Freelance Flash Games News

I’m back with another Freelancer’s Flash Bash, and I’ve got some juicy links for all of you. We have awesome resource lists, GDC round-ups, tutorials and my friends over at 8BitRocket have even released a book!

8BitRocket released their very own book, entitled The Essential Guide to Flash Games: Building Interactive Entertainment with Actionscript. It’s a monster of awesomeness, with over 650 pages of AS3 game development knowledge and tutorials. I know I’ll be using it when I decide to switch to AS3 this summer, now if I could just score a review copy ;)

Emanuele Feronato has a nice little series on Box2D game creation, and compiled a list of isometric engines for flash game creation. Be sure to check it out for some great free and commercial engines.

Facebook Indie Games, a new site to the indie games scene and my flash bashes, has been churning out quality articles on facebook game development faster than I can read them. Amongst his posts includes a great round-up of the best GDC slideshows, 10 reasons people buy virtual goods, and 9 ways to promote your game on facebook.

Fan To Pro, another new site to my flash bashes, has a massive list of game development resources organized into categories ranging from graphics and design to development and technology. Not only does he list over 100 resources to use, but he has comments about every one, helping you pick and choose the ones you’ll like best.

Flash Chaz is running a contest giving away free copies of SWF Protector. Head on over to win some free swag and take a look at his insightful article on player psychology while you’re there.

Flash Game Monetization, also known as Elite Games, has two good write-ups of Casual Connect in Europe. He discusses some interesting lectures, and various portals and companies that showed up.

Game Devigner has a good lesson on how pushing yourself beyond your limits and trying to do too much can really take a toll on you. After awhile without posting, I’m glad to see him back and working on a new game as well his own charity foundation.

Gaming Your Way, another favorite of mine, has some musings about types of game controls and a wonderful collection of tips for iPhone and Flash CS5 game development. He also has a wealth of information on the new service GamesChart in his interview with the founder Barry White.

Joseph Burchett has been busy with lots of flash related accomplishments, including joining the Flash Game License team. He was also featured on Game Developer’s Radio a couple months ago. It’s a great listen, and I meant to publish it ages ago, but haven’t gotten around to a link post until now ;)

Michael James Williams put out more of his excellent in-depth tutorials on topics such as AS3 code optimization and blitting in flash. He’s also a technical editor over at Activetuts + so be sure to give the site a look. It’s got a whole bunch of neat AS3 tutorials.

MochiLand put together a fine list of recordings from Flash Gaming Summit. Get your hunger for flash knowledge satisfied with recordings of presentations from some of the best developers and companies in the business.

Photon Storm has a nice tutorial on saving movieclips as pngs. Quick and simple, just the way I like them.

Iq Andreas put together a list of the best actionscript blogs to follow. I’m glad to say I made the cut. He also has a good tutorial on saving AS3 language references onto your hard drive.

Phil Peron created an introduction to ElectroServer and PushButton Engine for those of you interested in using these two game engines/frameworks together.

Porter’s World is advocating that the power is yours when it comes to monetization of your flash game. Don’t sell yourself short.

Rasmus Wriedt Larson is blogging quick tips for developers, such as scrolling in a swf and managing saved data. Useful stuff.

The Tech Labs put out the Sound Effects part of their Away3D shoot’em’up tutorial. Now you can listen to the pew pew of the lasers firing or any other crazy sounds you want.

Tim Roger’s has a lengthy article on video game design. It’s long, but much of what he says can be applied to flash games. Definitely worth checking out if you’ve got the time to read it.

Trent Polack has a whole overview of the Game Developer’s Conference, not only summarizing the events of each day, but writing up the important points from various presentations as well. Give it a look if you weren’t able to attend, or just want a memory jogger of all that took place at GDC.

Untold Entertainment also published a series of articles on the Game Developer’s Conference. Lot’s of good stuff to check out as he summarizes the encounters and events he attended each day. Take a gander for some of his excellent summaries and comical wit.

Vortix Games recently put out their Bold Pixel Engine, and are already hard at work on version 2. They also have a great post on fun’s role in game design and an interesting rant about acting professionally in the flash games industry.

When you sit down to develop flash games chances are you don’t even consider the game’s plot, or maybe you’ll throw a story in as an afterthought. After all it’s the gameplay that makes a game enjoyable. But, stop to think about plot for a second. While good gameplay will make your game fun, how far does that fun extend once the player is done playing? When they close your game, have they been emotionally affected by the game’s mechanics? Doubtful. It’s storytelling that will reach your players emotions.

Not textbooks though. They'll never reach your audience's emotions.

Storytelling reaches out to player’s subconsciousness in ways gameplay and mechanics will never be able to. Through the creation of dynamic characters and storylines, players become emotionally attached to the people and places within your game. They are no longer playing as a character trying to accomplish the tasks given to them. Your players will find themselves rooting for the hero, emotions rising and falling with his successes and setbacks.  With a great story, it becomes more than just another time killer on the web; able to make it’s way off the computer screen and into people’s thoughts and conversations.

Even if you have an awesome story though, how do you tell it in a medium that is known for jumping right into the gameplay and letting you play? Many game developer’s plow right through this problem, trying to utilize the typical movie style storyline in which the player is merely an observer to the events taking place. This just doesn’t work in games, especially flash games. Gamers sit down looking to play, not to watch long, unskippable cutscenes. Letting players skip the cutscenes doesn’t solve the problem either, as it would remove the storyline element of your game for those players.

So how do we convey a storyline to players without losing their attention? Simple; make the storyline interactive.  When your storyline is interactive it stops being a movie and moves it back into the world of our players.

Their fate lies in your hands Commander

To create this kind of interactivity in your games, you have a few options at your disposal. One of the design paths you could take is letting players decide how the player is going to talk and act in cutscenes. This is a technique that the wildly popular RPG Mass Effect is known for. The first time I played that game, it’s storyline blew me  away because I was the one in control of the conversations and actions the main character took.  Those decisions had a real effect on the world in which I was playing.

Another design choice you can make is to integrate the storyline into the playable world. A game that does this excellently is ImmorTall. The story happens around the player as they move through the world, blending the aspects of storytelling and gameplay into one.

Do you feel storytelling has a place in flash games? Share and discuss in the comments below.

Microtransactions are hitting the flash game industry with a fury. With multiple APIs and games utilizing them, players are starting to become more accustomed to microtransactions. No longer do you have to be a big name developer to secure yourself a chance to add micropayments into your game. That’s why I’m going to be going through ways to help you sell more microtransactions within your game.

Bundle Items

Nearly everyone loves a good deal. It’s what makes stores’ weekly ads so effective. Show a person a marked up price, then discount it with big percent signs and red crossouts, and suddenly the product looks much more enticing. The same concept applies to microtransactions. Show the player how much the items would cost separately, then offer them a discount for buying all the items together. Even better, offer a bundle of premium items but throw in a premium item that they can only get by purchasing the package. That way, the player has to buy the package if they want the extra item.

Offer Free Items

Now I know what you’re thinking, “I thought the purpose of this article was to help me sell more microtransactions in my game. How is giving items or content away for free going to help?”

Free items are going to serve a dual purpose in your game. First, if the player had not yet signed up for the microtransactions system you are using, then free items will help convince them to sign up. If they like your game, they have nothing to lose by signing up, after all they’ll be getting new items for free. This helps you because now the player has an account with the microtransactions system, and can add money to their account.

The second purpose of free items is to get the player used to buying things. For example, when you buy a free item with Mochi Coins, it will still have you go through the same process as if you had purchased the item for real money. It makes the player more likely to actually purchase an item because they are now used to the system and trust it because they have used it before.

Make it Multiplayer

This tip may not be doable for all games, but if you’re designing a game from the ground up, microtransaction work wonders in a multiplayer world. Multiplayer games are all about socializing and showing off your skills. For social multiplayer games, microtransactions let players be more unique by offering a greater range of customization. For competitive multiplayer games, gamer’s that want the advantage will have to buy the latest items and content to stay ahead of the competition.

It’s All About the Store

Thinks about the last time you went into a restaurant and read a menu. You may not know this, but chances are someone was paid to design that menu to optimize revenue for the restaurant. This same concept should be applied to your microtransactions menu.

Not only should your store be aesthetically pleasing, but it should be laid out in a way that encourages users to purchase the most expensive items. Here are some tips for creating a money making microtransactions store:

• Sell limited time offers. They catch a player’s eye, and motivate them to purchase because the player knows they only have so long before the item is gone for good.
• Put the least useful items next to more useful and expensive ones. By doing so, the player should find the complex item more enticing to purchase than the cheaper but less useful item next to it.
• The top right is the first place most people eyes look. So put your most expensive items there.
• Put boxes around expensive items to emphasize them in the game. It draws the player’s eye right to them.
• Use pictures. They let the player know what they’re purchasing and give them an concrete image to put with the microtransaction.
• Use an overpriced item to emphasize the cheapness of items around it. It makes everything else look like a bargain.

In the flash game industry, reputation is important when it comes to getting the best sponsorships. Most sponsors will let you put your own intro and developer branding into your game. Why not do something with that branding and use it to promote your own flash arcade site.

Today I’m going to be reviewing Pro Arcade Script, a quick to set-up and easy to use arcade script that lets you focus your time on adding great games instead of messing with mounds of code. I liked it so much I decided to use it for my own flash arcade, which you can check out at Meebli.com. It’s a great example of what the script can do, and how easy it is to customize the built in templates.

Let’s delve into the features of Pro Arcade Script first. On the front end, the script has 2 fully coded themes to choose from which can be modified fairly easily to make your site truly unique. Various page blocks can be added or removed including hot games, random games, news, top users, recently added games, favorites, and more. Users profiles allow players to add favorite games, list fans, and add friends giving the script powerful social features.

The key to this arcade script seems to be customization, and it shows on the back end. The scripts unique page block system allows site owners to customize the script to their liking, adding certain blocks to specific parts of the site. For example, if you want an add to only appear on the game page, you can do that. If you want to add your own html content or php scripts, that’s doable as well. The php based control panel allows site owners to quickly edit comments, site settings, contact details, and news.

Website owners will also be happy to know that the script supports caching, and seo-friendly urls, both of which are essential in getting traffic to your site and keeping that traffic happy by ensuring speedy load times. Built in ad blocks will let you monetize your site using popular ad programs such as Adsense or your own custom ads. There’s even a built in statistics program which lets you track the number of game plays.

Now, most importantly, Pro Arcade Script’s content management system. Games can be added manually using the forms you would typically see on most game site’s when submitting your games. Or, you can add flash games by using the MochiAds game feed. This means you are just a click away from accessing the hundreds of games within Mochi’s feed. The system allows you to filter games by category, tags, or content rating to ensure you import the games you want.

With all these great features, Pro Arcade Script will set you back a modest $59 to get yourself started. But just for being a reader of my site, you can get 20% off the list price using the code FFGREVIEW. Discounts are also available for arcade owners looking to buy multiple licenses. Interested in purchasing Pro Arcade Script? Check out their site for a full script overview and demo.

Vortix Games Studios has recently announced the release of their new Actionscript 3 framework called Bold Pixel Engine. The engine compiles a number of useful classes and coding tasks commonly used in game development to give developers a streamlined engine capable of efficient and effective game creation.

Already in use in two soon to be released games, Bold Pixel Engine integrates a variety of useful classes ranging from algorithms and data structures to input and sound control.It even has a fully functioning blit engine which allows you to easily add blitting, a technique that allows for extremely fast rendering by not using movieclips but by directly drawing to a bitmapdata object, to your game.

Designed to be aesthetically pleasing, Vlad of Vortix Games Studio comments “most of the decisions we did regarding the engine organization were tailored to be easy on the eye for developers. If you create a movieClip you’ll see A LOT of stuff there, functions, variables and so on. We coded BPE taking into consideration that less is more and that regardless of how complex it is, the only thing we as developers need to see is what was made public, all the rest is private or internal. This means that something as complex as the blit engine’s classes when being coded, only show a handful of methods and variables instead of a ton of stuff we don’t need or use.”

Here’s a quick rundown of feature for you:

• Collision Detection algorithm
• Path Finding algorithm for tiled maps
• Blit Engine
• Keycode Array
• Math classes such as Random and Geometry
• 2D Arrays
• States
• Clock control
• Toolkit which includes management for:
  • Music
  • Scenes
  • Input
  • Saves
  • Loops
  • Sound Effects

Best of all, Bold Pixel Engine is free! Vortix Games Studio designed it as part of their game development process and they’re now giving out access to their engine hoping they can help you with your game development process too. Go check it out.