How they build the identical game on Mac, PC, and Flash? For example: Plants VS Zombies

Question

Such as the famous game Plants VS Zombies, or Machinarium. They have Mac and PC version, and even online flash demo. It must be a flash engine or something, does anyone know this, what's that?

Answer 1

I once worked on a video game which ran on windows, gamecube and PS2. The game engine rendered the graphics using RenderWare. The RenderWare API was the same for all the platforms, but the machine code was actually different and customized for each platform. When we wrote the code, the code we wrote would be linked to 3 different renderware libraries, 1 for windows, 1 for PS2 and 1 for gamecube.

The actual game code was written in basic C and didnt use any platform specific library.

OpenGL is available on most platforms and is a popular choice for cross platform graphics.

Answer 2

Well, for one thing, you definitely can write Flash apps in C/C++.

See this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hX-Uh3oTcE

And I suppose with some C macros you can make it cross-compile between 3 platforms simultaneously with some effort.

Other possibilities would including using something like haXe or the NekoVM sort of thing.