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This week we’re excited to see Tiny Thief – a new interactive puzzle game from mobile game developer 5 Ants – hit iOS and Android devices. The game’s release marks one of the first third-party mobile titles to be published under Rovio’s new Rovio Stars brand and showcases the amazing work of Autodesk Customer 5 Ants.
Tiny Thief transports gamers into a medieval world, where they assume the role of a young thief who must uncover more than 100 hidden objects and solve problems along his journey into heroism. Throughout 30 different levels, players interact with 50 unique 2D characters, detailed backgrounds and 3,000 carefully handcrafted flash animations – all created by 5 Ants’ team of talented artists and animators.
With each level more sophisticated than the next, the 5 Ants team employed a mixture of vector and bitmap graphics to design the game. Having created a large volume of vector graphics in Flash CS5, midway through development the team realized that they’d need a high-performance solution to play out the Flash content on iOS and Android devices. Ultimately 5 Ants’ team turned to Autodesk's Scaleform Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK). Using the Scaleform Mobile SDK, they were able to easily port Flash CS5 animations to iOS and Android using the same code.
“Tiny Thief has so many levels, and they’re all very extensive. Every background is different, every animation is long and detailed, and every action on every object has a carefully handcrafted animation,” shared 5 Ants Programmer Miguel Santirso. “With so much going on, it would have been impossible to create this game using only bitmaps. We used a combination of bitmaps and vector graphics on the backgrounds, but 90 percent of the game is made up of vector graphics. That made the Scaleform Mobile SDK so valuable for us. Imagining using another tool on this project is just impossible now.”
“We’d created all this elaborate content in Flash CS5, but the tool we were originally using had a very specific limitation that prevented it from loading Flash CS5 with code when working with iOS. The Scaleform Mobile SDK allowed us to use all of the Flash animations we’d already created without forcing us to embed everything into a main SWF file,” added Santirso. “It was also much easier to integrate with native code. The game logic was written entirely in ActionScript, and we could use the exact same code for both iOS and Android.”
With Scaleform Mobile SDK now a part of 5 Ants’ workflow, the team has the flexibility to deploy the game to additional platforms in the future with minimal code creation. “With Scaleform Mobile SDK, porting is as easy as it can get. It gives us the ability to deploy our game to [other platforms]. We can use the same code and assets for iOS and Android, and only need to write small amounts of code that are specific to the new platforms we want to serve. It’s as easy as that,” Santirso concluded.
For more information about 5 Ants and “Tiny Thief” check out: http://area.autodesk.com/tinythief.
