About GAF

GAF - Faster game dev workflow

Creating a 2D game requires close coordination within a team of artists, animators, programmers, product managers and producers. Animations need to be carefully created and managed to run on multiple devices. GAF enables team workflow to progress much faster while supporting animation playback on multiple mobile device platforms at the highest possible frame rates.

Faster Workflow - Become a Hero!

As an artist or animator you can continue using Adobe Flash CC to create simple or complex animations. Once you save your animations out in .GAF format your programmers can easily run them on major mobile platforms such as iOS, Android and WinPhone at high frame rates. Your animations will play on mobile devices exactly as you created them in Flash CC which otherwise isn’t always possible. Your programmers will appreciate avoiding tedious tasks such as manually optimizing texture atlases and sprites to manage file size, etc. The .GAF format is already highly optimized for small file size and high frame rate playback. Your project managers and producers will love the faster overall development cycle that GAF makes possible. Less pain and so much to gain! Be a hero and let your PMs and programmers know about GAF and then start saving out your animations in .GAF format. They’ll thank you once they discover the increase in team productivity which in turn reduces time to market and lowers project cost. They will also be impressed by animations running in-game at higher frame rates on mobile devices. For more details into the nuts and bolts click here.

What you see in Flash is what you get on mobile

You don't need to learn how to use GAF. Simply create your animations as you always have done and save out to .GAF format. What you see in Adobe Flash will appear exactly the same after conversion into GAF.

Adobe Flash CC Extension

Publishing directly from Adobe Flash into GAF is simple once you install the GAF Publisher from Adobe's Add-ons website.

To download it and install manually click here.

Detailed instruction on how to use the GAF Publisher is here.

Most Features Supported

GAF supports 90% of what can be done in Adobe Flash. This means that in most cases you can continue creating animations with very few limitations to your creativity. The few options that are not available when working with the GAF Extension are as follows:

• Blending mode different from Normal;
• Masks under masks;
• Animated masks (Movie Clips with an animation inside used as a Mask);
• 3D transformations.

For Product Mgrs and Developers

High performance

GAF offers:

1. High FPS made possible via runtime libraries provided and supported by GAF Media. Frameworks supported: Unity3d, Cocos2d-X, Cocos2d-iphone and Starling.
2. Native API for each framework to control and manage animations with minimal Drawcalls.
3. Highly optimized texture atlas to achieve minimal RAM consumption and build size

GAF File Components

The GAF file is a zip archive which includes optimized texture atlases and a compressed config file. Each GAF file has all the necessary information to describe each animation to perform playback without stitch using any of the supported runtimes provided by GAF Media.

Runtimes supported for major frameworks

Once you have converted your animations into GAF files you will need to render those animations in your games. The GAF Runtimes are open source libraries (or plugins) that allow your game toolkit to load and render animations in your games.

The GAF Runtimes support full animation playback APIs which provides direct access to timeline, labels and sprites. The GAF Runtimes are developed and supported by GAF Media staffed with game developers who use GAF technology for all their own game projects.

The official runtimes are on GitHub (on open source basis) and in the Unity Asset Store.

Available License Levels

GAF licenses are available at three levels: Free, Studio and Enterprise. Mobile game development teams employing GAF in their workflow have experienced tremendous savings resulting from reduced workload and faster time to market. Find out which license suits your project and start reaping the rewards of lower game development cost and faster time to market. Click here for license pricing and details.

Best regards,

GAF Team