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Flash Tactics #3 – The Challenge of Branding Flash Games

Branding is extremely in the entertainment world.

A solid brand will give your game an established identity. That identity will help your players relate to the game. That relationship will give your game legs and make it easier for players to spread the word about your game. As a result your game will have more players and have a greater chance of becoming a franchise upon which other games can be built.

Many will say that you can’t have a successful piece of entertainment without effective branding.

While everyone can recognize that branding is important in the traditional gaming world, branding in the Flash world is not so black and white. The primary reason for this is that in most cases, the only tools you have to sell your game are a thumbnail image and the game’s name.


To stand out from on the crowded landing/search pages on Flash portals, a Flash game needs solid branding.
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My next Moleskine? The Designer’s Notebook

To say that I like my Moleskine would be an understatement. My Moleskine is my right hand, an extension of myself, it is the depository and reference point for all of my ideas, grand or small. I take it with me everywhere. If I’m upstairs at our house, my Moleskine is with me. If I go for a walk to the park to play with my daughter, my Moleskine is with me.

If inspiration strikes, I’d rather be prepared than count on myself to ‘remember it for later’.

My Moleskine is a riddled mess of notes, sketches, sticky notes and random ideas. It is held together with duct tape because my pen also needs to be with me at all times. (no point in having a notebook without a pen…)

4 Year's of Moleskine

I have lost two Moleskine’s in the past 4 years. Both were tragic events. One was left on a plane as the family was flying from Vancouver to PEI. By the time I realized it was gone, the plane had been cleaned. On the inside page of each of my Moleskines, I offer a reward of $100.00 if it is found. It still infuriates me to this day that the damn cleaners couldn’t bother to look inside the front page of that book.

I love my Moleskine.

This morning, while checking out Raincoast Book’s Blog, I stumbled across something that has the potential to replace my beloved Moleskine:

I present to you, the Designers Notebook:

Designer’s Notebook (Amazon.ca)

This book looks absolutely incredible! Wonderful bits of inspiration, handy visualization tools and more.

One question – if someone were to make this the ‘Game Designers Notebook’ and included notes and reference points from consoles, handy frequently used LUA and AS3 commands or other things along those lines, would people interested in something like that? What do you think? Leave a comment.

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Flash Tactics #2 – Making money from a free Flash game

The the most common question I get after “You’re doing WHAT?” about why I’m making Flash games is ‘Can you make money doing that?’, or even funnier is when a hippie artist type asks me ‘How are you monetizing your content?’

In the traditional games industry, we are so tied to the business model of “Putting a game on a box on a shelf” that the simple idea that money can be made from games in any other way is completely outlandish. The real “radicals” in the traditional industry are doing ‘digital download’ on XBLA and WiiWare.

But the times, they are a changing. And I love free stuff and I believe that the future of entertainment media is that everything we create will ultimately be available for free in some way, shape or form.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

While I was on the free bandwagon long before Chris Anderson released his book Free, Anderson helped me cement my ideas and gave me the courage to move forward with my dream of being an indie developer.

I believe that the future of digital media is free. I make digital media for a living and also like having a roof over my head and food in my belly. WIth all of this considered, I decided it was time for a change of tactics in how I approach the business of video games.

I asked my self (and continue to ask myself): What can a game developer do to make a living if their games are free?

Flash and the web are wonderful and fantastic in this regard and in this article I’m going to dip my toes into a few different ways a free Flash game can make money.
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