machine you can 
find, and you'll be amazed at how great it works on a quality machine". My 
AmphetaDesk software, now deceased, nor a game, I used to test on a Win 95 
66mhz/8M laptop I got at a flea market. If it ran decently there, I was 
assured it'd run fine everywhere else :) (AmphetaDesk is also a 
crossplatform piece of work, in Perl without requiring Perl, which is 
quite rare. I've long held that if it's not crossplatform, I won't code 
it, which is why I've chosen Flash as my only game-dev environment).

> A couple things to watch out for:

Thanks - tried and true experiences are quite helpful!

> If you test on Linux, sometimes sound effects create problems. After a 
> sound plays your movie might "hiccup." Button clicks might not hit their 
> target, or not register at all. I have to switch the sounds off until I 

I've not even approached the subject of sound, but due to weirdness with 
my primary Linux soundcard and the craziness of KDE sound handling, I 
don't even get sound in other people's Flash movies. Generally, though, 
the type of movie-goers I'm targeting, I expect very few of them to have a 
Linux machine, and those that do will be smart enough to recognize and 
expect deficiencies.

Thankfully, this first game is very "basic" in the "things Flash can do" 
department - I'd be able to equally build it in Perl/PHP/HTML without much 
loss in quality. There is very little animation (the only one will be a 
"move this square, in one of five positions, to this single position"). 
This game is ultimately serving the purpose of acclimating me to the Flash 
environment (and how it interacts with a server backend, provided via 
LAMP) so that our second game (the "real" one we wanted to make) will be 
more intelligent (from a design/coding standpoint) and less fallible.

With that said, the more I work on this first attempt, the more I think 
it'll turn out to be a better, more accessible, more income-worthy, game 
than the second one. We'll see.

-- 
Morbus Iff ( you are nothing without your robot car, NOTHING! )
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
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