Postmortem: Building Hard-shell Hockey with NME

After finally creating my first game with NME and publishing it to the Android store, I thought I would share my experience so far.

To begin, I should explain what NME is and what it can do since I have only given it a brief mention before.
According to the official site NME is:

“The best way to build cross-platform 2D games or rich applications.”
“Using the innovative Haxe language compiler, NME deploys the same source code to C++, JavaScript and SWF bytecode without sacrificing reliability. As a result, NME provides fast hardware-accelerated performance for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and BlackBerry, while also supporting Flash Player and HTML5. NME mirrors the traditional Flash API, so developers can leverage their existing experience to target new platforms, with better results.”

So far I have to say that statement is pretty accurate. But what about other similar tools that exist such as Corona, Unity, libGDX, Marmalade etc and why did I choose NME over them?
One of the more obvious reasons why I chose NME was my past experience with the Flash API which certainly lowered the learning curve. However, it was the fact that NME is the only truly free solution that won me over. LibGDX came closest out of the other choices I mentioned but it still required a $400 license fee for iOS. Having witnessed the HTML5 vs. Flash war I feel it is much safer to bet on technologies that are free and open source.
Of course NME is not without its flaws. Bugs and issues with various platforms do exist although fortunately they are few and far between. Additionally the community is not huge and so one can’t expect the same level of documentation and tutorials. That being said, I have really noticed over the past year how polished NME is becoming and how the community is growing which is fantastic to see. I am very much looking forward to seeing shader support for mobiles being added too.
So, having decided upon NME as the tool to use I realised I needed a game engine. When I first started there was not much choice so I decided to port over an engine I had made in Flash. As of now, ports of the popular Flash game engines like HaxeFlixel and HaxePunk exist. Regardless, software architecture and game engine design has interested me so I don’t feel that I wasted my time by creating my own and so far am very pleased with my results.
That being said, I did greatly underestimate how much work was involved in getting the game engine working properly.
The first challenge was getting the hang of rendering in a different way to what I had been accustomed to with Flash. In Flash, I would mainly use the DisplayList and at times blitting. This works great in web browsers but less so on mobile devices. Blitting actually causes the mobile to render via software which kills performance. The DisplayList, whilst better (it is GPU accelerated), is still not the optimum way of rendering. The best way when considering performance on mobiles is drawTiles and drawTriangles respectively. This means using a third party tool to export a swf into a tilesheet to render via drawTiles.
After understanding and implementing drawTiles, my next problem was displaying Android ads. I managed to find a library that used NME extensions to achieve this except that it did not work out of the box. Eventually I tracked down another person who had managed to get it up and running and they gave me a lot of tips. In the end this required delving into some of the NME framework and modifying the Java code template. It was after this that I decided to just focus on developing for Android as I did not want to waste a similar amount of time getting iOS ads working (although I believe they work out of the box on that platform) [...]

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