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.