Wow, it’s getting hard to keep track of all the exciting new APIs, SDKs and platforms emerging for HTML5 game development!

We just took a look at Ben Savage’s spaceport.io project today, and it looks really interesting.       There is both an SDK that helps you to convert AS3 games to native mobile apps, and one that helps you build apps from scratch.

The key here is that the software helps with converting AS3 games to native mobiles games, providing better performance than Flash running on those platforms.

If you are interested in how it works, there is a slide presentation that shows you all the gory details.

Here are some highlights:

• Includes a native renderer built in C++ and  openGL for iOS and Android (basically they recreated the Flash player  on those platforms)
• Can take a binary .swf and automatically convert it in seconds
• Includes 4 levels of code hiding/obfuscation to that makes the code at least as hard to decipher as a .swf
•  The software is free, but there is a licensing fee if your game generates more than $10k in revenue.
• Code can be automatically updated from their servers, allowing for automatic updates around the app store model.

• The conversion is *not* automatic, so some rejiggering of the code might be necessary, but it gets you most of the way there in converting AS3 to HTML5
• Games use Spaceport’s native formats, so after conversion you are tied to their service
• Since this is a “service” getting clients to accept using it might be a difficult task.
• The project does not appear finished yet, but you can get started now converting AS3 to JavaScript
• We are not sure if they use the Canvas or not, but from this story it appears that Ben appreciates it, however we could only see CSS mentioned in the docs.

We plan to test it out with an AS3 game soon.