About Flixel

Flixel is an open source game-making library that is completely free for personal or commercial use. Written entirely in ActionScript 3 by Adam “Atomic” Saltsman, and designed to be used with free development tools, Flixel is easy to learn, extend and customize. Flixel has been used in hundreds of games, including IGF nominees, Adult Swim games, and avant-garde experiments. Many Flixel users make their first game ever in Flixel.

Features

Flixel includes some basic features common to
many game engines or other game libraries.
  • Display thousands of moving objects
  • Basic collisions between objects
  • Group objects together for simplicity
  • Easily generate and emit particles
  • Create game levels using tilemaps
  • Text display, save games, scrolling
  • Mouse & keyboard input
  • Math & color utilities
Flixel also includes some new "advanced" features, which we'll explore in more detail on the features page.
  • Record and play back replays
  • Powerful interactive debugger
  • Camera system for split screen
  • Pathfinding and following
  • Easy object recycling

History

Adam started working on Flixel in March of 2008, and released the first public version in June 2009. Probably the most commonly asked question about Flixel is "where did it come from?" so we've included a short explanation here.
“I tried a few different times to make a little game engine type thing that would allow me to make retro games. That just seemed like a fun thing to be able to do for fun on a weekend. I tried it in C++/Python/OpenGL right when I left school, maybe 7 years ago? Anyways, it was a failure. Once ActionScript 3 came out, I was able to do some of the pixel-level stuff that I was really interested in. However, by the time I got my hands on AS3, I was more interested in just making little games, and seeing what patterns evolved. I kept making more complex games by reusing the code from the last project, and eventually those parts that I was seeing in every project got moved to their own folder. I think a lot of coders out there have a folder like this on their hard drive somewhere.”

Contributors

Flixel simply could not be what it is today without help, support and inspiration from a lot of fantastic people. Starting with v2.50, we have relied more on the kindness of strangers than ever before, starting with our awesome all-volunteer web team:

Special Thanks

Rebekah Saltsman puts up with a lot of crap, and without her patience there would not be any Flixel. Paul Veer painted the images on the index and 404 pages, as well as the background tile for this site. Ivan Safrin (F*ck Typing, Bitworld) taught Adam to write Flash games years ago, a pretty big moment in retrospect. A lot of Flixel forum members have caught bugs or contributed great snippets of code, too many people to list here. You’re all awesome. Finally, a big thank you to the indie games community at large, who have been so supportive and helpful and inspiring over the years.