HelixFox | Games by Kyle Rodgers

Flash games, Indie games and casual gaming in general are all doing very well at the moment, Flash games in particular being in a very good place for developers. The tools required to develop in AS3 are readily available (there are very good paid tools available [Flash IDE, FDT, Flex Builder] and it’s possible to create AS3 apps without actually paying anything [FlashDevelop + Flex SDK]). These tools are also sufficiently designed that it is relatively easy to create a game without being held back too much by the technology (that is, you don’t have to fuss around as much trying to figure out how to get everything working).

The latter point is most interesting to me, with the best point of comparison right now is with twenty or so years ago when the games industry was in its infancy. The whole industry was being fuelled by bedroom developers making games in their free time and as a hobby because they just liked making games. These days we have a similar situation with many flash games being developed by people in their free time as a hobby for similar reasons. The main point of interest for both of these cases is that a single person could quite easily make a game by themselves, without needing a full team to take advantage of all the capabilities of the technology. Obviously with traditional videogames the technology did advance and bedroom developers largely vanished in favour of development teams, but will this happen with Flash?

As technology evolves the possibilities evolve with it, but the effort required to make use of these possibilities increases accordingly. A single person could code a text adventure game on, say, a ZX Spectrum fairly easily, but when the Mega Drive/Genesis and SNES consoles were released, the games that were developed had bigger teams behind them, usually split up into an art team and a programming team.

The Playstation era saw us enter the world of 3D in commercial games, which is probably the largest single leap in technology games have seen in their lifetime, and also the largest leap in requirements to make a game. 3D models are much more difficult to create than 2D sprites and dealing with performance issues is much more ambiguous (2D sprites were mostly limited by colours, 3D models are limited by animation complexity, number of polygons, etc). All of this meant that you needed specialists who knew how to model 3D objects on your team when developing 3D games.

These days it’s not unusual for big budget console games to have teams of hundreds of people working on them, with the possibility of even more people being involved due to outsourcing to external companies. Grand Theft Auto 4 had an overall development cost of $100 million, which really highlights just how far past the age of the bedroom developer we are.

Taking all of this into consideration it’s interesting to look at the state of Flash games recently, which somewhat mirror the situation twenty years ago with developers making games as a hobby, and try to predict how things will change as Flash and Actionscript become more and more advanced (or even replaced by better or more accessible technologies). This is already happening with 3D being implemented into the Flash API and other libraries like Papervision and Box2D offering advanced systems to be implemented in games. 3D especially adds a lot of work to the game development process, as explained previously with the effort needed to create 3D models.

If things were to happen like they did before then we would see more and more Flash game collaborations where people combine skills to make a better game than they could make on their own. The overall quality of games will raise so much than a single person can’t make a good enough game anymore; the public would demand better graphics, better gameplay and more features than it is feasible for one person to implement. The number of people required to make a decent game will rise and rise as demands and the technological capabilities of peoples’ computers also rise.

But… will that happen? I don’t think so, and we have to look at a number of factors to understand why.

The first point of interest is an idea that the mainstream games industry has been running with for decades. The idea that consumers want MORE features with BETTER graphics that are more REALISTIC or otherwise impressive. There is a kind of technological arms race going on with companies boasting about the number of polygons in their characters, the minor details in their characters’ facial expressions, the number of individual blades of grass that are rendered…

There’s a simple fact that Flash games are much more casual than traditional hardcore games and are usually free and played for less than an hour at a time, mostly supported by advertisements. The fact that they are free is the key point here as it means the player’s only investment in playing them is their time (as opposed to a hefty £40/$60 when buying a new game), which means players are much more likely to actually try a game and are significantly less likely to be put off by poor graphics and low production values (the old idea of “You get what you pay for”).

The same holds true for other casual games, such as most of the iPhone’s game library. They do cost money, but usually only a fraction (£0.79/$0.99 for many, a little more for others) of what it costs for a full console game.

So, with a lower investment for consumers, there is less pressure needed to convince them to play your game. Which means less reason to pile on the graphics and increase production time and costs. We are more able to focus on making a great game.

Flash games in general have been playing catchup to console and PC games, mostly because of technological limitations of working within the browser. Because of this, the types of games that you see made in Flash tend to be very reminiscent of many retro games that were around fifteen years ago when similar technological restrictions were in place in the games consoles of that era. You see lots of 2D platformers, racing games, puzzle games, etc. One thing that you can notice, though, is that the Flash equivalents of these games are usually a lot more sophisticated than the retro games of yesteryear. Mostly because of theft.

It’s not really theft, though, but people making games will almost always look to existing examples for ideas and for examples of what not to do. For example, if you were developing a 2D platformer game now, you could look at Sonic 3 or Super Mario Brothers 3 to see what they did. You can look at those games and see what worked and what didn’t work and you can incorporate the best parts into your game and leave out the bad parts, perhaps coming up with an extra idea or two of your own to add to the mix. Later, someone will play your game, take your ideas and make them their own and the cycle continues.

This is a process that has always been going on in the games industry and you can actually see it happening if you look back at certain games. Raph Koster in his excellent book A Theory of Fun for Game Design suggests that for old shoot ‘em up games, Space Invaders came first, with Galaxian coming later, adding a couple of extra features (such as more aggressive enemies). Later came Centipede which let you move around more and later still came Galaga which added bonus levels and power ups. The general idea of what he says is that games would copy the general format of games that came before them and build upon that, adding new features and improving the overall experience. This process is what spawns genres and, if anything, has become much more blatant in recent years (What are the major differences between most first-person shooter games of this generation? Hardly anything, mechanically).

An amusing example of what is probably the latest big genre to be created is the Tower Defense, which is an apt example as it has been a big deal in the Flash games community (I’ve even made one!). I used to be into the custom scenario making community of Age of Empires 2 when that game was big and there were a few (very crude) TD scenarios released for that. Later, I got into the custom map community for Warcraft 3 and that is really where TDs started to become big. There are a lot of TD variants released for WC3 and most of them were pretty popular. So popular, in fact, that one of them (Element TD) was remade in Flash and, I believe, the first Flash TD to be very popular. Then Desktop Tower Defense was released and achieved an insane amount of publicity, allowing the creator, Paul Preece, to go on to form the Casual Collective (interestingly, it seems the flash version of Element TD was made by the other founding member, Dave, which I just discovered).

Nowadays you can see TD games everywhere and it is basically a genre in its own right now. I even have one on my phone (geoDefense)

This point has become a bit long-winded but what I’m trying to get across is that as Flash game developers we have a huge library of games that came before us that we can look to for ideas and mistakes that we can learn from.

So, back to the original point. Where are Flash Games going? Where will we be in five years? Ten? Twenty?

It’s likely we’ll see a variety of things happen. Some will find success releasing free games and reaping advertising rewards. Some will have their games sponsored. Some will manage to sell their games. Some will simply enjoy games and make them without thinking of making a profit.

It’s one of the benefits of having such an open platform with Flash in that there are no restrictions in what we can do. What happens with flash games is up to the developers themselves and the only limit is how daring we will be.