Swish - Create Flash Games and Animations on Windows

Swish is a program that automates many of the common tasks for which the Flash platform is used, especially dynamic Flash animation. Although it's not expressly marketed as a game creation tool, their latest line of products, SwishMax, incorporates the Actionscript language which can absolutely be used to develop a Flash game.

I first noticed Swish around 10 years ago. At the time, I used Macromedia Flash to produce animations for websites. I was able to get by, but the learning curve seemed steep, and my workflow seemed cumbersome and overly technical. Swish was the perfect solution, and I had a blast playing with all the built-in effects. I eventually began to experiment with some of the advanced features and found that I could use Swish to easily create a "virtual tour" animation, which I used for a real estate website.

What does this have to do with creating Flash games? Well, for one there are many successful Flash games online that essentially amount to virtual tours with a few extra buttons. The spot-the-item games come to mind. For those of you in particular who are interested in building a game around Flash animation, such as a point-and-click adventure with lots of ambiance and cinematics, Swish could be the right tool. As mentioned earlier, SwishMax does support a scripting language, so if you took the time to learn how to use it, a process which would share some similarities to learning how to make Flash games from scratch, you could make arcade-style games as well.

Price: $69-$149

Pros: Excellent for animation, lots of built-in effects, you own the rights to any Flash game you export, easily create point-and-click Flash games, nice support community and templates.

Cons: Not built to be a Flash game maker, relatively steep learning curve for creating arcade style games, no automated publishing\monetization features