Question

I have developed a casual game that has become a modest hit on a few flash gaming sites and
I’m weighing the pros and cons of adding it to facebook. I don’t have a strong coding background – I learned AS3 as I was developing the game- so I’m not sure if embedding a flash file is a good idea for facebook games. If I want to eventually enable in-app purchases, are there any reasons I might not want to use Flash? Does Flash make the game more susceptible to cheating? Are there any other reasons that I might want to go with HTML5 or another coding language?

Answer 1

HTM5 isn’t a coding language, but JavaScript is used for programming the HTML5 Canvas element, which is what your consideration would be.

There are a lot of Canvas vs. Flash posts on the internet and I suggest you search for them and read them. There’s no reason for me to reiterate what’s been said a hundred times.

There isn’t anything wrong with embedding Flash on Facebook, though the usual iOS crowd won’t be able to see it.

Personally I’d recommend learning Canvas, which is a lot lower level than Flash but totally doable. The future of flash is probably going to get a lot smaller, and you’re already boxing out at least one demographic (iPad/Phone/Pod/iOS) by using it.

So the bottom line is that Flash is easier, at least for now, but HTML5 Canvas is the future here.

There are a number of Canvas books that cover simple game development and there are already several libraries that make game creation easier (ImpactJS, Game Closure, etc. I’d suggest searching and taking a good look at the currently most popular ones)