not spending $700?

Is there any way to program Flash games for more than 30 days without spending $700? I really can’t afford that right now, but I love to program. I know, this question may have already been asked, or even answered in the stickies, but Flash is frickadiculously (my new word, a combo of frickin’ and ridiculous) expensive.

Well, if you’re actually looking to get the Flash program, you can try eBay. You just have to be careful about what auctions you bid on. You’re going to want the full non-academic, non-OEM version of the software. If you can get Flash MX or up, you can upgrade to CS3. You also want to look for a reputable seller (good feedback is a good sign).

If you want to save more than a few hundred dollars, there are a few alternatives. SWiSH Max is a cheaper alternative that its users seem to like. LiveSwif is a free alternative. I can’t recommend any of these because I’ve never tried them, though.

Additional alternatives:

HAXE
Flash Develop & MTASC
The Flex 2 SDK

Not as good, but many people use them.

Will I be able to upload games here with those programs? Swish, LiveSwif, Haxe, and the others?

As long as you can make a swf you can upload it.

Sweet!!! Thanks everyone!

They won’t as good of quality as mentioned.

Step one: Download Flash MX

Step two: Install

Step three: Use until trial expires

Step four: Download next newest version of flash

Step five: Go to step two.

;)

Nabb, so I assume what you’re saying is that I should download, do my work for thirty days, uninstall, and reinstall, but keep my work. Rinse and Repeat.

Do whatever works for you… unfortunately that’s one of your only options if you can’t afford the software.

Technically, he’s saying download, do your work for thirty days. Uninstall. Install a different version, but keep your work. Rinse and repeat until you run out of versions of Flash. I don’t know the EULA on the trial, though.

700$?? waste

That’s how much it costs to order Flash CS3 Professional from the Adobe store.

Well you can get the free compiler and SWFmill for free, why don’t you use that instead?

Your school may have it ask the license might strech so you can take it home.. for free.

I do not use the Flash IDE at all, just haXe and SWFmill. haXe is a great language and isn’t tied just to the Flash platform, so I do recommend checking it out.

The documentation is a bit sparse still but if you are already used to programming in other languages and can do some internet research it’s possible to do things this way. Space Creeps 1.0 was put up here two months, almost to the day, from knowing nothing about making Flash games(but knowing a lot about making games on other platforms).
However, there are some major caveats to doing things this way:

Vector graphics are harder. SWFmill lets you import SVGs but I opted for pure bitmaps at present, partially because I’m more comfortable with them, but also because they are faster to render. If you use SVG there may be compatibility issues causing Flash to render them incorrectly. Many people have had success with this route though.

Because the Flash IDE isn’t available you are putting together your game interface purely from code. This makes it harder to tweak the interface and my game has suffered a little from it. On the other hand it means I’m not tempted to be lazy and make a game that looks and feels like other Flash games – the option just isn’t there.

It’s a bit clumsy to add assets to a project with haXe. You have to manually add stub classes and then replace them by linking in a swf generated from SWFmill that uses the same naming. For example, one of my bitmaps:

class Gfx extends BitmapData { public function new(){super(0,0);} }

(later, when I need to access Gfx):

newbitmap.bitmapData = new Gfx();

You do this for each bitmap you have, but fortunately I have only one for the sprites: they are cut out and given separate IDs with some code.

SWFmill only very recently added support for importing sounds. To lower size, I use mono MP3s for the sound in Space Creeps, but only stereo is supported by SWFmill right now. So for the current release I don’t have sounds wrapped in the swf. They are instead loaded one at a time from my website each time the game is played. (ugly and probably a source of bugs) Hopefully in a few months this issue will be resolved – this will free me from the last major disadvantage I’ve encountered from free/open-source Flash tools.

To conclude, not using the Flash IDE has led me to make different decisions from most Flash game developers. There are some advantages and disadvantages, but overall I feel that I have gained flexibility from this route, and saved money too.

http://osflash.org/open_source_flash_projects

I’m not promising a free alternative that meets the standards of the actual Flash. I dont use the actual flash but if you need something open source. Here’s your place. Lots of FREE stuff for alternative flash.

Just throwing up a warning that any references to piracy or workarounds will get auto bans. We can’t have illegal activity discussed here.