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[muku]

It was designed by David Sirlin (the guy who designed Street Figher, among others).

Redesigned Super Street Fighter II Turbo you mean.

Um, that's... probably what I meant.

I knew I should have googled it more profusely...

[cmspice]

It was designed by David Sirlin (the guy who designed Street Figher, among others).

Redesigned Super Street Fighter II Turbo you mean.

In any case, I'm with xerus on this one. There's just something DIFFERENT about flash games. My theory is that it has something to do with the framerate/input lag. More or less, sacrificing a smoother gameplay experience for a wider distribution.

That's a very interesting point. Most do feel kind of different. I think it also has something to do with the vector graphics since now you have incredibly sharp graphics contrasting the lower framerate. DinoRun http://www.pixeljam.com/dinorun/ for example doesn't suffer from the flash game syndrome. Perhaps someone should get conclusive evidence of the difference between flash and non-flash games.

[Craig Stern]

As a Flash game developer, I can testify to some of the limits of the Flash platform.

Vector graphics in Flash entail a tradeoff. On the plus side, you can produce some really neat-looking and fluid animations with comparatively little effort, the system provides user-defined quality settings to improve either looks or performance, and there is virtually no cost in terms of file size to using vector graphics. There's really only one downside, but it's a significant one: since Flash has to create the vector animations itself with internal calculations in every frame, and since Flash never skips frames, using vector graphics can slow down Flash to the point where it feels like you're playing in slo-mo. This goes double if you use gradients or transparency effects--and I'm not even talking about the glow and blur filters.

I love Flash, personally, but lately I've had to create most of my graphics as raster images outside the program to keep things from grinding to a halt. If you use all raster images, you'll have no slowdown problems (though you will have a larger file size to contend with).

[Bad Sector]

You know, some people do have to pay bills and eat food. This needs money. They could earn this money by doing all sorts of jobs, but instead they decided to create games. Good or bad, it doesn't matter because there will be at least a handful of people who will like their games. Those people will be thankful for those who made them for their goo time. And the people who made them will do what they like and live from it.

Because you know, nobody forces anyone to make games. Its something you choose and when you're an indie trying to make a living from creating games, its very hard. Yes those people who say may make a less-than-$1k clone of some other game, but they might just hone their skill while making that clone and at the same moment pay their rent and bills. In many developed countries, including where i live, $1000 is a small amount unless you live alone or with your parents and have practically no life (you dont go out, you dont buy stuff, you just buy enough goods to live).

If Anne Starter just learned Flash and she wants to live from it, her first experiment will be something simple that she sees around. If its something big, since she is not skiller, she will drop it and maybe wont continue thinking that making games is not for her. If its something small which requires no real skills she will finish it and maybe find someone to license it for a few hundred dollars. The next step, like in every other thing, is to improve her last step. She won't suceed if after Pong she tries to make Super Mario 3. She may have difficulties if she tries Arkanoid. So a simple Breakout can be ok. I'm talking about the difficulty level here, not real games ok? :-P. What i mean is that she might need months to reach a level where she will try to make her very own original games that she can finish (she might have original ideas before, but she wont know her limits and her ideas will be left unfinished). In the meanwhile every small improved game she makes, finds its way on the Flash game sites and she gains a little money for her efforts - money that otherwise she had to gain from some othe job that in some cases wouldn't leave her enough time to learn how to make games.

There are many developers in Anne's position because while making games wont make you rich (this is reserved for a handful of people in the whole industry - most of us wont even reach close to that), it is very fun and the people's comments when they like your game are what makes you go forward when your last game didn't brought in enough money to pay everything you had to pay.

Unlike in other professions, most people making games love it, no matter their audience or size.

[Tobasco Panda]

I see no reason that one can't do BOTH. If cranking out some simple (or shitty) flash games for portals helps pay the bills and allows one time to work on other projects, why NOT do it?

It's kind of like how John Cusack does some shitty movies that make money, and then does some really awesome movies like High Fidelity where the movie is more of the point than the money.

[Dacke]

• Making small crappy games for practice and fun and possibly making some money, I have no problem with.
  
• Cynical mass production of clones for fast money is ok, but pretty low and despicable and makes the world a worse place.
  

While flash portals might be like catnip for moneygrubbers, I usually feel that most games (at least on Kongregate) fall in to the first category. It most often seems like the games are crappy because the designer is an inexperienced game maker and most of the time honest ambition shines through the crappiness.

[arrogancy]

It was designed by David Sirlin (the guy who designed Street Figher, among others).

Redesigned Super Street Fighter II Turbo you mean.

In any case, I'm with xerus on this one. There's just something DIFFERENT about flash games. My theory is that it has something to do with the framerate/input lag. More or less, sacrificing a smoother gameplay experience for a wider distribution.

That's a very interesting point. Most do feel kind of different. I think it also has something to do with the vector graphics since now you have incredibly sharp graphics contrasting the lower framerate. DinoRun http://www.pixeljam.com/dinorun/ for example doesn't suffer from the flash game syndrome. Perhaps someone should get conclusive evidence of the difference between flash and non-flash games.

If Flash games were actionscripted and based on sprite sheets (which no one stops anyone is doing), there is not technical reason why it couldn't run exactly like the same game running in C# or C++ or whatever, given of course that it is an applicable game that won't slow your processor to a crawl. For instance, Braid could be almost perfectly reproduced in Flash minus a few effects.

The issue is that most Flash game designers end up using vector art and tweens instead of spritesheets due to saving file size so they can get distribution on portals. Tweens on organic objects look like pure crap 99.9% of the time, so there is a visual disconnect as compared to other titles. Vectors and motion tweens are processor heavy, so they slow down frame rate and make it "feel funny." And there are your problems. 

It doesn't really have to do with Flash in itself; it has to do with how people use it.

[moshboy]

I think with Flash just like any other community, you have to do a bit of searching for the gems. Sure there's an over-saturation of clones and just plain crap from people attempting to make easy money but there are also people that do attempt to make decent stuff.

Here's an article about the sortof money that can be made off a flash game if you put the effort in:

http://www.flashgamesponsorship.com/regular-content/regular-content/my-experiences.html

It's a fair bit more than 1k.

[PenguinHat]

Shouldn't we be saying Flash game portals vs Indie games?

I mean, if the discussion was C++ games vs Indie games, or DOS games vs Indie games. Flash is just a language, a way of coding a video game.

[medieval]

It's the fact that the majority of flash creators, like already has been said, don't make their games with love.

That and many games are replica's from another flash game. There are like thousands of duplicates of the same game.


And, I can't find many flash games that have crisp pixels.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Huh? I don't think crisp pixels are an important part of being an indie game. Indie doesn't mean retro pixel art, there are a ton of abstract indie games and indie games with 32-bit color art too.

And a lot of indie games are replicas from other games too -- it's not as if all indie games are totally original. Take the current TIGSource contest as an example -- its entire premise is making lower-tech replicas of games!

And don't make their games with love? How can you even know that without knowing a person?

I think most of you guys are being too hard on Flash games. There's nothing inherently wrong with casual games and nothing inherently wrong with someone who just wants to play games between a sandwich and Excel.

[Alec]

Agreed... I've seen some awesome stuff made with Flash and there's certainly nothing preventing anyone from making a really creative casual game.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

1) Clearly there are many (even a majority) of flash game developers who just make awful clones with no love. Bjork said 'imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is also a kind of flattery that robs you' and I think that all the 'tower defense' clones are in a sense robbing Paul Preece.

I just noticed this, and just wanted to mention something here: Preece didn't create the first TD game, and flash TD games were still very popular before his game. TD games began back in Starcraft around 1999 as mods of that game, so they're almost 10 years old. So it's kind of weird to say we're robbing him just because he made the most popular one, and one that was only released like a year and a half ago at that.

Do some TD games exist because of his game's popularity? Probably a few, but I don't think most of them do. And a way you can tell this is that his game employs "mazing" as a TD mechanic, which is more common in StarCraft mods and less common in TD flash games, which tend to have dedicated paths. If most TD games were clones of his game you'd expect to see more "mazing"-based TD games instead of twisty-path-based TD games.

As an aside, people often say TD games are all alike, but they vary quite a bit if you're familiar with them. They aren't any more all alike than platformers or fps's or rts's are all alike. TD is also one of the only genres of game which was created by indies, since they came out of modding rather than any mainstream game -- most other genres came out of the mainstream, so I think TD games should get more respect than they typically get.

As an aside, here's a big list of many TD games: http://www.towerdefence.net/?page=allgames (also check out the side bar for the downloadable ones, including mine). If anyone spends some time playing through them and really gets into them, they wouldn't seem like clones of one another, but a rich genre with a huge variety of games.

[Nitro Crate]

Does Rampart count as a Tower Defense game?

It goes back a lot farther then StarCraft if so. (Btw, Marine Defense is awesome)

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

The person who created the first TD game for Starcraft said that he based the idea on Rampart, but I actually don't think it's very similar to Rampart. I like Rampart a great deal too, it was one of my favorite NES games, but I think the gameplay is very different, because in Rampart, you aim the towers manually, and you have to build tetris-like structures around them to keep them enclosed, so the basic idea of building things to shoot at swarms of enemies is the same, but the gameplay plays very different -- it's less about strategically placing towers than it is about keeping those towers enclosed in a solid structure with no gaps.

Another thing is that a core element of TD games is different kinds of towers and upgrading those towers. Rampart only had one type of tower and you could not upgrade it (just a basic cannon).

[Nitro Crate]

Hmm I guess so. Although I think it's not about the upgrades and the diversity of the towers but moreso the placement of them that is core. (and the defending of a certain place/object/whathaveyou of course)

I don't think of tower defense games as clones of each other, I've always thought of them as a genre.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

That's true, but in Rampart it actually doesn't matter much where you place down the cannons either, there's not much strategy to their placement, any spot is as good as any other spot as long as it's enclosed in the castle walls. Although perhaps not, I seem to remember that if cannons were closer, they fired faster? Hard to tell. Here's a video of the game, the difference seems minor to me:

[Nitro Crate]

That's true, but in Rampart it actually doesn't matter much where you place down the cannons either, there's not much strategy to their placement, any spot is as good as any other spot as long as it's enclosed in the castle walls. Although perhaps not, I seem to remember that if cannons were closer, they fired faster? Hard to tell. Here's a video of the game, the difference seems minor to me:

No I know, I'm not arguing that rampart is a tower d game. I was just throwing that in there before. My last post was just to have some friendly discussion on the aspects of a tower defense game. 

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Oh, I like discussing them, but we probably shouldn't hijack the thread... TD was only relevant here because people often say how Flash games are a million TD "clones", and I was defending Flash from that idea. I think the variety of TD Flash games that exist is one of the best things about Flash. A lot of them are poorly made of course, but there are at least a dozen or two really good ones.

[Nitro Crate]

oh,  :D

I completely forgot the point of the thread.

Yea so, I don't know the majority of flash games feel really unpolished.

But I mean, when I first played You Have To Burn The Rope, I didn't even realize it was a flash game. It certainly had the indie feel to it. The same goes for the wip, buddy base II. I didn't know it was a flash game either.

It's weird really.
I don't really know most flash games have this strange vibe that doesn't make it feel indie.

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