Cost of Developing in Flash

[Quest Engine]

I've looked around a bit and but I'm having a hard time believing what I've seen. Do you really have to buy Macromedia Flash for $600+ to develop games in Flash? How did the format ever take off if you have to spend hundreds of dollars for the IDE? It seems like the cost of entry is ridiculously high. Am I missing something?

[Sirrus]

I would assume that many flash games are developed either with pirated software or student liscenes.

Alex

[BlueWaldo]

I just posted in anouther forum that I am going to be developing a game in Flash so I will tell the ansers to your questions for my case. I have a student licence so the cost is great. I have experience using Flash from web design jobs I had before I start game development. Finally, last I heard the Flash plug-in was installed on something like 97% of computers on the internet. (Someone corrrect me before I spend too much time on this game if that is wrong.) I like the idea that most everyone will be able to play my game regardless of OS.

[PsychicParrot]

I've just purchased Flash MX 2004 for my company. I looked around and tried to find some alternative, but there doesn't seem to be anything viable.

The best product I found that supported Flash MX actionscripting was a program called Koolmoves (http://www.koolmoves.com ) although it is still at a fairly early stage of development which means it can be a little unstable sometimes.

To be honest, Flash MX 2004 is a great product and a good platform for 2d web games. The only problem is the price. At $600+ it's pretty steep, but I guess thats just the price we have to pay to develop for that particular platform. I started out as a Macromedia Director (Lingo) programmer, which costs around $2000 :eek: ... whilst it's a great platform for 3d web games, the amount of work I actually get in 3d web games just doesn't justify that kind of expenditure. With Flash, 4-5 months of web game work can pretty much pay for it.

[whisperstorm]

I'm working on creating an online rpg in flash using a neat technology called Laszlo -- it let's you make flash applications just like you'd create a web page. Basically you could fire up a text editor, learn a few tags in lzx (their application UI language) and have a simple game working in no time flat...

Anyway - I just wanted to mention it as an alternative to buying an expensive flash IDE --- the server is "free" for non-profit, and very affordable for commercial stuff.

http://www.laszlosystems.com

Here's some demos:

http://laszlosystems.com/demos/

Here's a pre-beta of the rpg I'm creating in laszlo:

http://www.mylaszlo.com/lps-2.0/whisperstorm/tinyworld/tinyworld.lzx?lzt=html

It's not optimized for speed or anything,but might give you an idea what you could do.

[Josh]

I say works what is best, dont worry about Pirates, I dont think we can beat them for now.