July 18, 2012, 10:06 PM — It has been fascinating to watch the evolution of Adobe Flash. What started out as a simple animation program 15 years ago has been transformed over time into a full-fledged development platform for interactive apps on the Web. Now, Flash Professional CS6 has evolved into a powerful authoring environment for creating animation and multimedia content for immersive interactivity across desktops, devices, tablets, smartphones, and televisions.
Because of its wide platform and device support, Flash has long been marketed as a develop-once-deploy-everywhere platform. Today, the largest markets for such technology are mobile games and devices, so it's no surprise that Adobe has focused on these categories in the Flash CS6 update.
The one major drawback to this strategy is that the available feature set usually tends to be the lowest common denominator of all platforms. Adobe hopes to compensate for this through prebuilt, native extensions that access platform- or device-specific capabilities. It seems promising that this strategy could open the game developer market for Adobe via Flash CS6.
Sprite sheets and Stage3D
Flash's animation antecedents clearly make it great software for game designers, and its new sprite sheet feature offers many advantages for game development. Sprite sheets let you convert vector art animations into bitmaps that are saved in a single large image file. By showing only a small portion of the image and moving the position of the image, Flash cycles through all frames of the animation. Sprite sheets are particularly important for devices with low processing power.
Generating sprite sheets in Flash CS6 is quite simple: Create a pixel-based animation and put all the sprites in one large flat image file. In a game, you create the animation by loading this single image and moving it quickly from one coordinate to another. This technique has been used in game development for years because it requires the least amount of processing power; the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) does the heavy work.
When Flash was first developed, the goal was to create animations for the Web, and bandwidth was the main issue. Animating vector art was advantageous because of the small file size. Since running the animation relied on the processing power of a desktop computer, this worked out fine. But with so many mobile devices surfing the Web and becoming a de facto game platform, game developers could not use Flash vector art in games anymore because they simply could not be sure that the game would run smoothly. Sprite sheets fix this problem and make creating games with vector art possible. You can keep working with vector art in an animation, but convert to bitmap imaging for the final game.
