Wow, I haven't posted in a while. In recent months I've been focused intently on a few things.

  1. Babies! My wife and I had twins in February.
  2. Learning a new technology while shipping an amazing game at Hive7.
  3. Working on a cool open source project.

I won't bore all you geeks with the baby stuff. If you can find the link to my personal blog you can go look at lots of pictures.

You should all check out Youtopia (the new game we shipped). We're really proud of this one.

So, drumroll please... *in my most awesome announcer voice* And, the new technology is... Flash! That's right, this Microsoft fanboy is now in the Flash camp. I really wish I could be working with Silverlight, but well, you can't build a game that runs on Facebook and make people install something. It just won't work. Once Silverlight has a market share more like Flash Player, then we're in business.

What do I dislike most about Flash? The development environments (yes, plural) for Flash pale in comparison to Visual Studio. Compiling is slow. Stuff crashes a lot. Heck, I even got the compiler to throw a null pointer exception on a few occasions! Debugging is a pain. The garbage collector isn't very fast. You only have one thread to work with. Hey Adobe is it still 1998?

All that being said, Flash (and more specifically Actionscript 3 and Flash Player) is actually really mature now and a decent piece of technology. It has most things a developer looks for in a language/runtime. And, well, it allows us to create a really rich and interactive experience that runs in your browser and doesn't require you to install anything. Obviously the business case here wins out over my whining.

I think I've spent enough time talking. Coming very soon, a useful post that contains lots of great technical info from the perspective of a C# junky diving head first into Flash.