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[hatu]

99% of Flash games are indie? As in made by independent developers. Or do you have some special requirements before you can call your game Indie?

no, 99% are crap

But they're indie crap.

[mirosurabu]

So don't doubt for a minute that Flash games make more money than shareware games, from what I gather it's hard not to make money with a Flash game, even poorly made ones that were made in a week can make thousands if they have even mildly addictive gameplay. Which is probably why you see so many Flash games.

Hey look!  A poorly made game created in less than a week with mildly addictive gameplay that almost has 1 million views!

I mean seriously.  It's a ripoff of a ripoff (Jelly Blobs of Doom and Fishy) and I even used bounding box collision detection.

I don't like it when my games do okay, because I know that much, much better games are receiving less attention.

Dodger (a freeware game, I recall, made for Allegro TINS competitions several years ago) rip-off. :D Proof that flash games are more visible. But something that should be taken into consideration is that they get more exposure because they are very short and casual in general, not just because they are online. They are more casual than shareware casual games. I recall most of games I have played that were made in Flash or were online in general (miniclip comes to mind) are either jokes or are very short. And I am not really a fan of that trend. There are exceptions, though. Ninja Ned comes to mind.

And I doubt I will ever. Why? This is why:

1) It's hard to make a flash game that will be successful. Too many releases each week.
2) It is very hard to come up with right combination at right time. Sometimes that means releasing a complete joke game made in half-an-hour
3) I am not someone who enjoys guessing what audience will like and then forcing myself to make such game. I'd rather choose to live from websites which pay you for viewing ads.
4) I enjoy making games which are in most cases not suitable for flash audience.

If I can't earn money and enjoy the process (and there are clearly people who earn money and enjoy making their games as well as their own games) I am at the wrong place then.

[Edmund]

1) It's hard to make a flash game that will be successful. Too many releases each week.

actually that isnt true at all, good flash games will get more exposure then the crappy ones also released the same time. in fact really good flash games stick out like a sore thumb on most sites and tend to get a lot of exposure.

2) It is very hard to come up with right combination at right time. Sometimes that means releasing a complete joke game made in half-an-hour

i have no idea what your talking about here...

3) I am not someone who enjoys guessing what audience will like and then forcing myself to make such game. I'd rather choose to live from websites which pay you for viewing ads.

why would you have an audience in mind? making a good game you enjoy should always be first on your list. flash is still indie, if you make a good game people will play it and it will get a following, just like any other indie game scene. and the money in flash isnt from ads its from sponsorships.

4) I enjoy making games which are in most cases not suitable for flash audience.

your not talking about the flash audience here, your talking about the casual game audience. there are more flash gamers that will enjoy your work then the number of GM gamers out there on the net. thats a statistical fact.

[mirosurabu]

actually that isnt true at all, good flash games will get more exposure then the crappy ones also released the same time. in fact really good flash games stick out like a sore thumb on most sites and tend to get a lot of exposure.

That might be true. I base my statement on the fact that I am not aware of really good flash games. At least not when I am not digging for good ones. In contrary, I am aware of crappy ones though, at least I was at the time I was checking out flash games regularly and when people were telling me about popular flash games.

It is very hard to come up with right combination at right time. Sometimes that means releasing a complete joke game made in half-an-hour

I wanted to say that it is very hard to make a hit.

your not talking about the flash audience here, your talking about the casual game audience. there are more flash gamers that will enjoy your work then the number of GM gamers out there on the net. thats a statistical fact.

That might be true (and I do talk about casual audience in general, including flash which I see as very very casual, but I may be wrong). I don't see flash gamers nor GM gamers as my potential target audience for some reason.

And I recall you mentioned on this topic something about a list of quality flash games. A list of quality flash games would be awesome.

[Glaiel-Gamer]

Wait are we still arguing flash v. gamemaker here?

The only real reason why you'd want to choose GM over flash is if you don't know how to make a good game in flash. Really, flash is better in every way, but it makes sense seeing that Flash is a professional program and GM is a beginners learning tool.

When it comes to audience, you will always get more exposure from a flash game than you will a download or purchase game. At a combined total, each one of my games probably has over a million views if you add the views they have on other websites, times 40 games really adds up. You're bound to hit part of the audience you want with that many people, even though you really shouldn't care that much about who you're audience is. There's a bit of everything out there and it shows that both stuff like Aether and Dad n' Me can be successful on the flash scene, even though one is focused on art and puzzles and the other is focused on mindless beating the shit out of kids on a playground.

[Glaiel-Gamer]

I wanted to say that it is very hard to make a hit.

Not really, there is a distinct pattern and it's only hard to make a hit if you're goal is to make crap a hit. Anything made well and original will become a hit most of the time.

I'll get on that list of awesome flash games, ranging from art games to action games
EDIT: 5 minutes of digging got me this

:the game:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/467574
Don't let the game turn you off at first, it's really well made and lasts a long time.

McDonald's Videogame
Political commentary wrapped up in a nice polished package
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/292911
Also from the same guy, Oiligarchy
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/468403
Both of these are fun, well made, and have a message.

Dad n' Me
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/254456

RaidenX
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/246725

Frantic
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/467632

Aether (shameless self plug)
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/459147

The Majesty of Colors
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/474519

I wish I were the moon
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/461959

Fancy Pants
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/420606

[mirosurabu]

Thank you. (to your older version of post, not links. will check them out later)

Regarding making hits, I guess my experience is either flawed or outdated. I'll have to look into this myself again.

When it comes to audience, you will always get more exposure from a flash game than you will a download or purchase game. At a combined total, each one of my games probably has over a million views if you add the views they have on other websites, times 40 games really adds up. You're bound to hit part of the audience you want with that many people, even though you really shouldn't care that much about who you're audience is.

So if I make a Flash port of my current project and market it via Flash portals I'll get more exposure regardless of its genre? I must try this out.

[Glaiel-Gamer]

So if I make a Flash port of my current project and market it via Flash portals I'll get more exposure regardless of its genre? I must try this out.

Ya as long as its free

[Kneecaps]

Hey look!  A poorly made game created in less than a week with mildly addictive gameplay that almost has 1 million views!

While my Crunchdown only has 0.75 million views to this day. Truly heartbreaking

I think that the sites you get your game on make a large impact on how much exposure they will get.  Since anyone can submit something to Newgrounds, games there require a much higher level of quality to be noticed than games on a site like AddictingGames, which just need to have almost humor and/or lots of redundancy.  Which is the only reason I can explain my game's "success".

[Craig Stern]

And I recall you mentioned on this topic something about a list of quality flash games. A list of quality flash games would be awesome.

I've submitted several good Flash games to TIGdb myself, though so far only "I Wish I Were the Moon" has been added. If I had any confidence that they'd be considered, I would submit more.

[Edmund]

im almost done with my list of 140+ good/must play flash games... i should have it up shortly.

ill probably make it a new topic with the list and link it here.. be back in a few

[Edmund]

Here is the list! lose a few weeks in it.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=4286.0

[aeiowu]

Looks like Father McMillen has got us flash indie guys covered

For the last couple weeks i've been in rapid development cycles in a collab with a programmer, jiggmin. We are able to churn out a simpler game in around 2-3 days. that's pretty awesome and a hell of a lot of fun. You might consider the games more like prototypes than full-on games, but that's kind of the point. We could most certainly take any of these and draw them out into full-fledged games.

However... I do see the allure of making a PC game due to its hardware acceleration. Flash has no hardware acceleration. Flash player 10 has a bit, but most folks use 9 due to 10 being released only relatively recently. I know that anything in GM can be done in flash, but not quite to the same extent. Furthermore this makes GM a little more attractive to making elaborate visual effects as you can be sloppier. Just throw a bunch of particles up there and not worry about it. In flash, there is most certainly a limit and if you make your game into a memory hog and people are playing it with 1 gig of ram, then that'll get eaten quick and whole hosts of folks will see serious slowdown.

That said, I totally agree with tyler, edmund et al. about flash being able to do everything GM can do, you just have to be a bit smarter about it.* I do expect flash to integrate use of the GPU in its future versions of the player, but currently that's how it is.

*I'm an artist.

ps. here's my shameless self-promoted link to promote indie flash game legitimacy: http://www.kongregate.com/games/intuition/dinowaurs-beta

[Loren Schmidt]

Thanks for the list, Edmund! There are some really good games there. Here's my opinion about Flash. I would by no means consider myself a 'Flash developer'. I've worked in C++, Java, the AGS toolkit, and only recently have I picked up Flash and ActionScript. Given my background, I think I have a fairly unbiased view of Flash.

Flash appeals to me because it is free (check out FlashDevelop if you're interested), cross platform, and can either be distributed online or as an executable. Game development in Flash is pretty straightforward when compared to C++ or Java, but it's not as simple as it is in AGS (or Game Maker or MMF or Construct, I imagine). There are a lot of resources online, which made it pretty easy for me to get started.

On the negative side, Flash is not very fast, and is a little more high level than I would like. I often get roped into using convoluted expensive functions when all I want is something extremely simple and fast. I'm also pretty turned off by advertisements, and making money with Flash games seems more or less dependent on spamming your players with a preloader and several banners. I also dislike the way most Flash games don't have a fullscreen option, but this is a design issue rather than a limitation of Flash.

All in all, I'm really glad I'm putting time into learning to use Flash. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who's interested in game development and has a little bit of programming experience.

[Craig Stern]

I'm also pretty turned off by advertisements, and making money with Flash games seems more or less dependent on spamming your players with a preloader and several banners.

Not true. You could always (provided you actually own Flash) publish your game as a standalone exe, or standalone Mac app, put it up on BMT or Plimus, then make your users pay cold, hard cash to play, the old-fashioned way.

Also, it looks like you could grab Adobe Air if you're just using Flex, and it'll create an executable for you.