What do I need to download to make flash games and how much does it cost? Also will I be able to use a mac to do this?
+2
A:
If you use the opensource Flex 4 SDK, then it would be free; however, if you use the Adobe Flash or Adobe Flashbuilder, then it will cost you lots of $$$ (much more than it is actually worth, I'd say). The tools all work on the Mac. I have the opensource Flex 4 SDK and Adobe Flash CS4 installed on my Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard computer. There were some minor things that needed to be fixed (I had to run chmod a+x on a few things that Adobe forgot to make executable, and attempting to alter the default install directory -- I originally tried using "/Developer/Applications" instead of the default "/Applications" -- makes the installation completely screw up), but other than that, everything has worked fine on Mac OS X.
As an aside, though, I would strongly recommend you take a look at HTML5 (see A platform game written in HTML5 and HTML5 Canvas Demos) and O3D or WebGL (if you want to make 3D games), if you are looking at developing web-based games. If you want to make games that run on the desktop, then I would suggest you take a look at Blender and Panda3D as alternative platforms for game development.
Michael Aaron Safyan
2010-04-02 02:22:14
Google 03D API doesn't work on my mac my graphics card doesn't work with it, is there anything similar to it?
mtwisterr
2010-04-02 02:39:38
@mtwisterr, what kind of Mac do you have? How old is it? What version of OS X are you running?
Michael Aaron Safyan
2010-04-02 02:52:55
@mtwisterr, you can look at WebGL as an alternative to O3D.
Michael Aaron Safyan
2010-04-02 02:57:42
@mtwisterr, both O3D and WebGL are fairly new and experimental... but if you are just making 2D games, then HTML5's canvas should be just fine.
Michael Aaron Safyan
2010-04-02 02:59:31
@Michael Aaron Safyan I have a mac book pro running os x 10.6.2 its less then a year old with a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card
mtwisterr
2010-04-02 03:26:30
HTML5 for web games right now? Does it even cover 50% of the market yet?
fenomas
2010-04-02 16:39:13
@fenomas, still beats Flash.
Michael Aaron Safyan
2010-04-02 18:53:17
@Michael: For <50% of viewers, that's debatable. For >50% of viewers, it's clearly untrue.
fenomas
2010-04-03 07:23:08
@fenomas, check out: http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/
Michael Aaron Safyan
2010-04-04 02:58:23
@Michael, that's precisely my point. It's great, but it only runs in nightly builds of a single browser. By comparison the Flash port of quake requires Flash 9, which is on ~98% of mature market PCs.
fenomas
2010-04-04 04:17:14