Is Haxe For Me? (2D mobile game development)

I have been using flash/air/as3/captive runtime w/ Flash Develop IDE & a custom 2d rendering engine swc “Genome2D” and getting acceptable results. I actually only use this engine to set up textures and blit 2d sprites. Everything else is custom framework logic code I’ve been using/porting for years. The main reason I am looking @ Haxe is it might be a solution that is similar to what I’m using now. Google Play is going to require 64-bit builds in august 2019 and I don’t believe Adobe/Air is going to support that and also I’m guessing even if it did, the genome 2d swc I am using will not be compatible in a 64-bit environment.

I have zero experience or knowledge of Haxe so I apologize for my noobish questions, but what about support for ANEs? I use ANEs for admob support, google play services, etc, etc. How would those solutions (and others) be handed in Haxe? Is there a store of some sort where you can buy add ons for Haxe?

I realize there are stable solutions like Unity and others, that I could look into, but I was told to check out Haxe first before committing to learning another framework so I thought I would post here. Thank you for any comments.

At face value it looks like you are in a very good position to move to Haxe. You are likely aware that Genome2D is written in Haxe, and you will find that porting your code is fairly easy. There’s some interesting success stories here and here and elsewhere.

When I migrated I was using FDT as my IDE for AS3. It had early support for Haxe but has since let it languish it seems. I really like VSCode and use that now. If you are currently using FlashDevelop, using HaxeDevelop would be an easy switch also.

Add-ons akin to what ANEs do would often be found in the Haxelib. For example, there are several which support Admob there. There are also compatibility libraries for consoles which are available if you provide evidence of your NDA.

I don’t consider Haxe to be great for a beginner, which you clearly aren’t. The freedom it gives makes it fantastic for an experienced developer, especially one with Flash/AIR experience such as yourself.

3 Likes