Flex is a great Game Development Language

There’s a lot of misinformation about Flex in the gaming community. Most people think you can only use Flex for boring business stuff – graphs and so on, and you have to use Flash/CS3 for games. Or they are misled by the fact most introductions to Flex want to talk about only MXML.

They don’t realise that Flex is simply a proper programming environment to create Flash applications using AS3.0.  On the other hand CS3 is primarily designed for creating animations, and as a side thought allows you to add code.

You can’t create decent artwork in Flex, just like you can’t in C++ – but you can write games in much more organised manner, like you would in C++. I’ve been working on a Flex game for about a year now (in a small team) and Flex(Builder) has proved itself as a perfectly good development environment for AS3… proper debugger, resource editor, etc. We use CS3 for artwork and the great thing is Flex has pretty seamless interop with Flash SWFs.

The bottom line is, Flex is designed for programmers, and Flash is for artists. If you’re used to modern IDEs and good coding tools, and you want to make a browser game, then FlexBuilder is the way to go.