Okay, so I’ve been playing some of the LD 19 entries. I think the best one I’ve played so far is Time Pygmy, a game where a pygmy from the neolithic era finds a time portal to 1989 and makes discoveries about the future.
It’s written in Flash.
Plus, Mike Hommel of Hamumu Software has seen his business grow this last year by making flash games and licensing them.
One of my goals for this coming year is to write more games…and writing them in Flash would help with that.
So expect me to start talking about FlashDevelop and Flixel soon.
Flash is pretty good platform for fast game making. Takes some getting used to at first, but once you get the hang of it and make a couple of useful libraries, it’s no problem at all to whip something up really quick. Just be aware that the trace function doesn’t always work in FlashDevelop 🙂 I use Flash everyday at work, so shoot me a message if you need any help.
Making a game in Flash is just… I don’t know, it’s like cheating somehow.
What makes you say that, Handshake? Do you mean entering a Flash game in the LD competition, or in general?
Like the site redesign, btw.
Are you still going to do the Metroidvania? Cause if you don’t I will be sad…
I think I’m due some cheating. Half of writing a C++ application is fighting with the damn compiler and linker about headers and libraries. I’m more than a little sick of it. And a language where I don’t have to keep track of every shred of memory? Nice. Plus, write once, run anywhere there’s a flash-enabled browser.
But don’t worry. I don’t intend for my games to be generic flash games. I’m going to try to do stuff with flash nobody has done before. Of course, that’s what everyone says…
As for Flash in LD… Isn’t the whole point of LD that it is really hard to make a game in 48 hours? Making a Flash game in 48 hours isn’t really all that massive of a feat, rendering the contest a bit bland really.
That said, I don’t know much about LD. Maybe the point is coming up with original game ideas in a short space, in which case using Flash just makes sense. That being the case though, LD isn’t near as interesting. I mean damn, I’m sure we all come up with original game ideas 20 times a week. That’s the easy part.
Making a Flash game makes things easier, but making an entertaining game given a theme, be it in Flash or C++, is still quite a challenge. In which case, you can save time by not having to worry about rendering/memory management as much (you still need to think about it a bit in Flash) and focusing on designing and making the game fun. I make Flash games for a living along with others and just implementing the idea isn’t the same as making it fun. On top of that, those who are truly dedicated would want to take the time to make it look nice as well, even if it’s simple low-res pixel art. So, yes, it is easier to tackle a game in Flash, but it’s still a lot of work making something worth playing.