Freelance Flash Games News

Game graphics are a great way to improve your chances of getting your flash game sponsored. The better your art is, the more professional and polished your game will look. Only thing is, hiring people to create game graphics for your can be expensive. So I’ve come up with a couple of sites you can use to get free game graphics in your flashes.

Gfx-Lib Fuzed

This site offers a nice collection of royalty free game graphics consisting of mostly tiles and scenery you can use in level design on a platformer. Themes range from snowy, ancient, forests, and even candy.

TomeTik

TomeTik offers a variety of game sprites ranging from terrain and scenery to characters and enemies. The art has a bit of an old school feel to it, but it could work well for RPGs.

Reiner’s Tilesets

This site is a huge collection of free 2d and 3d graphics to use in your games. It’s got buildings, monsters, people, vehicles, and more. The art seemed like it would be most useful in a strategy or tower defense style game, but check it to determine for yourself.

Looking for more game visuals? Check out my other post on free graphics for your games.

Flash game sponsorships can be a great revenue opportunity for developers. Developers can be paid big money to implement just a few logos and bits of branding into our game. I’ve had a couple people ask me lately, what does a flash game sponsor gain from a sponsorship? Here’s my take on it.

Sponsors all run their own game portals. These portals are competing for traffic and users. While there are millions of users to go around, there are also thousands of portals out there competing for these users. The more users a portal has, the more money they will be able to make off their advertising.

When it comes to marketing their portal, sponsors have a couple options. There is search engine optimization, which although it is free, is a difficult and time consuming task for most portals. Then, there is pay-per-click advertising, in which a flash game portal can pay to have their ad run on other sites. When users on those other sites click, the portal pays a set amount per click. Lastly, and one of the biggest marketing tools a portal has, is sponsoring games.

By sponsoring games, a portal is looking for more than just clicks through to their site. While clicks are a nice part of the sponsorship, if a portal wanted clicks they would just go to their favorite advertising company and buy them. No, a game portal is looking for branding and recognition when they sponsor a game. They want players to play a great game and associate it with their site.

Thus, by sponsoring good games, the portal will be associated with those games whenever they are played or talked about on the web. Even if a player doesn’t click, they still will have the game portal’s logo in their head whenever they think about a certain game. The more times a player sees the sponsor’s logo in good games, the more curious they will become of the site; resulting in a visit to the sponsor’s game portal.

GamerSafe is a microtransactions system developed by the creators of FlashGameLicense. But, the system is more than just a simple payment API. It is a place where gamers can store all their accomplishments and gameplay across multiple sites.

The thing that makes GamerSafe so neat is that it allows gamers to save their games all across the web. This means you can play your game on any portal, and still have your saved games. No more searching your address bar for that site you might have played your favorite game on. With GamerSafe all you have to do is create an account, and your games will be saved on their servers; accessible from any site.

There’s the obvious feature of being able to purchase in-game items, which GamerSafe does pretty well. The premium currency, called GamerGold can be purchased without ever closing your game. Just click on an icon in the game, and you will be taken to a secure payment site, where you can purchase GamerGold in amounts of $1 all the way to $100. Payment methods include the always popular PayPal and credit cards. GamerSafe even supports exchanges from other premium currencies, although that all depends on the other companies willingness.

Besides premium currency, is in-game currency which GamerSafe plans to standardize with their system. You can play games which will hand out the in-game currency, called GamerPoints. These GamerPoints can be won by completing tasks in a game, or unlocking achievements. The FGL staff assured me that games must go through a quality control before being allowed to participate in their system, ensuring gamers can’t just play a spammy Click the Button to earn GamerPoints game.

As I mentioned, GamerSafe is a complete package for flash game players, so the FGL team included the ability to keep track of in-game items and awards. No matter where your games are played, your awards and items will be there too. You can also view them from your profile, letting you stay updated on what games you’ve beaten and which items you’ve unlocked. One feature that’s nice is the ability to view which items or awards you don’t have in a specific game, letting you know which game aspects you still have to unlock.

GamerSafe looks promising so far. With lots of features packed into the system, and even more possible if needed (such as player-to-player transactions, and item carryover between games). While the system only supports AS3 currently, there are plans to make versions for AS2, Java, Unity, and Silverlight as well.

While the system is still in the early beta stages, you can still create an account and get a feel for how it works. So go check out GamerSafe.

Ranged weapons are an integral part of most action games. Whether it’s taking out baddies or defending your base, a game needs a variety of weapons to keep a player interested. Here’s my big list of ranged weapons to use in your flash games.

1. Machine gun
2. Sling shot
3. Pistol
4. Shotgun
5. Blunderbuss
6. BB gun
7. Carbine
8. Uzi
9. Assault rifle
10. Silenced pistol
11. Crossbow
12. Hunting rifle
13. SMG
14. Water gun
15. Dart gun
16. Glock
17. Auto-Shotgun
18. Laser rifle
19. Nail gun
20. Laser pistol
21. Composite bow
22. Long bow
23. Revolver
24. Throwing knives
25. Sub-Machine gun
26. Boomerang
27. Pea shooter
28. Musket
29. Cannon
30. Flame thrower
31. Gatling gun
32. Rocket launcher
33. Heat seaking rocket launcher
34. RPG
35. Turret
36. Rocket turret
37. Grenade turret
38. Laser cannon
39. Stun gun
40. Sniper rifle

Readers, I’d like to sincerely thank you for reading my blog. Without an audience, none of this writing could be possible. Thanks for all the support you’ve given me and my site over the past year.

Today marks my blog’s 200th post. My posts have been read by over 100,000 different people, who viewed over 500,000 pages of my site and commented more than 300 times.

To celebrate, I thought I would get my readers more involved in my blog. So I’ve come up with a couple questions for you.

1) What type of articles interest you the most?

Over the course of my writing, I’ve come up with a lot of post ideas; ranging from sponsorships and monetization to game design and development. What categories of posts interest you the most? Are there any specific posts you would like to see me write?

2) What posting schedule do you think I should have?

I’ve been working hard to come up with new, unique posts for you everyday of the week. What I want to know is, how often do you think I should be posting? Do you find it hard to keep up with my posting schedule, or is it fine the way it is?

3) What do you think of my site design and usability?

Freelance Flash Games is run using WordPress, meaning it’s pretty flexible with themes and plugins. What do you think of my current theme and the usability of my site? Is it hard to find your favorite posts? What could use work?

4) How would you like to be more involved within my site?

It would be great to have a community of developers centered around Freelance Flash Games, all looking to help each other and advance their game development skills. How can I give you more chances to be involved?

5) Anything else you want to comment on?

If there’s anything else you want to tell me about, feel free.

I know I’ve got at least over 150 readers subscribed to my RSS feed, so I expect some comments here. I can’t better my site for you if you don’t voice your opinion. So get over your commenting shyness and give me your best ideas