Diary of an Indie Dev #3

Had some success today with Android dev.  I need to develop a short course for work which focuses on Flash, making games commercially and putting it all on mobiles.  iPhones are impractical for a short course because the logical step is to teach xCode using Cocos2D, but that means I'm the only one that can teach it.  If I develop it using Flash, there are about 3 lecturers that also know Flash and ActionScript 3.0 so they just need to learn the game biz stuff, you know, marketing, Agile, bugfix, QA etc and then we can all deliver it.

So the breakthrough today was getting a swf file  running on my new HTC Wildfire S (Android 2.3) and work's Motorola XOOM (Android 3.0).  I found AS 2.0 commands weren't supported by a 3rd party Flash Player, but AS 3.0 was.  I also found a simplistic pipeline for students to come to class, setup their phone for game dev and quickly test a sample SWF to determine if they can use the phone during the course.

The student needs to do the following

1. Install their phone sync software (HTC Sync for example-the official one for your phone) which also installs the required USB driver free of charge -that's the important part.
2. Download Flash Player from MarketPlace.
3. Install Adobe Flash Player 10 if you can from the Marketplace.
4. Turn on USB Debugging on the phone and connect as a Mass Storage device.
5. Drop the SWF on the root of the phone's storage device which is basically putting at the root of the SDRAM card.
6. Open Flash Player on the phone, ignore errors to download Adobe Flash, and click on the sample SWF.
7. A benchmark test was to go to kongregate.com (thanks Nick) to test if the Flash Player installed a simple SWF player for the browser.

We think students will want to make a build every night they go home (who wouldn't) so they can show it off to their friends.