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So now that the restrictions are lifted from the third party developer by Apple. And the new packager for iPhone for Flash in CS5 is available for download. How much efficient it can be to develop a game in Flash for iPhone. How much worth it can be to invest time in developing games on Flash? anybody started working on game development on Flash for iPhone can help a lot.

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I built a game using the Flash CS5 iPhone packager which is still available: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monster-ball/id356171232?mt=8

My experiences were that it was quite easy to get going, and obviously you bring all your existing Flash skills - the problem is that performance is very slow, to the point where you can only make very, very simple games.

Unless you're making a very simple "fart app" type game, my advice would be to avoid Flash and go with Unity3D or cocos2D etc It will mean learning a new dev environment and language, but you will be able to make much better games.

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Hey! Thanks a ton for sharing your experience. That's what i needed. I guess i will have to buy a Mac system and get along with iOS app programming. :) – GamDroid Nov 11 '10 at 13:23
@GamDroid, you don't have to buy a Mac, you can either make a make a hackentosh, which is hacking a PC to install MacOSX natively, or there are ways to run it in Virtulization. – AttackingHobo Nov 11 '10 at 18:02
AttackingHobo made a good point. Although getting a Mac is definitely worth it. And you can go the other way round too: Running Windows on a Mac is probably easier than hacking the PC to run OS X. – bummzack Nov 13 '10 at 10:49
I disagree that getting a MAC is worth it; Twice the money for twice as slow, no thank you. – AttackingHobo Nov 13 '10 at 16:40
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I tried out the iPhone packager for a bit, although I was using it from the command line (I work in FlashDevelop, not CS5). I had a great deal of difficulty getting existing game code to work; I ran into a number of issues that were near-impossible to track down, including an error that I couldn't get info on using fdb. I was able to get an early version working fine, but when I tried switching it to AIR in order to get hardware features, I had so much trouble that I couldn't even get a version working again.

Your mileage may vary, but for the moment I would consider Flash for the iPhone a very high-risk prospect. There's limited support and experience out there, and the process is a bit convoluted. I'd invest only a bit of time at first; if things go smoothly, then go for it. But don't bet much on the platform until you're comfortable that things are gonna work.

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Thanks Gregory! this is why i needed to know what can be the implications using Flash. But still want to know the what CS5 has to offer. So i'll just check it out by myself before actually starting game development on that platform. – GamDroid Nov 11 '10 at 10:33
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i had a simple quiz game which seemed to be animating at 10-15 fps running on my iphone 3g. So i made a test app and had only two bit maps alpha fade in and out with one background image. It still looked to be 10-15 fps. I have seen Demos of apps made from the iphone packager and it seemed smooth, but my simple app was not smooth at all. I think the flash packager still needs alot of work.

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