Just throught I’d give a little shout out to my most succesful game to date

Christmas Crunch 

Almost a 120 milion plays!

There’s no need for me to fill in any backstory here, everyone knows what’s going on. This blog entry is about the comments I’ve read elsewhere that Flash needs to go quietly into the night, that it should just dissapear and then there will be world peace and everyones computer will run 10 times quicker!!!

Man…where do I start. Ok well first off Flash isn’t going anywhere, and there are a number of very good reasons for this. First is that there are a lot of vested interests that have built themselves up on the shoulders of the Flash player, I’m talking about the 10,000s of individuals that make their living off of Flash, 2nd are the companies where Flash is integral to their output (and has been for many years), I’m talking about that it is now on so many PC’s/Mac’s and that people are so used to it no one is going to dump that kind of market penetration into the users world for any reason, but mostly I think the reason it’s not going anywhere soon is because Flash is good. Yeah I said it, let me say it again “Flash….Is…..Goood”….why? because it’s the smoothest path for creative people to express themselves online, whether it be in a game, an animation, a presentation, an RIA on and on and it’s very good at that. What other software tool out there allows you to do what Flash does, as easily as Flash let’s the user do it? What software allows the scope and flexibility of what the Flash player allows for?

There was a time when Flash wasn’t everywhere, when it was more a novelty than a necessity, but over time because it was so good for content creation, great content was created for it and it become something that you needed to have to see the latest “cool” thing online (and that doesn’t even really include Video), if Flash is/was so bad how did it get into that situation? The success of the Flash player is CONTENT DRIVEN, all the naysayers seem to forget that, people liked creating with Flash and that desire to use Flash is not going anywhere.

It’s not all smelling of roses though, I’m not saying that Flash is perfect, it does crash sometimes, and I’ve thought for a long time that Adobe going down the road of trying to allow developers to develop iPhone apps was never going to work out well (not because it’s not cool for developers to create iPhone apps in Flash, but because I never thought Apple would allow it). And take out iPhone development from Flash CS5 and a lot of developers are going to think “what’s the point of upgrading??”

For me when Adobe think of Flash as a games development tool they should be thinking of it as a social games development tool and build in tools/libraries/API’s that make it easy for us to connect all the dots and use the social graph from within Flash, obviously there’s a number of 3rd party tools out there that are starting to do that, but I think it should be something integral to Flash anyway.

Overall though as long as Flash allows developers and designers to express themselves as well as it does, and then show the result to millions it’s going to be a long wait for anyone waiting for it to go away..

I had to post this, being a child of the original computer gaming boom this video hits all the right points for me.

Been some big announcements in the Flash game world in the past 7 days, and try as I may I can’t find anyone talking about it in the blogosphere so I’ll throw my 2 pennies in.

I think it was about 7 days ago that I first noticed something on the Mochi front page mentioning a “fund”. Those words went right past for me on my way to my dashboard, but eventually a little voice must of been nagging away at the back of my brain because I found my way to..

http://www.mochimedia.com/developers/fund.html

This could be fantastic news for indie Flash developers, and really might give a jolt in the arm for developers who have an idea that would be great, but they can’t invest the time into it because it’s going to take too long or maybe seems a bit too ambitious. The reason I say “could” is because of course it all depends on who they invest in. If the funding goes to already established “big” game developers who don’t need the investment then I think it will be a shame and will not push things in the direction they need to go in (innovation). I don’t envy Mochi’s position as they must be getting 100s if not 1000s of emails from developers (mine included) all after a slice of the cake, and trying to choose who gets what won’t be easy. Personally I hope to see some amazing games come from this fund, and for it to foster burgeoning talent.

The next big thing from Mochi was their social API, which looks really exciting. This year was meant to be my “Facebook” year, where I finally manage to create some Facebook games, but seeing the few glimpses of the social API, is making me think that might be a better way to go. For me it’s all about how easily (or not) can my game spread virally through “social” means, and seeing that Facebook has recently changed how things are done on it’s platform, an API of this type (which is plugged into FB anyway) could be a good thing. I like Mochis API’s anyway and having all this integration under one roof allows me to concentrate on creating games that are designed from the ground up to be social in nature.

I think that’s what’s so exciting about all of this for the Flash indie development community, is that up until now these various aspects have been separate from each other, or at best have been cobbled together in a manner to try and get some benefit from one or the other. These new services should allow games to be created where microtransactions and the social graph are so integral to the game that they are not even noticed, and are just there as part of the experience.