The Gaming Side of Renaun

Posted on November 17, 2011 | 16 comments

I love games. Both PC and Board/Card games. I loved exploring different interests in college from computers, archeology, and music. Through all those years and up to now gaming has always been apart of me. Great memories around gaming shaped me up to day. Like having a paper route when I was 12, just to go buy 2 Nintendo games each month. Or family reunions of playing spoons and watching my 70 yr old great-grandma leap over the table to get to a spoon. Pursuing computers and programming was driven largely because of my interest in games.

The first AIR mobile application, nearly 2 years ago, I built for iOS was a game. It was so much fun using my skill set to built the application, it reminded me of the days when I was first learning how to program and how fun it is. The app is called Raining Blocks and been in the app store for almost 2 years now, it was just for fun and I don’t tell many people about it – until now.

I did Flex, since 1.5, and Flash work before joining Adobe nearly 4 1/2 years ago. The different projects have given many different programming experiences, from libraries (Pacifica), code in the Flash Player (Pacifica), server side payment integration (Shibuya/InMarket), and many demo applications. At the core I understand the Flash Player and like building components and libraries. Since joining the evangelist team I get to build more and more examples. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I augmented my examples with games when possible.

I just spoke at FITC Screens on “Digital Fun in the Digital Home” where I used applications like PickQuick and Eiden1. Both have all their source code available on github. Eiden1 was designed by my 5 year old at the time and has been to show since it uses WiiMotes through a Android IME with the Android device hooked up to the TV, a console in your pocket. Games just make sense to me when showing off cool features.

So I like games, whats all the fuss. Well, I am excited to say that my new focus as an Evangelist is Flash Gaming. I am joining the gaming evangelist team, so you’ll be seeing more posts around this topic.

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  • http://www.garthdb.com GarthDB

    Sweet!

  • Mark Rondina

    Congratulations on the new focus!

  • nick

    wooooo! looking forward to it!

  • Guest

    Is it true that Adobe is dropping support for AIR on the desktop, and it will only be AIR on mobile, going forward?

    • Anonymous

      No that is not true

      • Guest

        Cool. Thx for the clarification.

  • http://www.facebook.com/jefferyfoster Jeff Foster

    Cool! congrats!

  • Shawn Blais

    Awesome! First order of business should be educating the masses about properly using GPU mode. I try, but no one reads my tiny blog :)
    http://esdot.ca/site/2011/fast-rendering-in-air-3-0-ios-android

    Yes, Stage3D is coming, and Starling/ND2D is what we will use eventually. But, performance in GPU mode is amazing, and it’s here today, no need to wait. It also vastly outperforms Stage3D on mobile at the moment.

    More people should know about this…

  • Matt

    Congrats Renaun! I know you’ll both love it and be extremely successful!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=601895552 James Lei

    Just understand, Flex 4.6 is still under NDA until release. Most likely, Adobe could not mentioned the plan on AIR yet till 28th Nov. Has anyone read NDA clause in the Flex pre-release participant at all?

  • GrahamP

    Congrats – sad to see Adobe turning their back on enterprise, but good luck in your gaming-focussed role.

    Another recent unpopular development from Adobe we in the gaming industry want clarification on, is how exactly are Adobe going to (to borrow a grim phrase from the accountants) monetize Alchemy 2? Many of us have already drawn the conclusion that the new opcodes in the player will somehow be blocked to those without a paid-up Alchemy license… and that this may lead to Flash apps that use it needing to be somehow signed by Adobe. All very unwelcome and unwanted developments if true.

    The Alchemy debacle has negatively impacted a lot of us in the Flash gaming world- Away3D’s physics engine is an Alchemy port of Bullet (which I was depending on for 2 upcoming games), there’s a Box2D with Alchemy port, etc. All now broken, with developers wondering whether Alchemy 2 will be economic for their current projects.

    Having seen how Adobe treated a perfectly healthy and thriving enterprise side (apart from self-inflicted wounds like crazy LCDS pricing), I find it hard to put my trust in the platform to continue forwards without any more nasty surprises. Developments of the last month have lead many of us Flash/Flex developers to believe that we need to move our skills to competing/alternative technologies. Good luck with convincing us otherwise!

    • Anonymous

      Alchemy was always more then just opcodes in the player. It was a way to bring C code to the player. There is plenty of work around making that experience better.

  • Geoff Freedman

    Congratulations Renaun that makes a lot of sense and I know you’ll serve the community well.

  • Almog

    Congratulations on the move over to the Flash gaming team, but does show Adobe is moving there focus away from enterprise. Either way make sure to check out my startup Scoreoid – http://www.scoreoid.net/

    Scoreoid, developed by game developers for game developers, is a non-restrictive, reliable and easy to use gaming platform designed to handle but not limited to scoring, leaderboards and game management, including advanced functions such as platform content awareness, for multi-platform games.

  • Tyler Wright

    That’s great! I’m excited, maybe I should start watching your blog more carefully… :P

    • Anonymous

      Like you watched my blog before :)