Yuki 7 is a fictional movie franchise – a fictional, female version of James Bond if you will. The Yuki 7 book “Seductive Espionage” is written in a documentary style, chronicling Yuki’s rise to popularity and the careers of her creators.

The pulp style and flavor of Yuki is one of the main influences on Ray Ardent (the original back-ground mock-ups were done in a style similar to Darts) and I’ve been a huge fan of Kevin Dart’s work ever since I stumbled across his table at Comic-Con four years ago.

Absolutely brilliant and inspiring work!

Noobie Noobinson is a local Vancouver band composed of pure awesome. Stick around for the end section to see what I’m talking about.

On Dec 1st, 2009, I hadn’t written a line of code since high school, way back in 1992. High School computer programming was done in BASIC and was taught by the drama instructor. It wasn’t exactly a solid programming foundation.

I knew that 2010 was the year I would go full time with Ninja Robot Dinosaur, making Flash games on my own. But without the ability to program, there wasn’t a lot I could do.

I needed to learn how to program Flash games – and fast.

Not only did I need to learn how to make them, I wanted to learn the right way. No mad hacks weak-sauce AS2 code that runs through some miracle of weirdness – I wanted to learn to write proper OOP code.

Dec 2009 was not going to be an easy month. I was in the middle of moving from the east coast of Canada to the west coast (Canada is really big), I was also working over-time, finaling Gundead Defense for iPhone and getting a milestone ready for a Wii game I was working on at Longtail Studios. For most people, relocating a family while crunching at work would be enough – but I thought ‘What the hell, I’m going to learn to program ActionScript 3 too.’

I set a sizable goal for myself – complete one AS3 Flash tutorial a day for 30 days.

I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

This isn’t called ‘Boot Camp’ for nothing. It isn’t easy. Expect to spend 2-5 hours per tutorial (depending on the scale of the tutorial, your own experience and debugging ability).

Learning to program is like learning to speak a new language. There will be late nights, very late nights and a few early mornings.

Step 1: Get your Software.

Download Flash and Flash Builder. Both have free trials and many tutorials are written so that you need one or the other.

If you are on a PC, you can get FlashDevelop for free. FlashDevelop is a suitable replacement for Flash Builder and many developers prefer it over Flash Builder.

Step 2: Beginner Tutorials

The AS3 101 Tutorials by Dru Kepple are a great way to get your feet wet with the fundamentals of programming.

Tutorial Tip: Sometimes, when doing tutorials, there are typos. If you have completed everything and it’s still not working, don’t be afraid to download the demo code and compare it to your code.

Each tutorial covers a fundamental aspect of programming and gives you a project to complete based on the lesson.

AS3 101 – Variables
AS3 101 – Functions
AS3 101 – Branching
AS3 101 – Arrays
AS3 101 – Loops
AS3 101 – The Display List
Optional – AS3 101 – XML

The AS3 101 Tutorials will help you get oriented with coding in Flash and will give you a basic understanding of the building blocks of programming.

Tutorials – 6

Tutorial Tip: Cutting and pasting the code doesn’t teach you anything. It’s best to type in the code yourself. Not only will this force you to read every line of code, it will help you in finding typos – a handy skill to have when it comes to debugging your own original code.

Step 3. Get your book on.

Even with all of the awesome tutorials available online for free, I still recommend working with a book or two. Online tutorials frequently have typos that can have you bashing your head against the wall (this comes from experience), while most books from reputable tech publishers are thoroughly proof-read and tested. This can save you a lot of agony.

These are the books that I found most helpful:

Get it on Amazon.ca

An easy read and a fantastic starting point for people who have no idea what they are doing when it comes to programming games. It has very little to do with ‘Design’ and really focuses on getting you up and running writing AS3 code and understanding the basics.

Tutorials – 5

Get it on Amazon.ca

A fantastic reference book, handy for looking up information. Not game focused, but very thorough, easy to read and infinitely useful.

If you order these books right away, chances are they’ll be on your doorstep after you’ve finished the AS3 101 tutorials in Step 2.

Step 4: Beginner Game Tutorials

FlashGameTuts is both a blessing and a curse.

On the plus side, you get to build the basics of some core games – breakout, shooter, platformer and tower defense. On the downside, the code isn’t the cleanest, the comments aren’t the best, there are frequent typo’s and some functions don’t have any tutorial elements.

note: Some links to source files are broken on FlashGameTuts – but the correct links can be found on the creators homepage: http://www.mrsunstudios.com/tutorials/

Flash Game Tuts – Breakout
Flash Game Tuts – Winter Bells
Flash Game Tuts – Rhythm Game
Flash Game Tuts – Vertical Shooter
Flash Game Tuts – Platfomer
Flash Game Tuts – Tower Defence

Tutorials – 6

Doing these tutorials was a huge turning point in learning to program. Not only was I finally making games, the errors in the tutorials forced me to pay more attention to what I was doing and taught me how to debug. Prepare for frustration, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

Step 5 – Let’s Meet Emanuele

Emanuele Feronato is a wonderful human being and his contributions to the Flash game scene cannot be understated. One day, I will meet him and buy him many beer.

Emanuele’s blog has many year’s worth of tutorials on making Flash games, both AS2 and AS3. He is especially adept at taking a popular game and building a prototype of that game with his own code.

Most of Emanuele’s tutorials are not thoroughly commented, but they give you a great idea of how to tackle tons of different game mechanics in Flash. The tutorials are also great for learning how to read code.

Tutorial Tip: I like to print out tutorials and read them the night before I do them. This helps me wrap my head around the whole tutorial. At the very least, I recommend reading the whole tutorial and making sure you understand the intent of the tutorial before opening Flash and building the game.

We’re going to go through 10 of Emanuele’s Tutorials. Here are the ones I did, but feel free to search the site and see if there are tutorials of games that are more interesting to you. Just make sure to do the AS3 version of the tutorial.

Make a Game Like Cirplosion
Build a Game Like Sproing
Create a Game Like Snowflakes
Chronotron Prototype
How to Use a Flash Tutorial to Make Your Own Game

Emanuel’s site is also a fantastic source for anyone looking at working with Box2D and Flash. (Box 2D is a physics engine for Flash). Here is a great starting point with Box2D:

Box 2D for Absolute Beginners Pt 1
Box 2D for Absolute Beginners Pt 2
Creation of a Flash Artillery Game with Box2D
Box2D Rope
Platform Game Basics Using Box2D

Tutorials – 10

The last group of tutorials focuses on the excellent set of game libraries from Adam Atomic called Flixel.

As I said in Flash Tactic’s post, I’m a big believer in using libraries like Flixel or Box2D to get your game up and running quickly.

Flixel for Absolute Beginners
Seifer Tim’s Flixel Tutorial
Multiple Rooms in Flixel

note: Flixel is a frequently updated library – and as such, the tutorials run the risk of being outdated. In this case, either check the Flixel forums for help (the Flixel community is nothing short of awesome) or, go through the excellent Flixel Documentation and see if you can solve the problem on your own.

While the BootCamp method is no replacement for an actual education in computer science, it did take me from a ‘White Belt’, not knowing anything about code to a ‘Yellow Belt’, able to read other people’s code and having a general idea of how to make things happen in a Flash game with code in a month.

It exposed me to multiple methods of programming and syntax so that I could figure out which ones worked best for me.

Best of luck in your Boot Camp. If you find any other additional tutorials are helpful links, please put them below in the comments and if you make it throught the boot camp, it’d be awesome if you could let me know.

Good luck!

So what happens when you add a set of Flash libraries for that makes is even FASTER to make Flash games?

Six months ago, in Dec 2009, I had never programmed a game, ever. The closest I came was a non-functioning bowling score app I wrote in BASIC on a Mac in grade 12 (which was back in 1992…) Since then, I haven’t programmed anything. Nothing, zip, nada.

Today, Ray Ardent is a 12+ level platformer with 10 power-ups, parallax scrolling, multiple dinosaurs with their own AI (who explode into chunks when they die), cut scenes, music and fx, motion blur, pick-ups and double jumps (because double jumps are awesome!).

Not bad for a guy who’s never programmed a game before.

Flixel - FTW

There’s absolutely no way making Ray Ardent would have been possible without Flixel, the awesome Flash library from Adam Saltsman (aka:Adam Atomic) of Canabalt fame.

Without Flixel, my first game probably would have been something signifigantly smaller, simpler and I know for a fact that the code would have been a gigantic mess.

Flixel gave me a structure to follow and set the framework which allowed me to have a basic prototype up and running in a couple of days (knowing what I know now, making the original Ray Ardent Prototype would take a couple of hours, as opposed to a week).

As Ray Ardent grew in scope and complexity, the Flixel framework let me get new features up and running quickly and if I needed to build something from scratch, it was easy to extend and build upon Flixel. When problems came up, the Flixel Community was fantastic, with helpful responses and code samples.

As a bonus, I met a couple of other local developers using Flixel through the community and we’ve gotten together a couple of times to talk games, Flash and life.

Flash game libraries take the pain out of a lot of elements of game development that are boring, repetitive and time consuming, letting you focus on making the game. It is a solid foundation upon which you can build a game.

For any developer looking at Flash and making Flash games, I cannot recommend libraries enough. Yes, you’ll have to learn to use Flex/FlashDevelop and yes, you’ll have to learn some new commands, but the amount of time you save in the long run is more than worth it.

All of the libraries below have everything you need to get started:
- Great Tutorials
- Great Community
- Regular Updates
- They Are Free

Game Libraries:

Flixel
Flash Punk
Push Button Engine

Physics Library:

Box2DFlash

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.

How do we go about building a brand when the limitations of the portals are considered?

A brand needs to communicate a lot of things to the player:

What is the genre? What does the player do? Is it familiar to other games I may have played?

What is the setting? When and where does the game take place? Is it sci-fi, zombie apocalypse or swords and sorcery fantasy?

What is the tone? Is it gritty or funny? Is a game for adults or kids?

That is a HECK of a lot of information to get across with nothing more than a name and a thumbnail.

I believe that this is why so many successful Flash games take the “literal” titles route. Crush The Castle, This is the Only Level, Epic Fantasy Battle 2 and Warfare 1944 are just a few of the games that have received incredible success by putting a ‘literal title’ on their game.

These games are successful because they make the most of the communication opportunities that the portals offer them. People know that they are going to crush castles in Crush The Castle, play on one level in This is the Only Level, have fantasy RPG combat in Epic Fantasy Battle 2 and play a WWII strategy game in Warfare 1944.

The risk these games take with literal titles is twofold:

First, it’s easy for the player to forget the title, or confuse it with another game. Most people I know who have played Crush the Castle or This Is the Only Level will call them ‘The castle physics game’ and ‘the elephant puzzle game’. This ‘brand confusion’ is considered a huge problem in the traditional world of marketing. Consumers find it difficult to differentiate between brands and are less likely to return to your brand.

The second concern is the ability to defend your copyright. If someone comes out with ‘Smash The Castle’, ‘No Other Level’, ‘Legendary Fantasy Fight 2′ and ‘Warfare 1943′, it will be difficult for you to defend yourself. Without a distinct brand, you must rely on the scruples of the industry to stand by the original game and ignore clones (good luck!)

If going with a literal title is so risky, why not go with a unique branded identity? This is how the traditional entertainment industry does it, but they have a few advantages over Flash games:
- A great trailer/promotional network make informative brand-building trailers and PR junkets are established and reach the target markets, wherever they may be.
- Marketing budgets that put the brand in front of the target market (Remember seeing Assassin’s Creed in the middle of the Octagon in UFC fights a couple of years ago?)
- Shelf space, large posters and larger images in the digital distribution networks.

A few pixels can make a big difference

It’s very hard to build a brand off of that little thumbnail with little or no marketing budget to increase awareness.

Developers have successfully crossed this line and come out with a unique brand that successfully communicates what their game is about. SteamBirds is a recent and fantastic example of building a successful brand.

Through the color scheme of military green and the airplane imagery, you can guess it’s a war game where you pilot a plane. From the name itself and font choice in the logo, you can guess it takes place in a steampunk setting.

Cool – SteamBirds is a steampunk airplane war game. It could have just as easily been called “Airplane War” but SteamBirds gives the game an identity. (It was actually called ‘SexyPlane’ early in development)

Many other games have achieved success with a brand built for the Flash portal market. Morningstar, the Bloons franchise, Stormwinds, and The Siege of Theldale all have informative and unique brands well suited for the Flash Portal Market.

Then you also have games like Sonny and Balloon in a Wasteland – both of which have ambiguous titles and images that don’t do the best job describing their gameplay (RPG and defense respectively). These games have brands that are similar to traditional entertainment brands. Yet, without a big marketing budget, both have achieved a tremendous level of success.

The images for these games are unique and probably contributed to pulling players in, but the other element that is much more important than branding is quality, especially in the Flash portal market.

Every great portal has an effective and well-used method for rating, reviewing and recommending games (recommendation still has a LONG way to go, but it’s getting better).

I believe that both Sonny and Balloons in a Wasteland achieved their success based on the quality of the games and the brand is the wrapper for a great game. I also believe that both games would have been even more successful with a little bit of extra effort on the branding side.

Branding in the world of Flash Portals (and social networks) is different from almost all other entertainment mediums and the rules are still being defined and refined on a daily basis.

When you launch your next Flash game, spend a little bit of time thinking about how people will discover your game on the portals and hopefully you will have the next SteamBirds and not the next “Roboshooter”, “StickSniper” or “________ the ________” game.

Flash Tactics #1 – The Most Accessible Gaming Platform in the World
Flash Tactics #2 – Making Money From a Free Flash Game

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.

Let’s start off with the ‘old guard’ of revenue for Flash games – Sponsorship and Advertising.

1. Sponsorship
Sponsorship and exclusive site licenses are the traditional method that Flash developers who have been making a living doing Flash games have relied on to pay the bills. Fundamentally, it involves putting a splash screen at the start of your game that directs your players to a video game portal site.

If you play a lot of Flash games, names like Armor games, King.com, Kongregate and Addicting Games are probably very familiar.

The process for sponsorships is relatively simple. The developer either:
a) Posts their game to flashgamelicense.com and lets potential suitors bid on the game and discuss sponsorship options.
b) Contacts the sponsors directly through cold-calls or previously existing relationships.

Once the sponsorship deal is in place (ranging from $100-$45,000 with potential for performance bonuses)
the developer puts the splash screen in and any other logo placement that’s been arranged and they release the game.

The sponsor will usually feature it on their site, which can drive a boatload of traffic to your game. In addition the sponsor will often re-distribute your game to other Flash portals.

The average sponsor price for a highly rated game is around $5000. This means that you can eek out a living on sponsorships if you can make a great game every couple of months. It’s not very lucrative, but it’s a living. (High end games can be very lucrative Steambirds was recently offered $45,000 for sponsorship)

The one occasional bad side of sponsorship is that some sponsors are hesitant to allow other revenue streams in your game. Many sponsors have been very frank about their refusal of micro-transactions and advertising in the games they sponsor. I understand and appreciate where they are coming from, but I believe that this attitude enables portals like Kongregate which have a more co-operative and open minded attitude towards the business end to get better games.

For more information on sponsorship, check out flashgamelicense.com. On their blog, FGL also has a great review of their statistics from 2008-2009.

2. Advertising

In addition to sponsor logos at the start of a game, most frequent players will recognize the ads that play during load screens.

Through providers like Mochi Media and Heyzap, developers can put ads in their game to generate revenue. In most cases, it’s a VERY simple task to implement the ads.

Advertising revenue is measured in eCPM which measures the average amount of advertising revenue generated, by region, per 1000 gameplays.

The average eCPM is pretty low – between .15 and 1.00, but it can be higher, depending on the ad and the region it’s playing in.

What this means is that if your game is played 1000 times a day, you might make a dollar. Maybe.

But if your game is played 100,000 times a day (not too unusual in the Flash game world), you can make $50/day.

If you make a game that is successful this can help put food on the table. If not, it still might pay for a trip to Starbucks a couple of times a week.

3. Microtransactions

Microtransactions (or MTX) are widely considered to be the key to the future of financial success of Flash games and it’s hard to argue with the success Zynga and many other Facebook game developers have had with MTX and virtual goods.

The big barrier for indie/solo developers and MTX in the past has been the hassle of security, database and payment processing. This has been getting easier and easier every day since Mochi Coins were announced a almost a year ago. Since then Gamersafe and Heyzap have introduced simple and easy payment solutions (in return for a 30-40% share of the revenue) and some portals, like Kongregate have introduced their own currency system.

For developers that want to be a bit more hands on with databases and payments, Super Rewards and Paypal have both been very active in reaching out to small and indie developers in exchange for a much smaller piece of the pie (4-10%).

The numbers are still a little inconsistent, but developers are reporting that 1-4% of their customers use MTX. eCPM reports range from $1.50-$20, and I believe this has a lot to do with the design of your game and suitability for MTX.

A lot of developers are cramming MTX onto a non-MTX game and if you are using MTX as a business model, the core of your game design needs to keep that in mind.

If you have an eCPM of $4.00 and your game is played 100,000 times/day, that’s $400.00/day. That’s pretty good.

4. Premium Digital Download
While this is another model that many portals frown upon because it takes the players away from their site to play your game (but you can sometimes negotiate sharing a percentage of sales with the portal), the option of extending a game by offering a paid version of the game has been very lucrative for some developers.

The paid version is generally priced between $10-15 can range from a level builder, additional content, HD content or a radically different game. Fantastic Contraption, VVVVVV and Now Boarding have all used this method.

An interesting evolution of the premium download is the premium unlock, where the player pays a one time fee to unlock the whole game. VVVVVV which is available as a download, is also available as a not-so-micro-transaction unlockable on Kongregate and Captain Forever lets you unlock Captain Successor for $20.

5. Merchandice

The final option that I see very few people doing in the game space is creating t-shirts, toys and other merch to sell. To me, this feels like a no-brainer, especially in free-to-play. The inspiration comes from the webcomic world where Penny-Arcade, PvP, XKCD, Dr. McNinja, Diesel Sweeties and dozens more make a large portion of their living by giving their comic away for free and selling t-shirts and other physical merchandise to their fans.

Dr. McNinja

The interesting thing about most merchandise is that the majority has nothing to do with the webcomic itself, rather, the products reflect the interests of their readers. Penny Arcade’s readers are fans of video games, so most of their merchandise reflects this.

I believe that the potential of merchandise in the Flash game space is tremendous. Some people are strongly opposed to micro-transactions regardless of how much they love your game, but wouldn’t have a problem dropping $20 on a t-shirt.

Webcomic creators report a conversion of 3-5% from reader to paying customer with an average order of $25. Because Flash games have a more global audience (and one that can’t fathom the idea of a t-shirt costing $20), a 1% conversion rate might be more suitable to Flash game players.

Merchandise might be scary for people who have never printed a shirt before, but it’s extremely easy, the internet is filled with tutorials and your local screenprinter should be more than happy to help you get set up.

Putting it all Together

Five simple, easy and cheap ways to generate revenue from a free Flash game.

On their own, each has the potential to generate a livable (in some cases, barely-livable) wage for their creator if it achieves a moderate level of success. If a game is a tremendous success (see Fantastic Contraption, Desktop Tower Defense and Farmville), they can be VERY lucrative for their creators.

And just like any other part of the game industry, a game isn’t successful unless it is fun, polished and appealing. In other words – your game needs to be good. A lot of people have approached me with concern about the HUGE amount of ‘basement weekend’ games that look bad, play worse and have audio that makes you grate your teeth. The nice part of the Flash world is that it has a very democratic way of allowing the best games to rise above the rest. Portals have become surprisingly effective at rating games and promoting the ones with the best ratings.

Sources:

Steambirds by the Numbers – Andy Moore

Love Letter to Flash pt. 1 and pt. 2 by Dan Cooke

Looking Back at 2009: Trends and Statistics by Flash Game License

Panel: Money in Flash: Next Gen Monetization – Flash Game Summit

Panel: Monetizing Your Game Outside of Sponsorship – Flash Game Summit

Panel: Everything About Sponsorship and Licensing – Flash Game Summit

The Ups and Downs of Getting a Premium Flash Game to Success – Flash Game Summit

Webcomics.com – the business and art of making webcomics

Other Flash Tactics Posts:
Flash Tactics #1: The Most Accessible Game Platform in the World.

Eskil Steenberg’s online multiplayer game Love has gone live. It is a collaborative, procedurally generated MMO that looks like nothing else (gorgeous!)

Here is a video to give you an overview of the game and gameplay:

GDC is where the shroud of secrecy is broken.

It’s an event where developers from around the world come together to celebrate their love of making games. Want to know how BioWare tackled cinematics in Mass Effect 2? Go check out Armando’s talk. Interested in the latest AI developments, there’s a WHOLE summit just for Artificial Intelligence.

Every time I go to GDC (I think this will be my 8th time), I’m amazed at how open and candid the other developers are. These are trade secrets, their companies competitive advantage, that they are sharing.

While it’s true that some of the sessions are pretty light and filled with marketing and PR buzzwords, but if you have ever been at a Clint Hocking GDC presentation, you will leave that room with a better understanding of how to design better games, if it doesn’t all go over your head.

And the candor doesn’t end in the presentations. If you want to know more, chances are that a deeper discussion into the topic at hand is only a few beers away.

On top of this assault of information, there is the added bonus of a little thing called ‘Friendship’. While some people will degrade the term by calling it ‘networking’, GDC is a place where I can meet up with past co-workers who have drifted to all corners of the globe, as well as meet new friends.

This year also marks my first trip to the Flash Gaming Summit (which, after being a HUGE success last year, I’m surprised isn’t a part of the official GDC this year) and it will be great to see what the big movers and shakers in my newly adopted Flash world are thinking 2010 has in store.

I’ll be posting pics and stories from GDC on my Twitter @shaneneville .

And if you are going to be at GDC, and you don’t know me, please come up and say hi (I’ll be the guy in the NinjaRobotDinosaur shirt) or hit me on Twitter to meet up.

A lot of people just don’t get it.

Flash Tactics is a series of blog posts outlining why I believe that Flash is not only a great game platform, but how I believe developers can find success on a platform that is dismissed by so many developers.

Flash Tactics Part 1: The Most Accessible Gaming Platform in the World.

For me, it’s as simple as this – no other gaming platform in the world has the install base, accessibility and reach that Flash has.

As a developer, my goal has always been to get my games in front of as many people as possible. With this goal in mind, Flash became the only real option when I decided to go out on my own.

The Flash Player install base is huge – in most markets, it’s north of 98%, meaning that for almost every player there are no barriers preventing them from playing your game. They simply have to go to a webpage and play the game.

No trips to a store, no logging in, no credit cards, no download or installs – just go to a site and play.

This sort of access is unheard of on all other platforms and it multiplies your audience by a tremendous margin.

Consider that a ‘hit’ PC game will sell 1 million units in the first year of release, before it’s removed from the shelves. Through the long tail of digital download services like Steam and D2D, you can probably tack on another 500K units sold at extreme discounts through the lifetime of the game. In addition, it’ll probably be pirated an additional 2 million times. So if you make a hit PC game, you’ll hit 3-4 million people. Not bad.

Compare that to a good Flash game, which can get 1 Million plays in its first week. A hit Flash game can get close to 1 million plays/day. It’s not unheard of for a hit Flash game to have 50-80 Million plays in a year. And these numbers don’t fade in the way that traditional games do.

A twitter search for ‘Flash Game’ will reveal mentions of ‘classic’ flash games like Desktop Tower Defense and Fancy Pants Adventures alongside 2009 hits like Canabalt and Crush the Castle. People are still discovering these games for the first time and they are sharing them with their friends.

When most games have faded from peoples memories and sales dwindle, Flash games are still out there, building an audience for your game.

Flash is free, Flash is everywhere and new people are discovering Flash games every day.

As a game developer, this is simply too tempting an audience to pass up, and that’s why I chose Flash.

In upcoming Flash Tactics posts I will answer the second most common question I get: “How do you make money giving your game away for free?” (and I’ll try not to quote Chris Anderson’s book on the subject too much…)

Other Flash Tactics Posts:

Flash Tactics #2: Making Money From a Free Flash Game

Captain Forever - Build a Ship

Captain Forever is a new flash game from Farbs in which you fly through the galaxy, blowing up other ships and salvaging what is left for your own ship.

The gameplay itself is wonderfully addictive in how you always want to try and build different shapes of ships. Combat is very interesting in that you want to destroy the enemy ship, but also want to save pieces for you to salvage.

If you like Captain Forever – for $20 you can become a supporter and have access to the game Captain Successor.

Here’s a fan-made video to give you an idea of what’s in store when you play Captain Forever: