In the last few days, after doing Mini LD #28, I’ve changed my mind about which tools I want to use for Flash development.

For a long time I’ve been using the open source HaXe compiler to build Flash 9/10 swf’s, but I ran into some show-stoppers with it. The biggest is that I can find no sane way of making a preloader work with external API’s (Kongregate, Mochi, etc.), and some other lesser issues with compatibility. This isn’t a big problem for LD, but for anything I want to publish it’s a huge problem.

The best solution is a change of compiler, and main library. As far as I can tell, the best alternative (for Linux, and my code style) is the Flex framework with Adobe’s mxmlc compiler. While it’s slower and not completely open source, it should get round most of the big problems, while still running on Linux and not needing a specific IDE.

At the same time, I’m also starting to use Flixel, because it provides neat ways to do most of the tedious work for me (I hope that’s not cheating :P).

The first test will be if I can re-write my Mini LD entry using the new kit. So far I have an almost working core, with stats, players, SFX and AI.

Current public build: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16895250/flixel_sea/build.swf