Follow on to my other games question?

Question

Is it free to create games and the stuff that you make them with
eg.flash and java

And how would you get them

Answer 1

Please note that the java development environment is free and doesn't 'come with' an IDE (although there are plenty of java IDEs out there that you have to pay for that have a development environment included, but there are also several that are free). If you download the latest jdk, create a game with it and put that game on your website, sun hasn't made a penny. The flash development environment does cost, however.

Download java from:
http://developers.sun.com/downloads/

Download flash from:
http://www.adobe.com

Whichever way you go, think about the learning curve involved. For example, here's a rough idea of what you'd have to do to make an image of ball going up and down in flash (I'll talk in very rough general terms):
- Draw a ball
- Mark a keyframe on a timeline
- Draw another ball later on the time line
- Mark another keyframe
(This is a shorthand for saying 'here's the ball at the start, here's the ball at the end, draw all the stages 'inbetween' for me.)
- export as a flash object. There are a couple of minor other things to do, but by and large that's it.

In java, to do something similar would involve:
- writing code to describe the 'thing' you're making as an applet.
- writing code to set up something to draw on
- writing code to make the ball bounce (e.g. with a sin wave, possibly with double buffering to stop the image flickering)
- writing code to draw a ball at various intervals at the appropriate place.

It's a general description, but you get the idea. One is drag and drop, the other is programming.

As java's free, and the last time I looked you could play with flash free for a month, have a play with both.

Answer 2

When you create a game using Flash or Java, the companies (MacroMedia or Sun) make their money by selling the programming environment (the IDE) and the compiler.

You are free to distribute software you create using the language any way you want as part of the license when you bought the IDE and compiler.