Export flash-games as "embedables" to iOS and Android

Question

Our situtation right now is that we have a couple of games built with flash / actionscript3, that we want to port to iOS / Android. If necessary we could potentially re-write all of these small games, though if that has to be done I want to redo it properly, which leads to my question:

Does it have to be re-written? Is there a way to export as3-based games in a way that they can later on be "embeded" into a native iOS / Android App? Or if not is there any setup that would enable us to develop games cross-platform while the "app-container" itself remains native. So far I was pointed towards Adobe Air, Haxe and Cocos2D which could suite our purpose well, but since I dont have any particular experience to draw from I´m struggeling to make a educated decision.

I would love to hear your opinion on that "native-container" + "embeded-games" idea, or your suggestions towards cross-platform development mainly with desktop, iOS and Android in mind. Seperating games and the app from each other sounds a whole lot cleaner to me and should make simultaneous development easier, but thats only a wild guess.

thanks a whole lot, Jery

Answer 1

I'd argue for porting to Haxe. Having never used Haxe before, I ported the entirety of an ActionScript MMO client into Haxe in a weekend. It's that easy. Definitely worth the time investment, as it frees you from dependency on a potentially dying platform. The only pain in the language is lousy pascal-style for() loops.

However, be aware that there are limits to what it can accomplish.

For example, the HTML5 compile target requires (because of HTML5 limitations) that you use WebSockets instead of Sockets, which will require some work on the server side, too.

And rich text boxes are a pain when cross-compiling: there's pretty much no web language that has them right, and they all require a lot of work to get anything even close to decent: the Flash Text Engine has not been ported to Haxe to my knowledge, so you can't do anything portable with that.

Answer 2

Since you have already written the game in AS3 I would suggest using Adobe Air to publish on iOS and Android. The performance should be decent enough depending on the game. This seems to be a decent tutorial for packaging Air apps on iOS, http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/packaging-air-apps-ios.html.

For future development I agree with Dewi Morgan in looking at Haxe and OpenFL (the X is no longer capitalized). The API matches Flash and in the majority of cases will work similar. The OpenFL wiki is a great place to get started. There are also two popular ports of Flash frameworks, HaxeFlixel and HaxePunk, which may speed up the development process.

Cocos2D is definitely an option as well although if you're already familiar with the Flash API then OpenFL makes a whole lot more sense.