Even though it had become evident over the past few years that flash was a dying platform, they finally set the timer for the true end. According to the Adobe blog post found here, flash hits end of life in 2020. This means the end of the platform that all of our games are made in (only exception being that one test 3D first person shooter, never mentioned on the blog).
While this news isn't greatly unexpected, it means a difficult change for us here at Time Bending Games. As lead developer, college has slowed development on Battle Ball and others, as can be noted by the long time between small releases. Additionally, Co-Developer Nick Jensen has (mostly) moved on to a career in professional software development, having little time or ambition to continue his projects (mostly referring to SpaceShipCraft).
Q: Is it the end????
A: THIS IS NOT THE END! The bad news stops here, as plans are still being made. In fact, last week I worked on implementing a whole new update check system for Battle Ball in an attempt to shift towards a standalone game. With the change in market, players are looking to different outlets to game. No longer do we see the era of web browser based games. Instead, we are seeing a migration back to downloaded games, in the form of the now giant Steam.
Q: So you are moving to steam? Is that the future?
A: Not exactly. What I do know is that we need to get out of browser development, and have it happen as quick as possible. While Adobe did mention the end of Adobe flash, it mentioned that this has no bearing on the end of Adobe Air. As some of you may know, Battle Ball and Space Conquest are now on ActionScript 3, and are perfectly publishable to Adobe Air (and thus, standalone exe and mobile apk format). This is the future of our games. If all goes according to plan, I am going to try to get all of our projects running on ActionScript 3 and have them published to exe format and (hopefully) mobile. Steam, however, is a whole different can of worms. Steam charges $100 to publish, an amount of money I can't afford to invest so heavily in games I make no money from.
Well that's all for today,
As always, Cheers. Even cheers to the bad news :)
Jordan
