I was watching a video showing an ngmoco rolando2 level designer. He seemed to be using flash CS4 to make the maps. Would anyone know how I would go about doing this?
Just in case you need to know, I am an intermediate programmer, I know both Java and Objective-C pretty well.
I don't know if any of what I'm about to say is true or not, but hopefully my input will be helpful:
It could be simply that the level used in Rolando are simply vector graphic images and the designer you saw in the video simply preferred Flash CS4 as his vector editor?
Again, I could be wrong here.
It's also possible that the game has some code that decodes flash files into usable levels somehow - assuming this would be permitted by Apple in regards to their "no interpreters" rules.
My final thought, which in my opinion would be the least likely, is that the game may be a flash game compiled to run on the iPhone using Adobe's beta flash-iphone SDK. I say this would be the least likely as I believe ngmoco haven't used this method in any of their previous games and I don't see why they would suddenly resort to this method of developing iPhone apps.
In my game Hudriks I also used flash to design levels and even make some animations.
There is no any tool to do this, so you need to develop it yourself with requirements for your game.
First of all, it depends on your game and what exactly you need to design in flash - just putting images, defining their parameters (bonus values), ground path, etc.
After that it is important to define structure of your flash file - how you store different levels (in symbols or scenes), what layers for each level you have (boundaries, objects, obstacles, etc).
If you need to have some extra information for you objects in flash, most probably, you will need to develop custom panel in flash to setup all parameters. I used setPersistentData for storing information for flash objects.
After that you need to develop script that goes through all objects in your symbols and extracts basic information, like transformation, and your custom data. I faced some problems with getting correct transformation values, especially for rotation. Had to do extra heuristics.
For animations I just used motion tween data. In my animation framework did simple implementation supporting basic parameters (transformation and alpha) and only linear curves. Fortunately, in Flash CS4 there is function copyMotion that gives you XML for the animation. You just need to parse it or convert to your own format.