Before finding fame with Pocket God - and losing his weekends in the constant need to supporting it - Bolt Creative's Dave Castelnuovo ran a Flash development studio.

So who better to ask about Adobe announcement of its Notus technology that enables developers to turn their Flash apps into native iPhone apps?

Pocket Gamer: How useful is it for you as an experienced game studio to be able to make native Flash apps for iPhone?

Dave Castelnuovo: It depends on the actual implementation. From the articles and demos I've seen, it looks like an all or nothing solution. So you have to create all your assets in Flash with all of your code in ActionScript, and Creative Suite 5 will create a packaged app that you can either test or submit to the App Store.

Flash is the best way for developers to organise interactive 2D assets and animations though, so what would be really useful for me if it was open to the point where I could package assets and events that are defined in the .fla and use my own code and graphics engine to manipulate those assets.

Would Notus have made a difference in terms of how you approached Pocket God's development?

I would have explored the Creative Suite 5 solution first, but I have a feeling I would have wanted the ability to add my own C++ and Objective C code, which would have forced me to use a solution similar to our existing development pipeline.

What limitations does Notus have compared to building native iPhone apps from scratch?

I'm not sure but my guess is it will be comparable to using Unity. You can probably do the same level of game and while there are a lot of impressive games out there that use Unity, if you really want to push the limits, you need to use an engine that you have low level access to (C++ or Objective C).

There is only so much you can do with a generic engine that you have scripting access to. If you have a certain type of game and can place restrictions on what your render, logic and physics engine needs to handle, you can find ways to make your engine really quick.

Also, if you want to do something special with your game code-wise, you might be limited by the Flash or Unity API.

Would you like Apple to open up iPhone so it could handle in-browser Flash games?

Actually, I don't think it would be possible for Adobe to offer an iPhone flash plug-in that works well with Flash content that is optimised for playback on a PC. I tried to play Restaurant City on my UMPC the other day - which is faster than an iPhone 3GS - and the frame rate was horrendous.

The solution they are offering with CS5 is a lot different compared to creating a generic plug-in that can parse and play any SWF file.

There are a lot of optimisations they can make at compile time that you couldn't get away with when loading a SWF, because that is optimised for download speed rather than execution speed.

Besides, as a former Flash developer, I would prefer for mobile and PC to be separate. I want the ability to push the limits with Flash on a capable computer with a 1280x1024 resolution and hardware acceleration. If I had to worry people would be viewing my Flash game on an iPhone, it would water down what I was able to do. I think it would put us back five years in what we are finally able to do now.

My previous Flash game - World Golf Tour - pushes the limits of a 1.5GHZ CPU with 1 GB of RAM. UMPCs and mini laptops are causing us to pull back on some of the cool stuff we want to do. I couldn't imagine if people wanted to play the current version on a phone.

What effect do you think this will have in terms of the number of Flash games that will be released onto the App Store?

The number of apps available on the App Store will sky rocket - the rate of release will be even faster than it is now.

Even though you might not be able to build the most technologically impressive game with CS5, any designer who knows a little bit of ActionScript can now make an iPhone app.

This is a huge shift because the hurdles necessary to learn C++ and Objective C put app development out of the reach of most designers and quite a lot of web programmers too. But Flash is so accessible that literally anyone will be able to make an iPhone app.

Thanks to Dave for his time.

You can keep up-to-date with Bolt Creative's activity via its blog and the Pocket God twitterfeed.