Droid X, Adobe Does

Not too long ago, I got back in contact with a friend from Adobe, and took him up on an offer. I met him at the Kongregate GDC VIP party hosted at the Harlot in San Francisco during FlashGamingSummit 2011, and we started talking about game development over a couple (or more) awesome drinks. I soon found out he was an employee at Adobe, and worked closely with their mobile development branch. He asked me if I was into mobile development yet, and told him that I was very interested in entering the market, but didn’t have a phone that was compatible. I then showed him the pathetic excuse of a phone I had, and I think he died a little inside at the site of it. After a bit more talking, some deep developer bonding, and a bit more alcohol, he offered to send me a free Droid X when I got back home to Vermont. After a few months of being back home, I got back in touch with him and level-upped my phone status.

My old phone wasn’t even a smartphone, and was just your basic text/call phone with a physical qwerty. My new Droid X is pretty beastly compared to almost every phone on the market right now (even at a year old), even just out of the box. To spice things up a bit, I spent a day rooting it (while ensuring not to brick it), installed some awesome customized UI features that the Android Community taught me, and got most of the essential apps and widgets I was interested in. As is, the thing runs fast, does more than I knew smart phones could prior to owning one (including running Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars on the SNES, which my modded Nintendo DS can’t even do), and is looking pretty awesome. I’m extremely happy with it to say the least.

After playing my fair share of Angry Birds (finally), configuring the phone to my liking, and marveling at its abilities, it’s finally time for me to start thinking about what I’m actually going to do with it that will pay my proper thanks to Adobe. I’ve been wanting to port some of my older games for awhile now, so that’s definitely going to go on the list of things to do. To start though, I think I’d like to try some very casual, smaller-scale projects just to see how developing for it is. On that note, I was at a friends drinking the other night, had some dice, and invented a great new game that I think would do fantastic on the mobile market, so I’ll go ahead and make that when I get some time. For now, I need to finish up Daughters of Pytheus and get on to some new projects.

Seeing as I have an awesome phone now, capable of running flash content, it’s safe to say that I’ll definitely be entering the mobile market. It’s a great opportunity for me to continue learning to program, while exploring a whole new market and meeting new people. I’m looking forward to playing with the new API’s for multi-touch, accessing the accelerometer, etc, and I’m eager to see how I can implement them to some of my previous games. Adobe has done a fantastic job getting flash on mobile devices, and it’s only going to get better as phones increase in power and Adobe continues to polish the mobile version of flash player. I want to take this time to give a huge, incredibly sincere thanks to everyone over at Adobe, and even more so to my contact there whom I will keep anonymous for obvious reasons. Adobe is an awesome company that has a huge impact on my life, and I’m glad to see that even the staff is awesome. I’m going to get back to working and enjoying my awesome device, maybe later I’ll go watch some flash videos with it in an Apple store.