Sketch: Advantages of using. August 25, 2007

Since the UI/Skin is one swf and the code in a separate, loosely coupled. It provides many benefits in team development. Here's a short list.

• For Design teams, Reskinning games is drop in replacement. Just the Fla, no code, compiler, SVN and dependencies to set up for a designer, no worries about changing a piece of code that they should have.
• For a coder, no fonts, cross platform issues pop up, no worries about bumping things.
• It helps enforce good boundaries/interfaces between teams. frameLabels can be checked to conform to an API and script complain on compile.
• Facilitates reuse. Code "engines" become easier to maintain as they can only be changed by developers, preferably thorough a unit testing framework. Similarly Existing skins can be turned into completely different games if the new logic uses the same view/controller API.
• Working with contractors/outsources allows you to send just the compiled file instead of the source tree.
• bug fixes and new features can be rolled out by dropping in new files. Say a puzzle whose boards are generated purely by script, gets new levels or features. This is very useful when you have multiple skins, or versions (if configuration controlled) for the same engine in production, an Ant script can just update the folders with the new file rather than needing to recompile all of them. One one project we have close to 30 minigames, each about 5 minutes long, just different assets and configuration files. So it's compile once, copy 30, rather than compile 30.