Adobe Flash is the Obvious Choice for Game Development, says Harish Sivaramakrishnan

The Adobe Flash Platform is the leading platform in the world for developing games on the web and devices says Harish Sivaramakrishnan, a Computer Scientist at Adobe Systems. Harish is immensely passionate about anything pertaining to Adobe Flash, Flex and other platform technologies. He is a hardcore UI / UX enthusiast and strongly believes that building great user experiences is the key for the success of any application. He has worked in the Flex Engineering team @Macromedia and Adobe for the Flex 2.0 – Flex 3.0 releases, and in the Adobe Media Player team implementing the Digital Rights Management features to AMP (now known as OSMF).

Harish spoke to Saltmarch Media about the reasons for which the Adobe Flash platform is so popular for developing games on the Web and mobile, the packager option that Adobe has for Flash developers in order to help them develop applications in Flash and to port them onto the iPhone and the NVIDIA-Adobe partnership to develop GPU accelerated Flash. He also shared his thoughts on the fastest growing places for game development, words of wisdom for startup game development companies and the main skills Indian game developers should equip themselves with to gain a sizable share of the global game development work.

Q. Please introduce yourself to our readership and and tell us how a Chemical Engineer from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science in Pilani became a flexgeek?

My name is Harish Sivaramakrishnan and I work as a computer scientist and platform evangelist for Adobe Systems. I have a day job that requires me to speak to the developer community and basically tell them about how cool our technologies are and find out what is and what’s not working for them. I used to dabble with a little bit of programming when I was in college while trying to do some automation work for some of the chemical processes and that’s how I got started.

By the time I graduated 10 years ago people were finding software jobs irrespective of what they studied so I got placed in one of the large MNCs with a nice five–digit salary and that really helped me make a decision at that point in time. Honestly speaking, that’s how I ended up in software but then I realized through the years as to the potential of the software industry and I stayed on without ever feeling the need to go back. It’s not an elaborately different story and it’s the same as any average college student who comes out of college and gets hooked into the software industry.

Q. What, in your opinion, are the reasons for which the Adobe Flash platform is so popular for developing games on the Web and mobile?

Adobe Flash is a mature 10+ year legacy technology so it’s not an innovation that we started one or two years ago. We have spent many years innovating on that technology and what it has really translated to is that 99% of all connected PCs have Flash players running on their systems. So for a game developer who’s trying to build a game and trying to get it distributed to people, it fails me to think of a better medium than the Flash platform because it’s one platform through which you can be quite sure your product is going to reach your target audience. The runtime makes a huge difference and Flash’s runtime availability is fantastic.

On the flipside, if you look at the tooling we have for developing games, we are far ahead of the tooling that comes for casual gaming. Of course this is not so for some of the serious gaming that’s not web specific where it’s a different story all together. But pertaining to the Web – the Flash Professional CS 4 and Shockwave and other tools that Adobe has been building for years, are immensely popular and has made many enterprises successful in building games. So I think it is the tooling coupled with the very popular runtime that’s widely accepted and distributed that makes Adobe a very obvious choice as a platform to building games.

Q. Can you tell us in brief about the packager option Adobe has for Flash developers, to help them develop applications in Flash and to port them onto the iPhone?

Adobe recently announced a way by which developers working on Adobe Flash can continue to build on Flash and port those applications to run on Apple’s phone. So the Adobe Creative Suite 5 allows you to build applications using your favorite tools and Action Script and you can package it to run as a native application on an iPhone. This enables all Flash developers to continue to use the tools that they love and tools that they are familiar with and target Apple’s runtime on iPhone. That software is in a pre–release right now and we’re hearing some really good things about it.

Q. Can you tell us a bit about the NVIDIA–Adobe partnership to develop GPU accelerated Flash?

Recently there has been a lot of developments on what NVIDIA has done to help and develop Flash to perform better. The QUADRA that NVIDIA has right now helps Flash to perform far better on all possible environments. It is excellent that such a partnership exists and users of both Adobe and NVIDIA technologies are now reaping the benefits that they get from better performance across the usage.

Q. In your opinion, which are the fastest growing places for game development at the moment?

If I look at casual gaming I see a great expansion. I personally work with folks in China and Japan where they have localized gaming for their own community. Some of their games might not really make too much of a differentiation to folks outside these countries but they have their own set of games that they build and there’s enormous opportunity in China and Japan.

I notice that even in India we are taking largely to casual gaming and social gaming. Almost everyone I know is playing Farmville on Facebook. So there’s a growth of people playing games in this country.

Looking at India Game Developer Summit 2010 (Lit Ed.), the buzz that I’m seeing and judging by the number of people who turned up for my talk, I think it is seriously happening in India as well. It is growing in a very big way over here and I had an interaction with a couple of the companies and I think we are coming up in a significant way in terms of game development. I think, generally, the emerging markets, as they call it, holds a lot of promises.

Q. Do you have any words of wisdom for startup game development companies?

What I’ve seen is the whole ecosystem is now changing with respect to the Web being a part of our regular life. The Web is now accessible, and not just on PCs but on mobile devices, tablets, refrigerators and even car consoles, and is much more of a democratic medium. So Internet has really changed the spectrum of how games get developed and delivered.

My impression is that unless you develop games to have a viral transaction across all forms of Web it’s going to be hard in the days to come. Keeping the social angle intact, building games that will keep people engaged, identifying the right audience for your games – I always take the example of cricket – I believe that any cricketing game is going to be lapped up and if that’s the case then it should be targeted to a country where cricket is appreciated.

So if you are building casual games I think the target should be specific in terms of where you can really find distribution, where you can really find audience and where you are confident of making money out of a gaming business because ultimately people want everything for free.

As a guy who’s playing a game I really don’t want to pay but on a serious context, monetization is very important so is identifying the right pockets to invest your games in.  Break out of the conventional wisdom of building games just for the Web.

Creating your own web site might not be the only way to circulate your games so keep your eyes open. Social media and Web 2.0 provide big opportunities. I believe that anything that forgets the presence of social media might not be taking a very confident step. If you are factoring that in then the business is hot and you can get some good stuff going.

Q. What, in your opinion are the main skills Indian game developers should equip themselves with to gain a sizable share of the global game development work?

This question has multiple manifestations. Game development, however trivial people may make it sound like, is serious engineering. The blood and sweat an engineer puts behind getting a great game out into the market is as complex as an enterprise application.

We have some very senior accomplished game shops in India and they’re doing a great job in mentoring the new ones. Whenever I meet some new programmers who’re taking to game development what I tell them is, you need to understand your user in order to create a good gaming experience. It is not always about engineering a game but understanding the whole humanness of a game which can then be translated by several programming concepts like physics engines, inverse kinematics, implementing bones, implementing perspectives etc.

So it is not just about the theory of 3D perspectives and the theory about kinematics but what is more important is to apply that to the screen you are catering to. So building a mobile game is probably very different from building a tablet game and a PC game.

What I usually see in people is that – game development is seen as a simple programming exercise and building something which is to the specifications. I feel gaming is more of an imaginative process. You need to think if you would really want to play the game you are building. All talented engineers will go through this phase of how to get a program to run in a way that the user would like it. So a user–experience based approach is very important. Performance and size of the game are also important and should not be discounted but at the end what really matters is if the game and game play looks attractive to the person who is using it. That, in my opinion, should be paramount.

It all comes down to choosing the right platform, technologies, libraries and engines. So keep your eyes open and do not get bogged down to one particular stack or one particular line of working. This will not result in imaginative games but games that just work.

To summarise I would say that gaming is no different from engineering so all the engineering stuff that you do directly apply to gaming, but gaming is far more fun and far more imaginative.

Q. What are Adobe's ambitions for the next five years with respect to the gaming industry?

We have been building these tools and runtimes which are definitely helping game developers and publishers. So our tools and runtimes have time and again proved to be very successful for developers and we remain committed to continue to innovate our tools and runtimes to make it more conducive and helpful to game developers so that they can actually take it to the next level.

For example, the Fash player 10.1, which is in beta right now, has got extended features like accelerometer support and geolocation, multitouch and things that are very commonly used in gaming context. We also have optimixation for mobile so application development for mobile gets far more easier. We are in the process of disruptively innovating and helping our customers. We will remain committed and focused and will work very actively with the community and we will listen to what they want.

We believe that the game developers and publishers will benefit from the innovations we do and we will do our best to keep the ecosystem going forward. And the success of the community defines the success of Adobe and we value their success in a very big way. Flash player is a ubiquitous runtime today and we believe we will do innovations to keep it that way and provide features that allow people to do far more than what they do currently.