Wow, talk about a real gem of an article I’ve ran into. I was checking the referrers from one of my sites and found this article by Scott Bilas. To quote,

This paper is the story of the Oberon development team’s experiences with building games in Flash. All of us came from big games where we built our own tech (the author was a C++ game systems engineer for nearly ten years), so why did we choose Flash as our development platform instead of building our own casual games platform? What was so hot about Flash, and what caused us headaches? And, most importantly, when should we avoid using Flash entirely?

If you’re interested in this whole gaming/Flash business (I hope you are, or else you’re pretty lost since you’re here!), be sure to check it out. It’s a very good analysis of the features and pitfalls of Flash as a game programming platform. It’s quite a big article too.

Read more: What About Flash? Can We Really Make Games With It?

Update: By the way, this was the content of Scott Bilas’ presentation at GDC 2005. There are other presentations done by him that can be found here, including the slideshow version of the above article. He also has what sounds like a pretty handy application: a wrapper/loader that makes the ‘dirty rect’ of Flash movies (the area that actually gets updated when playing a movie) visible. I couldn’t get it to work (needs some DLLs, or the .NET framework it seems) but it would be a killer Flash performance debugging tool, specially for game programmers. I’ll have to try it again later when I have time…