Over at Viral Flash Games, I’ve decided to give away the entire VFG1 games pack for free. These are older non-AS3 games, but there is still value in reskinning them, learning from them, re-using some of the assets or even porting them over to AS3.

I’m using the Pay With A Tweet system which means you just have to send a Tweet, or post a message to Facebook about the games and you’ll automatically get access to download all the source codes, FLA files and a licence to rebrand them, plus you’ll also get a preview PDF for the all new Viral Flash Games II with details of all the games and links to demos!

Here’s the link, go grab the games!

Earlier this week I announced that VFGII, the eagerly awaited sequal to Viral Flash Games, was coming soon. We I’m pleased to announce that the new games pack will launch this coming Wednesday, 5th December!

9 all-new games will be included, all coded in Actionscript 3, all with full source code! We’ve put together a PDF preview giving details of all the games which you can download HERE.

Watch this space for news of when we launch on Wednesday, or head over to ViralFlashGames.com and sign up to the email newsletter!

Over at Viral Flash Games we’re gearing up to launch an all new pack of 9 original AS3 games with full source code!  Following on from the hugely successful original VFG pack, the new games cover a wide spectrum or genres from racing, to shooting, puzzles, slots and more!  The pack even includes full source code to an iOS game, live on the app store, and built in Flash!

More details to follow when the games launch next week, but if you’re looking for AS3 games with full source code to learn from, or to reskin/rebrand then check out this blog post at viralflashgames.com

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In over 9 years of web game development I’d never used a third party framework until recently, preferring to code everything up from scratch. Both Flixel and FlashPunk had caught my eye though and for the past year or so I’d been meaning to try one or the other.

Well, a few months ago the opportunity presented itself. Hasbro hired us to develop a multi-world game to promote their new Kre-o range of toys and I decided it was the perfect project to test these frameworks with.

Actionscript Game Engine

A framework, or game engine, is essentially a group of libraries. The libraries typically cover functionality shared by many games, such as collision detection, tile mapping and blitting (see Craig Beswetherick’s article in FFD July 2011 for a great intro to Blitting)

With this core functionality readily available, use of a game engine allows for rapid development. In fact, I’ve seen a number of quite playable little games on some of the development forums recently which people have put together in a single day!

Flixel or FlashPunk

Both Flixel and FlashPunk are open source, AS3 game engines, and in general both do the same job. Flixel is the more mature project, and has been used on quite a number of popular games including the popular Canabalt. It was for that reason I decided to test Flixel first, and while it was certainly robust there were a few small issues I had with it, especially with the apparent lack of control over the way collisions worked.

FlashPunk on the other hand is a newer project, but which is rapidly expanding. There is a very active user community on the forums at FlashPunk.net and lots of great tutorials for learning the basics of the framework.

While the 2 engines are very similar, I instantly felt more at home with the FlashPunk code, which I felt to be less restrictive. The collision detection issues I had with Flixel were easy to solve with FlashPunk and in less than a week I had made the decision to build the Hasbro game (named Kreon Chaos) using FlashPunk as the basis.

Building Kreon Chaos

The reason for wanting to use a third party game engine for Kreon Chaos, was because we wanted to focus on the gameplay and level design without spending too much of our allocated timeframe on low level code. The brief from Hasbro was to create a game which focused on the Kreons – mini figs (like Lego men) of the Transformers characters. They wanted the player to be able to control any of the Kreons, and for them to each have their own abilities, so we decided on a 2D side scrolling platform/puzzle game.

Taking inspiration from a 1990’s SNES game called “The Lost Vikings” we decided that each level would be designed such that the only way to complete it was for the Kreons to work as a team. For example, we gave Bumblebee the ability to hack computer terminals to turn elevators on, or turn of laser hazards. We gave Sentinel Prime the ability to hold his shield up above his head so that other Kreons could jump on him to access hard to reach areas.

Using the FlashPunk engine as the basis for the game freed us up to spend the time necessary to work on these design aspects, rather than writing code to handle the tilesheets or collisions. It was a real joy to work with and I only wish I’d made the step a long time ago. One thing’s for sure – I’ll certainly be using FlashPunk again for future projects.

The Flashpunk Framework

FlashPunk games are built around 2 basic constructs – Worlds and Entities. A FlashPunk World is an organisational class which will typically be a level or a menu. A game can have menu Worlds, but only one of them is active at any one time. So for example, when you select “Level 1″ on a level select screen the game will change from the “Level Select” World to the “Level 1″ World.

Worlds can contain any number of entities, and have a controllable camera which makes scrolling and panning super easy. Entities are the objects which populate a world, like characters, enemies, cars or platforms. Entities can interact with one another, move around the World and be controlled by the player.

Worlds and Entities can be extended and are super easy to imp0lement and adapt. There’s little point in reinventing the wheel by putting example code up here when there are some excellent beginner’s tutorials at the FlashPunk site. It will only take you an hour or so to go through the beginners tutorials there, and you’ll see just how quick and easy it is to get a simple game off the ground.

FlashPunk iOS game development

What I found REALLY exciting with FlashPunk was the performance achieved. Even with hunderds of entities animated on screen I was able to achieve fantastic framerates. In fact the performance was so good I decided that maybe it was worth going back and testing the performance on the iPhone.

I spent some time testing the idea of developing for iPhone/iPad with Actionscript a while ago but the results were disappointing (FPS was less than 10 even with just a single sprite on screen!) but since I was seeing such good performance with FlashPunk on the desktop I thought it was worth a shot – and the results were superb!

I was able to get a simple arcade game running on an iPhone at around 25 FPS – good enough to be playable, and releasable.

I’ve been turning that initial demo into a full game and will be submitting it to the App Store within the next 7 – 10 days, and once it’s on there I’ll write a detailed post about how I did it. Basically though, with the combination of the FlashPunk and targeting AIR 2.6 it is possible to develop AS3 based games for iOS devices – something I had previously thought was not possible! Check back for a tutorial on the build process soon.

Well I need to apologise, it’s been a looooooong time since my last post here!

I know a bunch of you have been wondering if and when the Flash Games Classroom course is coming out, and thanks to everyone who has been filling in the survey so here’s a quick update.

The short answer is yes, there is a course in the pipeline, but it’s probably NOT going to be the “complete guide to developing Flash games” that we originally intended.  From the feedback we’ve been getting there are several specific key areas that lots of people want info on, so that’s where we’ll be focussing and so the course will be a number of key “modules” covering those topics.

Some of the tutorials have already been written, and we’re looking at a probably launch in November, so watch this space and make sure you are on the newsletter mailing list to be kept up to date.  I promise you won’t have to wait too long for details this time!

So what’s with the huge delay?

Well, sometimes life just gets in the way!  I’ve been super busy working on a ton of games for clients.  I was trying to reduce my workload to concentrate more on the course, but when clients like Hasbro and Lucasarts are asking for games it’s hard to turn them down!

I’m 80% through a BIG game for Hasbro at the moment which is due to launch next month,  and from then on I’ll be a lot more focussed on this!

At the same time, I’ve been working on some iPhone game development.  In fact, that has been going so well that I’m planning a series of Flash for iPhone development tutorials to post here, and an iPhone module in the classroom

(and for those of you saying “you can’t run Flash on iPhone” or “iPhone games compiled for iOS are poor performance” I have news for you – you CAN develop high speed, efficient game code for the iPhone using Actionscript, and I’ll be showing you some examples here real soon!)

Finally, there is a complete new Viral Flash Games package in the works, so if you’re interested in getting your hands on a whole load of new games, all written in OOP AS3 and all with complete source code keep at eye on that site for an announcement in a few weeks (plus a fire sale of the last few AS2 packs at a crazy end of line price!)

So there we go, that’s the score and hope that all the col stuff coming helps to make up for the massive sabatical!

Yes, you really can develop fast and playable iPhone games in Flash, watch this space for examples and tutorials very soon!

As games developers we all have one thing in common.  Whether we’re creating games for fun or profit, we want more people to play our games, and that means we need to do a little promotion!

The average Flash games developer tends to pop their new creation on their own sites or blog, upload to the Mochimedia network, and hope that the game is good enough to go viral.  While that’s a great start, we can do better!

There are literally thousands of games sites out there which you can submit your games to, but a relatively small number of them will be worth the effort.  The biggest obstacle in getting your game out there is finding exactly which sites to submit to, so we’ve done the hard work for you and written a free report listing hundreds of the top games sites that you can submit to, and get a huge amount of exposure!   Many of the larger sites also offer sponsorship deals too, so use this list to allow your game to get the attention it deserves!

The free report is in PDF format with clickable links, so download it, and go through it at your own pace.  It starts off with some of the “big guns” like Kongregate and NewGrounds, but quickly moves into hundreds of smaller, but still very popular sites, many of which you might not have heard of.

If submitting your game to hundreds of sites sounds like a daunting task, check out the final page of the report which has some tips of making it an easier task!

Download Where To Submit Flash games here!

Browsing through the new releases on MochiMedia these days, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the most popular games genres are tower defence, “dress up” girl games and side scrolling, monster truck “stunt” driving games! Just because that’s what hundreds of newbie developers seem to be releasing doesn’t mean that’s what people want to play though!

Tower Defence I can understand, in fact some of the better tower defence games (such as Bloons Tower Defence or Desktop Tower Defence) are very popular at the moment, but there are 3 genres of browser games that are hugely popular, year after year. These types of games might not be groundbreaking, sexy or exciting, but they get hordes of players, and when well designed they tend to be guaranteed hits!

Last year MochiMedia ran a survey that showed the average casual gamer to be 43 years of age, and that 55% of players are female which goes some way to explain why arcade and strategy games don’t feature here. So, what are the 3 most popular genres…

Word Games

From the humble crossword to games like Word Reactor, words games are always popular, particularly with female players, and the older generations, word games attract large numbers of players and can be single or multi-player.

Since word games, in general, tend to be relatively simple to develop and with low overheads in terms of performance they are ideally suited to the Flash platform.

Card/Casino Games

Texas Hold’em on Facebook regularly attracts 15 million or more player per day! From Windows Solitaire to multi-player card games, this is an evergreen genre which always attracts players. The rules to many card and casino games are already well defined so you can spend less time tweaking and deciding on gameplay, and more time creating a polished experience.

Again since there is little in the way of graphical overhead these games are ideal for Flash, and work extremely well as browser based games.

Puzzle Games

Since Tetris is one of the best selling games of all time, it should come as no surprise that puzzle games are extremely popular online and attract huge numbers of players. Bejewelled, from PopCap games, has apparently been downloaded over 150 million times, and has sold over 35 million paid versions! Again, with a few exceptions, they tend not to be processor hungry and so are well suited to the Flash platform. While the term “Puzzle game” can encompass a wide range of game styles, generally they are 2 dimensional, and relatively simple both in terms of gameplay and development.

So, the next time you’re deciding on the next game you want to create, ask yourself what you want to achieve.  If you want to push the boundaries, and create a new, funky arcade game great – but realise that while a word or puzzle game might not be as interesting to develop, it could end up being way more successful!

With the release of CS5 imminent (the official release date is 10th April – just a few days away) online bookstores such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble are slashing the price of CS4 titles. If you’re looking for some solid introductions to Flash and Actionscript there are some real bargains to be had.

Books like Flash CS4: The Missing Manual, Adobe Flash CS4 Classroom In A Book and Learning Flash CS4 Professional are being knocked out at way under half price in some places, so grab a bargain while you can! In fact, if you’re in the UK you can get an even better deal in the current Amazon “50% off selected computing and internet books” sale where several Flash titles are reduced even further.

Of course, the bargains won’t stop at just books. I suspect that after April 10th there will be plenty of opportunities to grab bargain bin versions of Flash CS4, so if you’re still using an old and weary installation of MX2004 and looking to get up to date without splashing out on the latest upgrade to CS5 when it’s released, keep your eyes open for the next few weeks as I’m sure you’ll be able to grab a real bargain!

Well first of all apologies to everyone for the lack of posts this month, if you follow me on Twitter you’ll know I’m extremely busy with a couple of big games for clients so I’ve had very little time for blogging!

Anyway, one of the projects we’re currently in the early stages of is a multi-player game for the Facebook platform.  I’ve done some multiplayer games in the past, quizes and simple heads up puzzle games, but nothing this big or complex.  In the past I’ve used both SmartFox server, and an early version or ElectroServer, but since I’ve not done any multiplayer games for a while I’ve been researching which would be best to use for this project.  As part of that reserach I picked up a copy of Jobe Makar’s latest book Actionscript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds and I thought I would post a quick review here.  (By the way – I’m now 99% decided on Electroserver for a number of reasons, so expect a tutorial on that in the near future once we have the first demos completed!)

Actionscript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds

I first heard of ElectroServer in Jobe Makar’s first book Flash MX Game Design Demystified.  From the title you’ll immediately realise that book is quite a few years old, writted back when Flash was still a Macromedia technology.  In fact, that book was published in 1993 right about the time I was first getting into Flash.  It was actually March 2003 when I uploaded my first Flash games to a website and saw the incredible potential for the technology – and a good portion of my knowledge at the time came from that book.

Well, fast forward 7 years and what does Jobe’s latest offering bring to the table?  Well as you’ll gather from the name, the book is about multi-player game development, and specifically about building multi-player Flash games in AS3 using the ElectroServer socket server.  In the second chapter Jobe does talk about different technologies, and briefly mentions alternatives to ElectroServer, but then moves swiftly on and focusses on ElectroServer for the rest of the book.  Now, I should mention that there’s a good reason for that – Jobe is one of the co-founders of ElectroTank, the makers of ElectroServer and so has a vested interest in promoting the software.  Having said that, I’ve spent quite a bit of time investigating and testing alternatives, particularly the big rival SmartFox, and in my opinion ElectroServer is the best choice for most applications.

The early sections of the book focus on server technologies, concepts and security issues before an installation guide for Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac.  Then he dives into the ElectroServer API with the obligetory Hello World example.  The rest of the book then teaches one concept at a time using real world examples.   Chapter 5 looks at chating, how chats are made available to users and how to set that up using ElectroServer.  Chapters 6 through 8 look at more basic concepts such as the difference between client and server code, movement and lobbies and finally in chapter 9 Jobe gives the first full game example – he takes you through the process of building a real-time tank game, and by the end of that chapter he has covered a lot of really useful concepts, from collision detection to path finding and even spatial audio (something very few authors seem to touch on).

Chapter 10 looks at tile based worlds, discusses their advantages and looks at the logic behind a tile based engine, and a good explaination of the a* pathfinding algorithm.  That is then built on in chapter 11 with a look at building a co-operative 2 player game.  Chapter 12 is where things start to get really interesting with a look at the isometric viewpoint and how that can be used effectively in building virtual worlds.

The rest of the book I’ve only skim read so far, and it covers a number of useful topics such as player avatars, buddies nd virtual worlds, and finally the appendix offers a guide to setting up the sample extension which can be downloaded from the website.

Here’s a breakdown of the chapters in details:

Chapter 1. Web Game Landscape
Client-side Technology
Where Multiplayer Fits In

Chapter 2. Connecting Users
Connection Techniques
Socket Server Choices<

Chapter 3. Security: You vs. Everyone Else
Logical Security
Physical Security

Chapter 4. Introducing ElectroServer
Server Concepts
Installation
Hello World
Administration Panel

Chapter 5. Chat
Overview
Simple Chat Room

Chapter 6. Where Decisions Are Made
New Concepts
ElectroServer Plugin Concepts
Installing the Extension
Dig Game

Chapter 7. Real-time Movement
Responsive Controls
Path Types
Frame-based Movement
Latency and Clock Synchronization
Time-based Movement

Chapter 8. Lobby System
Common Features
Game Flow
Dig Game 2

Chapter 9. Real-time Tank Game
Game Overview
Authority and Prediction
Line of Sight
Game Messaging
Mini-map
Message Aggregation
Level Editor
Spatial Audio

Chapter 10. Tile-based Games
Tile-based vs. Art-based Levels
Other Tile-based Benefits
A* Pathfinding

Chapter 11. Cooperative Game Play
Types and styles of Cooperative Game Play
The Game: Super Blob Brothers
Server vs. Client: Who’s the Boss?
Game Messaging
Client-side Details

Chapter 12. Isometric View
Basics and Benefits of Isometrics
A Technical Look
Sorting Algorithm

Chapter 13. Avatars
Meet the Avatars
Rendering Approaches
Sprite Sheets
Avatar Creation and Customization

Chapter 14. Virtual Worlds
Common Features
Old World
Map Files
Map Rendering
The World

Chapter 15. Buddies
Relationships
Buddies in Old World

Chapter 16. User Homes
“Open House”
User Homes in Old World

Appendix: Setting Up the Sample Extension
Server-Level Components
Old World
Configuring the Logging
Setting up the Server-side Development Environment

Conclusion

I’ve not had time to go through all of the examples yet, but those I have gone through have been excellent.  Jobe is a great writer and is able to get the concepts across easily making the book quite an easy read despite the technical content.  It’s also well laid out and edited so you’re overwhelmed with pages crammed full of code. In fact, when I first picked the book up I was a little dissapointed as it’s quite small and I wrongly assumed it was light on content, but quite the contrary – in fact it’s amazing how much solid content Jobe manages to cram into such a small package of less than 300 pages.

Personally I can’t wait for the designs for my project to get approved by my client so I can dive into the development work, and many of the concepts taught in this book will be cornerstones of my approach to the new game.  If you’re at all interested in building robust multiplayer games in Flash then you really do need this book, and you can certainly expect one or more tutorials on the subject posted here at some point in the future!

Buy Actionscript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds on Amazon

I had an interesting conversation with one of my pupils over the weekend about whether Flash games development was commercially worth the effort.  His concern was that while he wanted to learn game development for personal reasons, he felt that commercial web design might be a better direction to focus in as it would be easier to get a job, or start a successful business in that field.

My answer was quite simple – there are thousands of very talented web designers out there, and very few good games developers!  Add to that the fact that casual gaming is definitely on the rise, and there are more and more posts on the freelance sites looking for developers every month and it’s clear that this is a growing industry and a better one to be involved in than web design in my opinion.  And I’d like to think that my opinion counts on this matter, since I’ve been a commercial web designer and Flash games developer for the past 8 years!

Anyway, we discussed several different approaches to making an income with Flash game development, many of which my pupil hadn’t considered, so here they are in the hope that more people find inspiration…

6 ways to monetize Flash games development (without getting a job!)

Developing games for clients might be the most obvious way of earning money as a developer, but it’s surprising how few companies offer the service. I’ve been developing games for over 8 years now, and I’m constantly asked to work on new projects. There are lots of companies out there ready and waiting to pay you money to design and develop games for their marketing campaigns.

If you don’t want the obligation and deadlines of working for clients, sponsorship mighht suit you better. This allows you to develop a game at your own pace, and once completed your sponsor pays you to embed their branding and links into the game. The amount you’ll earn will vary, depending on the company which is sponsoring you, and the quality of the game.

Taking it one step further, you can monetise your own games without needing a client or a sponsor. Networks such as Mochiads allow you to embed adverts into your games, and publish your games on their network which gets you both revenue and exposure at the same time.

You can also monetise your games by simply hosting them yourself, and displaying adverts on the same page. Banner adverts, Adsense blocks or affiliate promotions are all viable ways of monetising the traffic that a good Flash game will generate.

A very recent, and rapidly growing technology allows for in game currencies. While this is quite new there are already 2 networks offering the service and I’m sure this will grow tremendously in the coming months and years.

Finally, perhaps the most obvious, and certainly the most glamorous way to capitalize on the success of a good Flash game is to release a commercial version. Whether it’s a downloadable PC game or a port to an entirely new platform, such as the Nintendo DS, the Xbox Live network or the iPhone, a well designed unique game with the right marketing can be a real success, and open the doors into the mainstream gaming industry.

So there you go, six different ways to generate an income from your Flash games development.  In fact, why not start right now.  You could take the Flash Asteroids Tutorial I posted recently, modify that with your own ideas and pop it on your own website with some Adsense ads! Or how about grabbing some Flash Games source code, using some of what you’ve learned here to add new levels, change the graphics and put your own features in and submit them to Mochiads?  The opportunities are all there, you just need to pick an idea and run with it!