Flash game for desktop + mobile using starling/stage3d

Question

It has been a nice run of about 7 or 8 years now that we have developed Flash browser based games for the web exclusively. Of course with the ubiquity of mobile devices, things have changed. Clients are starting to demand, almost assume, that games will work in the browser - on the desktop and on their tablets.

Putting aside the whole discussion of using an HTML5/JS solution instead, we're sticking with Flash for the next project and need to figure out the best way to get it to run on the desktop browser and on the iPad, while maximizing code re-use.

Given the current state of technologies today, what is the best path? This game will be a 2D side-scroller type game with some physics, and development will be done mainly with bitmap graphics (as opposed to vector) and spritesheets.

Here are what I understand to be my options:

Option 1: Develop the game targeting the 'standard' flash player for web (11 or higher), then port to an iOS AIR 3.2 app, doing appropriate optimizations like the ones outlined here.

Option 2: Use Starling/Stage3D for desktop, and then port to an iPad app. Just wondering if starling is ready for primetime making production quality games for mobile + desktop. Does Stage3D still work well enough in software mode on older machines?

Option 3: The new feature in CS6 that lets us publish to HTML5. Is this even close to mature enough to publish a full game? The benefit of this solution is that it could run in the browser on the iPad instead of being a separate app.

Thianks so much for any guidance.. I'm also wondering about pitfalls, and optimization techniques involved in any of these. But it seems the underlying question in all this is should we use Starling/Stage3D or not?

Answer 1

Definitely Option 2.

You could go with Option 1, but performance on mobile would likely suffer without Stage3D hardware rendering.

Option 3 is only a good choice if you're designing/porting ad banners with basic animation, should be avoided for game development.

More here: Adobe Gaming SDK