Head on over to the iTunes App Store now, and support your favorite indie game developer! Chroma Circuit can now be purchased for the iPhone and iPod Touch. If you’ve played Chroma Circuit before, get ready to experience new touchscreen controls, slick new graphics, and a total of 30 puzzles to solve. That’s 12 more levels than the original web version, plus some remixed levels that better fit the iPhone’s screen.
Alright, with the sales pitch out of the way, let’s get into the nitty-gritty details. First of all, yes, Chroma Circuit is built with Adobe Flash. It’s not Flash Player, though. This is a native app with the ActionScript compiled down to ARM assembly. You can read more about the details in the press release, Adobe Opens iPhone to Flash Developers (which has a quote from me!), and on the Apps for iPhone section of Adobe Labs.
Of course, what everyone’s been waiting for is, what do I think about it? Personally, I absolutely love this technology. I spent a few weeks with Objective-C earlier this year, trying to do a port of Chroma Circuit. I started getting the hang of the language and tools pretty fast, but to be honest, I wasn’t a fan. Too much memory management. Drawing and animation APIs that were a pain. It just wasn’t for me. I kept an interactive prototype of Chroma Circuit sitting around for months without any updates. Then Adobe asked me to help them bring Flash to the iPhone, and I had a more complete prototype within a couple of hours because I could reuse my existing code from the web version with very minor tweaks.
Optimization
Currently, iPhone native apps built with Flash are obviously slower than typical native apps, especially on older phones. The bottleneck, much like in the browser, is the software renderer. I think I’ve seen some speculation that because ActionScript is traditionally an interpreted language that it’s probably very slow when pre-compiled. That’s simply not true, and unless you write crappy code, it won’t be your bottleneck. Adobe has said that they’re using the same software renderer as their browser and desktop runtimes because it keeps things visually consistent. I like that, and I’m excited to see optimization to make it run better on less-powerful devices. Hopefully, that optimization will make its way back to Flash Player itself—much like what’s already happened with Flash Player 10.1—and that it will help push the community to innovate more.
Of course, optimization is not all on Adobe’s side. The fact is, most of us write code that is “good enough” to run on modern desktops. For a mobile device, optimization is more important, and I’m working hard to ensure that future updates to Chroma Circuit run better. Though I haven’t started using the new hardware acceleration feature, cacheAsSurface, I have spent time simplifying some of my graphical effects (which don’t need to be so detailed on such a small screen), ensuring that vectors don’t get redrawn unnecessarily, and making some display list manipulations (like depth changes) more conditional. For the original version, I focused mainly on removing bitmap filters (either completely or replaced by PNGs) and turning static vector art like backgrounds into bitmaps. Both helped quite a bit, and that’s the best I could do with a looming deadline to get it into the App Store in time for Adobe MAX. Now that I have more time to focus on polishing, I can explore and discover new ways to make the game run faster. Again, while I want to see more performance coming from the renderer itself, I certainly am not denying the fact that part of the job is my own.
The Future
What’s coming next? More features and better performance in Chroma Circuit, of course. My other games, Gridshock and Qrossfire, will be getting the iPhone treatment too. Making iPhone games isn’t my sole focus, though. The App Store is not a gold mine, and probably hasn’t been since people started calling it that. Instead, iPhone apps will be just one part of my revenue. Licensing, advertising, iPhone apps, and probably more. Adobe’s Shibuya looked pretty cool. Maybe I’ll make some AIR desktop versions of my games too. Certainly, there are new games simmering in my brain, and I’m sure you’ll see those hitting portals and making their way to iPhones and desktops as well.
That’s the focus of what I call “phase two” of Bowler Hat Games. I want to explore more revenue sources and discover a good mix that will help me reach my financial goals for the business. With the retroactively named “phase one” coming to a close, I hope to share with you a blog post with some charts and analysis showing the breakdown of revenue so far. I haven’t compared all the numbers yet, except to ballpark it all in my head, so I’m pretty excited to get down and dirty with the data.