Adobe Flash Player
Adobe Flash Player is a cross-platform browser-based application runtime that provides uncompromised viewing of expressive applications, content, and videos across screens and browsers.
Flash game development software, runtimes, and servers
Before building a Flash-based game, you need to understand the available game development options. The resources on this page will help you understand what IDE, player/runtime, and server (if any) is right for each of your projects.
In addition to third-party IDEs such as FDT, FlashDevelop, and Stencyl, you can read about Adobe's game development software.
Flash game development runtimes |
Flash Player ubiquity is one of the key advantages of building your games in Flash. By choosing Flash as your delivery mechanism, you have a choice of where and how to deploy your games--be it in the browser(Flash Player), Mac and PC desktop (Adobe AIR), mobile or tablet browser (Flash Player 10.2), or iOS App Store (Adobe AIR).
Adobe AIR
The Adobe AIR runtime enables developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash Professional software, and ActionScript to build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser.
Flash game development authoring tools and IDEs |
You have quite a few choices of development environments when creating Flash games. Here are some of the more popular ones.
Adobe authoring tools and IDEs
Third-party authoring tools and IDEs
Flash game development servers |
For some games, such as social or massive multiplayer games, you may need a server to allow your game players to interact with each other. Here are the server options available for this purpose. In addition to the options below, you may also need an application server platform such as ColdFusion, PHP, ASP.NET, Java, etc.
Flash game development programming languages |
Most Flash game development centers around the ActionScript 3.0 programming language. If you're building Flash-based games using the Flex framework, you will also need to be familiar with MXML. Here are some resources to get you started.
