From Animate to… what?

Except for AS3, I have absolutly no experience of coding games. I’m a graphic designer who found Adobe Flash 20 yeras ago, and then spent many years learning AS3 and had a platform for childrens games online. After Flash was banned I was devistated and gave up everything.

But now I really miss creating these funny games and I want to give it a try again. I’m pretty comfy with AS3, and AI suggested me to consider Haxe. So I went googling Haxe/Openfl, Starling, Feather and a bunch of game engines etc. But I still don’t get it. I want to make apps which looks good on a high res screen, like Ipad Pro. I don’t want a HTML5/js game, or to be locked in to an expensive game engine, or to spend the rest of my life try figuring out what the skilled game makers taIk about. There is no speed, collisions or multiplay in my games, but a lot of movieclips and soundfiles.

So I have all that stuff and AS-files in Animate, where I easily can control and test all functions. My coding skills are limited but sufficient for the type of games I do. But then what? Convert mc:s to sprites and wrap it all into Air (and get low-res images?) Or should I convert the AS-files to Haxe? I think I’m capable to rewrite it if needed. But is it worth the effort, how do I start, and where do I go from there?

It seams to be a thousend ways of migrating to various game-making universes, and a million stars out there who contributes with their own bits and pieces for all kind of solutions… but not a single over all map to be found.

So what is the smoothest way (for a non-skilled programmer) to go from AS3/Animate to a functional game and beyond to Ios and other app stores? Excuse me for asking these silly basic questions. I’m not even sure that this is the right forum. But I’m really eager to learn, if someone just suggested a smart way to go.

Interester

Hey @Interester I’m glad you are giving Haxe a shot. Your question might be more appropriate for the OpenFL forum because that would be the best option for a Flash refugee. I also was a graphic designer well-versed in AS3 who migrated to Haxe/OpenFL when the writing was on the wall for Flash. While there are many options out there, as I’m sure you are aware, there are lots of success stories of developers converting from Flash. Poptropica and FlowPlay come to mind.

There is no single overall map because each project has unique features and needs. One big question I would ask is how did you build your animations? Tweens: try Actuate. Spritesheets: try OpenFL Tileset/Tilemap or other solutions. Timeline: OpenFL can load swf at runtime as an asset, or else convert it to Haxe classes. That could be a big time consideration so you might do well to figure out your solution to that, along with whether you need to rebuild graphics. By the way, OpenFL supports SVG if your art style supports it.

It sounds like you maybe built your own game engine. Again, depending on your needs you might consider Starling or HaxeFlixel which have heritage from AS3. The latter is quite popular nowadays.

As far as the language goes, here is a concise summary of the differences between AS3 and Haxe. There are a lot of AS3 conversion tools but I have found that the Haxe compiler gives a lot of good feedback and it will help you to learn as you fix this and that. You will find that the OpenFL Samples repository can be a good place to get familiar with OpenFL, especially for building things from scratch.

I hope that helps a bit, and I hope to see you on the OpenFL forum!

Thank’s for your support! I will read and consider your tips thoroughly and then move this thread to OpenFl.

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