The Scaleform Mobile Game Kit provides a best-practices sample implementation of a mobile, touch-based game built using Autodesk® Scaleform® as the engine and renderer. The game, Starforce Battlement, is written entirely in ActionScript 3 and leverages Scaleform’s ‘Shippable Mobile Player’ for cross-platform deployment. A detailed description of the implementation is included within this overview. Although the game is specifically designed for mobile devices, it can be played on any platform that supports mouse or touch input, including PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android.

The kit includes the full ActionScript 3 source code for the game and the main menu, including sample frameworks for multi-resolution support, sound playback, saving and loading to device, achievements, and an iOS Game Center integration. The kit also includes all of the Adobe® Flash® content and assets used in the game. All of the kit’s resources can be reused by developers and/or leveraged as best-practices samples for architecture and implementation of their own game using Scaleform.

Although the game was designed to leverage Scaleform for playback on mobile devices, it can also be played back in a web browser using Adobe Flash Player making it a good benchmark for Scaleform’s memory footprint and performance on various platforms.

A simplistic breakdown of the core components that makeup Starforce Battlement from a development/runtime perspective:

1. Flash Professional is used for interactive art, animation, UI layout, and level editing.
2. Gameplay logic is written in ActionScript 3 (FlashDevelop 4 is our recommended editor).
3. Exported .SWF files are played back by Scaleform on the device.
4. Scaleform’s renderer takes care of drawing the playback result to the GPU of the device, effectively displaying it on-screen.

Figure 1: Starforce - Level 1 Screenshot

Starforce Battlement is a tower defense game with role-playing game elements. The primary objective of each level is to prevent oncoming waves of enemies from reaching their destination. Every enemy that reaches the destination subtracts one point from the player’s life. If enough enemies reach the destination that the player’s life is reduced to zero, the game is over.

Players can build units/towers at designated locations on the map that will attack the oncoming enemies, preventing them from reaching the destination. Eliminating enemies rewards the player with credits which can be spent on building new towers or upgrading existing towers. When all enemy waves have been eliminated, the level is complete.

Figure 2: Starforce - Main Menu

As a full game demo, Starforce Battlement also includes a main menu for level select, tutorials, and viewing player statistics/achievements, all of which can be reused by developers for their own titles.

Starforce Battlement will be available as a free download on the iOS App Store in May 2012. Developers are encouraged to download the application to an iOS device to see how Scaleform works on iOS.

Starforce Battlement showcases the following Scaleform mobile features:

1. Cross-Platform Mobile Support
2. GPU Vector and Bitmap Rendering
3. Full ActionScript 3 Support
4. Multi-Touch and Gesture Input Handling
5. Saving and Loading Data
6. Sound and Music Playback
7. iOS Game Center Integration
8. Orientation Lock / Orientation Handling

The kit also provides sample ActionScript 3 frameworks for the following:

1. Player Achievements
2. Sound and Music Playback
3. iOS Game Center Integration
4. Saving and Loading Data