The Race for Mobile and Hard Days inline for Flash Development

The Race is on for mobile and woe to those who skills sets are about to be out of date. So Who is the Loser (as of now - November 2012)?

• Flash (ActionScript)

I would highly recommend any Flash Developers out there to bone up on other technology as many changes are hitting this field and even though I personally think flash has years of life in it yet, many I work with do not.

I could do a whole Blog about Bay Area Perceptions about the Death of Flash (The King is dead, Long live the King) but it would just make me mad so I will skip it in general.

But I will say the following, Flash can do amazing things if you have the right personal to use it as a tool. But with a gleam in there eyes, non Flash Developers love talking smack about the platform. I always thought some of it was based on "No Real Developers write code in Flash" or some other strange idea's, but after watching a few projects get cancelled recently I think it actually has some merit.

• Its 3D toolsets are really in the starting stages, and Unity really has a better 3D workflow for non UI work. To work in 3D you have to program everything and it is really time consuming.
• The Flash 3D Workflow for art is not fun at all and very painful.
• Adobe came up with great enhancements with 11.4 + of the player, But the Flash player fragmentation (Think Google) has made it very hard to get users all on the correct 3D Flash Player and have a simular experience.
• AIR is fantastic, but the Flash Player is Not. AIR for mobile is also very much in the starting stages and requires some smart people to use it well.
• Artist Like to use Unity as its much more of an Artist Tool than a programmers tool.
• 3D on Mobile and the Web is just so much more Cool.

So Adobe know of these issues and have impressed me about how quickly they are trying to push out changes to support companies and developers. But the basic question is ..... Do they have enough time to do it before Major Studios switch to other platforms?

I have no idea what that answer will be, But I have seen the likes of a change like this before and it happens very very fast. If you are in the wrong side of the change, You could find yourself out of a Job and losing that senior developer position for that of a junior developer mighty quick. Once the developers can not find jobs in the field then the problem just gets worse and the cycle accelerates. 

Even though most engineers would agree with me that a good client developer is a good client developer no matter what there language is, most Product people do not see it that way. They want you to have the flavor of the hour now even though its very simple to train you in it.

So for any game developer in any field, Its always the smart choice to keep up to speed on the new technology and stay current.