Flash on the Beach 09 Write Up

OK, so it’s a little late but I thought it was worth sharing my experience of Flash on the Beach this year.

We all know about Flash CS5, codenamed ‘Viper’, and it’s many new features so I won’t bang on about that. Although I am looking forward to having custom code hinting, and the ability to publish to multiple devices (inc. the iPhone). Instead, I thought I’d list the sessions I attended and my thoughts on them.

iPhone Application Development for Flash Developers

On the Sunday I was able to attend the iPhone workshop with Julian Dolce, which was really good! Julian covered the basics of Objective-C, including displaying external images, playing sounds and using the UI Kit. It hasn’t made me want to shell out for a Mac and begin a career as an iPhone developer, but it was a brilliant insight into how it all works, and I left feeling confident that I could build iPhone applications (if I wanted to).

Adobe Keynote

Although Adobe had MAX coming up, it was nice that they gave FOTB attendees some sneak peaks at CS5. In the keynote Richard Galvan talked about Flash Player penetration figures, the future of Flash on Mobiles, upcoming features in Adobe AIR and showed sneak peaks of CS5. The announcement that interested me the most was the ability to deploy Actionscript 3 Flash applications to Mobiles using Flash Player 10.1; I think it’ll be awesome to use the same codebase to deploy to multiple devices (and it’ll be great to completely eradicate the need for AS2!).

Casual Game Architecture: How to finish coding a game without despising it

The next session I went to was Casual Game Architecture by Keith Peters (slides are available). This was probably my favourite session; I really enjoy reading Keith’s books, and his blog, and the topics he chooses to talk about. This was a really interesting session and shared views of my own. Keith talks about good application architecture being core to not losing interest in a project, and I agree. Far too often developers jump straight into a project without thinking about it architecturally and are too eager to begin development.The project then gets very complicated very quickly, and slowly thoughts of “let’s just get it done” creep in. I’ve been guilty of this in the past too, but think that you should always have a plan of how the application should be developed before touching your keyboard. Unless you’re learning something new, programming should just be a typing exercise.

Keith mentioned the gaming toolkits Flixel and PushButton Engine, and also announced Asobu (Keiths own toolkit). I’ve looked into using PushButton Engine for a game I’m currently developing, but it wasn’t a particularly elegant solution and I chose to develop the game from scratch myself. I’m looking forward to seeing what Keith comes out with. Keith has also posted a video (from PushButton Engine) about using composition over inheritance for games; it’s definitely worth watching (even if you’re not interested in game development).

Lead the hand and the arm will follow

I went to see Rich Shupe talk about inverse kinematics in Flash CS4, which was an interesting talk. There was some good points in there, but most of it I’d already seen in other Flash CS4 demos. Lee Brimelow shows some of the features in his Flash CS4 feature tour.

Who’s a bright spark then

Mike Jones chose to talk about the new workflow between Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder and the design tools from the creative suite. It was a great insight into how many caveats and work-arounds there are to get the products to play nice. Flash Catalyst has certainly come further than the initial demos I’ve seen, but there’s still a way to go to reach a level where we’d rely on Flash Catalyst on a daily basis. If Adobe get this tool right it has the potential to revolutionise the designer > developer workflow.

Big Spaceship: Fun Begets Quality

Joshua Hirsch gave a great insight into how his company operates. It’s always great to discover how other companies perform the same tasks as you do, and to find out what works for them. Some of the points I took away from this talk were:

• The three F’s. Fun, Fame and Fortune. Big Spaceship only take on projects that meet at least 2 out of those 3 criteria.
• All of their employees are considered creatives, and are involved in their projects from the start. So the developer doesn’t get the designs and brief for a project dumped on their desk, they actually has input from the beginning of the project, like everyone else. I think this is really important, too often than not it’s the developers that are up-to-date with the capabilities of the technologies they work with. So it’s always good to have the developer involved from the start, that way the client is aware of what can and can’t be done at the beginning of the project, rather than 2 months down the line when it lands on the developers desk.
• Happy staff are productive staff. I really like the way Big Spaceship aim to provide an exciting workplace, so their employees want to come to work. I also really like the idea of staff pitching for a project to do in the two days after they’ve finished a project. It really promotes the creativity of the staff, and enables projects and ideas to emerge that wouldn’t from solely focussing on client work. A lot of these internal project end up on their labs site, or as proof of concepts to show prospective clients.

Telling Stories

Hillman Curtis showed his work of video portfolios, which was interesting to see. I didn’t really take much away from his session, but did enjoy watching it.

Epiphany

Joel Gethin Lewis gave a really good presentation on his work and the route it has taken so far. It was really interesting to see the experiences he has created using technology.  Some of his projects used Open Frameworks – a toolkit I want to look into. I haven’t really programmed using C+ before, but the projects he demoed made me want to give it a shot (when I get some spare time!).

Final words

I wasn’t able to stay down in Brighton for the other two days, but thoroughly enjoyed the two days I had down there. As you can probably tell, my two favourite sessions were Keith Peter’s and Big Spaceship’s, and each for different reasons. I would definitely recommend Flash on the Beach for anyone, especially those involved in projects that use the Flash Platform. Well done to all of the Flash on the Beach team – top job!