ActionScript and Mobile Publishing Workshop

This is how you do it on Android devices.

Story and photos: Emma Kiiski and Heidi Mäenpää
This nice two-days workshop was held by a visiting lecturer from our partner University FH Joanneum, Austria: Didi Mosbacher. It was rather interesting for the game developer students since our main goal for the workshop was to create a Tamagotchi game application and publish it to a tablet device or smart phone.

Emma's Tamagotchi.
..someone forgot to feed him.

The point in the class was to learn some ActionScript 3, which isn’t taught at our school. So it really was an interesting - and useful - topic! There weren’t so many students in this workshop which is a shame. All game development students could have gotten some nice advice.
Heidi's cool retro Tamagotchi is a jellyfish!
We found out that the publishing isn’t that easy on iOS devices, especially when compared to publishing on an Android device. You have to first pay a lot to register as an App Developer and afterwards you will spend hours and hours struggling with the poorly designed Developer interface and all kinds of small details. It was surprising to see how difficult it was to try to get an application into iPhone and publish it, and then compare it to the fact how easy all Apple products are to the end-users! It was at least comforting to know that the Android marketplace is easier and more developer friendly.
Is it playable?
ActionScript in action!

You can’t really  learn AS3 in two days but the workshop gave an excellent example on what you actually can do in a short time if you are enthusiastic about Flash. Even though Flash is bit by bit getting outdated, you should remember that there’s always something to continue its path. Mr. Mosbacher introduced to us the AIR, which most probably will replace the features of Flash in the future. 
Game Over

Thanks to Didi Mosbacher once again for the great workshop!


Emma Kiiski is running Score Game Development Community, also a student of our Media Programme.
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