I thought I’d start out the new blog with a short review of my attempts at Flash game development. Seeing as I’m planning to work on some brand new games in the near future, it might be helpful to put down exactly what worked and what didn’t in the past. In this post I’ll refer to one game as “being successful” because it had 50k views in almost two years. Compared to any good Flash game, that’s rubbish. None of the three games were truly successful, quite the opposite I’m afraid, so when I talk about how one game fared I’m only comparing it to the other two, not to other games out there.
So, without further ado, here are the three Flash games that got me started in game development!
Truck Dodge was based on an old console game my girlfriend used to play while growing up. I figured a simple racing game would be a good place to start, so I got to work. The game was finished in about 3 days and published the next day (January 2009). And… it was crap.
Out of the three games, this one has been the most successful when it comes to the total revenue generated. Now, more than 3 years after its launch, it has a total of 41k views which, even though fewer than Dead Roads, were mostly on high eCPM portals, which means each view was better payed compared to each Dead Roads view.
Playing it today doesn’t reveal many things that went right while developing it, except for the fact that it is extremely simple and that it has a good name. I believe that the Dodge from Truck Dodge got me a lot of views simply because people thought I was referring to the car.
There are however a large number of things that I did completely wrong: the complete lack of polish and proper testing; the lack of a feeling of progression in the game; the fun of the game (it is however quite stressful).
Christmas Lanes was my second attempt at making Flash games and was instead a puzzle game. Another mistake thing I tried was giving the game a Christmas theme. In over two years the game gathered a bit over 2k views, so it was a complete failure in that department.
Like Truck Dodge it wasn’t polished, gave no sense of progression and wasn’t very fun. Worse still, you actually had to learn how to play it and there was no proper tutorial except a message box at the start of the game which nobody ever bothered reading.
The one thing that the game did get right was the graphics. While nothing to write home about, they were a huge improvement compared to Truck Dodge which had completely vectorial graphics. Christmas Lanes sported a hand-drawn interface and loads of more detail. While helpful, this didn’t make up for the poor gameplay, so overall the game was a failure.
Dead Roads is the spiritual successor to Truck Dodge and an attempt at fixing some of its problems, while also using things that I learned during the development of Christmas Lanes. Out of the three it is by far the most successful, raising over 50k views in under two years (about half the time in which Truck Dodge gained 41k views) and receiving much better feedback on various portals.
During the planning stages I had a number of elements that were supposed to improve on the original concept but that never made it into the final game. These included running down and killing zombies, customizing your car, a storyline with a couple of simple cut-scenes and a mounted weapon (and destructible obstacles if I remember correctly). However, as usual, I was in a hurry to launch so none of these actually made it into the game.
Despite the fact that the levels actually felt slightly harder as you progressed, the increase in difficulty was negligible. Overall the game was slightly more polished than my previous work, but there was still more to do. I think the biggest problem with the game is that I didn’t spend enough time making sure that it was actually fun.
I’m very pleased with how the graphics turned out (and it seems that a number of players were too) and in the end I think the localized damage on the car was a nice touch, although a bit too subtle. In any case, this is definitely the better looking of the three.
So what have I learned?
- I need to polish my games and resist the urge to launch them as fast as possible
- I need to spend more time playing the game and making sure its fun and engaging
- A game’s name is extremely important as it’s the first thing your users see
All three games did quite poorly compared even to average Flash games out there. The main cause behind their issues was my rush to publish the games without putting the necessary effort into polishing and making them really fun. Hopefully I’ll resist that urge while working on my next project, but more on that later!