game made with AIR for the next 5 years?

[semoki]

​"Hello, I always appreciate the hard work of the AIR SDK team. My game, which I had prepared for a year, was released, and I even received an email from the Google Business team confirming a global feature spot, but it was ultimately not featured. Although there were many variables, I suspect the sudden rise in the ANR rate, which was higher than the Google Play Store average, might have been a factor. I removed the game after the featuring failure.
​I have a dilemma as I plan to develop a new game:
Should I continue creating it with AIR, or should I take the time to learn Unity and develop the new title with that instead?
​What I'm curious about is: Will I be able to update a game made with AIR for the next 5 years?
​For issues beyond my control, such as ANR or Google's annual updates, I must rely entirely on the SDK team. I am aware that the AIR SDK was recently acquired by another company and that it might not be their main line of business.
​I feel anxious and curious about how to proceed with the new project.
​Will I be able to update a game made with AIR for the next 5 years?"

[marchbold]

Yeah, I totally get where you’re coming from. It’s tough putting so much time into a project and then having things outside your control affect the outcome.

That said, I do feel like the AIR SDK has been building real momentum again lately. The team’s been active, updates are coming through regularly, and there’s clearly a continued commitment to keeping it up to date with OS changes and to address stability issues.

On my side, we’re continuing to invest heavily in our native extensions and developer support for AIR. We’re making sure ANEs stay compatible, stable, and feature-rich, so developers can confidently keep shipping and updating their projects without worrying about platform-level issues.

No one can say for sure what the next five years will bring, (that’s true for any engine) but right now, I’m feeling positive about where AIR is headed. Hopefully more devs see that too and start to feel that same confidence. It’s still such a great tool when it fits the kind of game or app you’re building.

[GeneralVimes]

Great question and theme of discussion!
I decided to look back what I had 5 years ago in 2020, and there is quite a story :)

In 2020 I returned to indie game development after working some time at a publisher (when I couldn't do my own indie games according to the contract). At that moment Harman had already started taking care of AIR and I rebuilt all my existing games for the x64 architecture, everything worked well. For the new game I decided to start from pure HTML5, and thus I created Babel Tower.

I published it in summer 2020 to Armorgames (where I got 1M plays), to CrazyGames and to some other portals. People liked the tower building mechanics, I released updates, but then I thought that this should be released as a mobile, too. I explored the tools to create a mobile game out of HTML5 and stuck with the main problem: all of them required Mac to build for iOS. Also when I tried to launch a livestreaming session for my players the browser with the game started lagging quite significantly when the streaming software was working.

So I decided to rewrite the game to Action Script 3 and use AIR to publish to mobile. In fact, not much rewriting was needed, as my previous games (like Steampunk Idle Spinner) already had a solid base of functions needed for the games in general and for idle games, but looking at this codebase with a fresh eye and adjusting it for the needs of the Babel Tower helped me to refactor the core essentially and make it easier to use it as a base for the next games.

In August 2020 Babel Tower was released to Android and Google play as Idle Tower Builder (I plan to add new towers into the game, and also decided to use a more search-friendly game name). It was noticed by youtubers, such as Fady and Vitemin, also one of the updates got featured by Google (yes, it was the time when you could fill in Google's form regarding your upcoming updates).

At first I tried to update 2 versions simultaneously, but then, after floor 17, focused entirely on the AIR game. Over the years the game got the content for 30 floors, contest mode, PC version was build with AIR as well. In 2023 the game was noticed by Real Civil Engineer, Felps, ImCade and other youtubers, which helped boosting the players' community.

For some time the game experienced high ANR, but I managed to solve this by reducing the amount memory which was used by the MovieClips.

I used the same basic engine, which I wrote atop of AS3/Starling, to make other games. The most notable is Farm and Mine, with which in 2024 we were accepted to Google Play Accelerator.

I'm using Distriqt for In-App purchases, ads, Firebase, Share and, them most recently, Achievements and Leaderborads. many thanks to @marchbold for updating the libraries and to @ajwfrost for the overall development support of AIR engine!

In the meanwhile my HTML5 players were asking for the updates' too. Finally, in 2024 I wrote a python script which takes my AS3 code and converts it back to JS. So now my workflow is: write code in AS3, use AIR to compile it to Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and MacOS, then run my Python script and get and HTML5 build. Just yesterday together with my artist partner we released an HTML5 tower builder game: Third Piglet's Tower.

Of one thing which will ensure good AIR future and which we as developers can do, is to expand our knowledge to new generations. Organizing showcases of released games, video lessons, sharing some code pieces, etc. We dot this here, also in Discord https://discord.gg/NxyuZpWZt3, Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/as3/ and Starling forums: https://forum.starling-framework.org/

It would be great to see your game, too!

[GeneralVimes]

When I started making my Flash games back in 2010s one of the first tools I bought was KindiSoft's SecureSWF. Stealing SWFs by various websites was really an issue in that time. But additionally I added my own (quite simple) domain checking system. And when one of my most successful Flash Games, Alien Anarchy, was released to the main sponsor's website, it got stolen within a day, despite all the protections :D But the hackers didn't find my own security layer, and the game version which they cracked and published to their website stopped working :D

I don't think the exact code steeling is a big issue on mobile. If you release a successful game, a much bigger risk will be is a big company will just look at your game and hire a team to recreate its gameplay, and then will pump tons of money to boost their clone. There are multiple cases of it in mobile gamedev, and it has nothing to do with the development tool. In the contrary, I suppose, the developers who use the most widespread engines, like Unity, are much more vulnerable to that.

[marchbold]

There is the swfencrypt tool included as part of the AIR SDK that you can use to encrypt your swf as part of your packaging process if you wish.

I'd suggest you focus on creating your application first and then look into tools for encryption when packaging :)

[Joseph-Cat]

@marchbold je vois le fichier swfencrypt dans le dossier bin mais je ne vois pas comment l''utiliser dans adobe animate cc 2023 si vous avez une idée merci d'avance

et @marchbold et @GeneralVimes @ALL ou est ce que vous stocker les clés de licence de vos apps si vous devez l'utiliser hors-ligne ?

je vois le keystore mais je ne trouve aucun librarie pour l'implementer dans as3.

[marchbold]

I don't believe there is anyway to use that in Animate, you'd need to do it as part of a packaging script process, where you sign / package your application.

[GeneralVimes]

et @marchbold et @GeneralVimes @ALL ou est ce que vous stocker les clés de licence de vos apps si vous devez l'utiliser hors-ligne ?

I just have my .p12 file in the same folder as the game source, application.xml and other files

[Dextercitox]

My feel in these last 5 years is that the support and development by the Harman team has been much more than I expected, and we're really happy.
We also have a nearly 30.000 hours of development app (not a game) made with Air, and for us is the best option by far to keep Android/iOS developments in parallel with a small team.
I'm agree with @marchbold, things look good for the next years and from the community we're open to help also in what's needed.