Adam “ATOMIC” Saltsman has been on an epic coding frenzy this week, with constant twitter updates about all of the new features and bug fixes being added. Flixel really is a great little package - quick and easy to learn, producing amazingly retro results.

I took a little time to play with it a few months ago, putting together a pretty nifty little pong game in a matter of a couple of hours, all whilst learning about OOP and AS3 by taking apart the demo game (Mode). Flixel has change a lot since then, especially in the past couple of weeks.

You can download the latest version from Adam’s Github, as well as some example games that you can learn from. Some of the recent changes are designed to make it easier to port to other platforms, so in future you may find yourself developing a game in ‘vanilla’ flixel and then being able to quickly port it to iPhone, XNA, etc.

Definitely something to keep an eye on.

This looks interesting:

“FlashPunk is a free ActionScript library designed for developing 2D Flash games. Its goal is to provide you with a fast, clean framework for prototyping and developing games; this means most of the dirty work — reliable framerate, sprite rendering/animation, player input, and collision detection (to name a few) — has been covered with a set of base classes and functions for your ease of use. This gives you more time and energy to concentrate on the design and testing of your game.”

As an alternative to Adam Saltsman’s Flixel, this certainly has potential. I’m not saying that Flixel needs a rival (I actually think it’s awesome), but competition is always good. Also, since both of them are open source, hopefully they’ll be able to learn from each other’s strong points.