“At the end of his talk, Dan painted a very bleak picture of the Flash games industry, one where ongoing consolidation leads to big, unstoppable companies, and Flash developers serve at the behest of their new overlords. He’s totally right – that’s already happening. But then he started channeling Karl Marx and Sun Tzu, preaching that workers (Flash devs) must own the mode of production, or build their castles on less crowded hills. His advice: be platform-agnostic. Don’t be a Flash developer or an iPhone developer or an Android developer. Be an octopus. Constantly dip your tentacles into many different buckets, pulling out new players and audience members on a variety of platforms, so that you don’t become beholden to the powers that will eventually control any particular platform, given enough time.”

It’s funny, I’ve for the longest time identified myself as a Flash Developer – even now as I primarily do C# development. It seems like the advice is conflicting though – some say to specialize and be the best at what you do and some say to “Be an octopus.” I’m starting to lean toward the octopus camp in a Robert Rodriguez “People are scared when you can do everything yourself” kind of way…

Building Great Games With Flash

This was an interesting session in that the demands for innovative are presented as being very high and the power of Flash being able to deliver is also very high. I know that sounds like a schmaltzy pro-adobe marketing milkshake but it just seems like Adobe is really the place to make fun stuff happen when it comes to casual gaming. Two really great notes to take away from this session is the need to rapidly prototype idea’s before going crazy with the implementation AND that the best games are made great by the amazing amount of polish they receive. Couldn’t agree more on that last point…

Oh quick note – fast forward to the 15 minute mark or you’ll be listening to 8-bit music mixed with background noise…

Flash Platform Gaming Showcase

This session had a fair amount of interesting stuff in it – namely – that gaming is now being seen as one of the top 3 use cases for Flash. Apparently before it was video and something to do with cupcakes but now…NOW…it’s gaming! It was cool to hear that adobe actually has an arcade team and are looking to post some game-related content to the ADC in the next few weeks. Other cool tidbits – Pixel Bender apparently has some cool stuff on the horizon that doesn’t involve just manipulating images and Three Melons has a game development tool? Very interesting…

Building Browser-Based MMO’s

This was an engaging session on the business-side of building MMO’s and was really interesting to get an insight to what kind of topics need to be considered when taking on something like an MMO…Here are the standout notes on this one:

• “…Casual gamers play just as long as hardcore games but they need to think they can stop at any moment…”
• Figure out what you can automate early and do it.
• You’re app is just going to break, you can’t plan for it. Build,Test,Fix.
• The whole concept of cliffs and the funnel.

So now I’m a little brain-fried but definitely got some useful information from tonight’s session. I’m done with the Max-at-Home gaming track so I’ll probably finish up tomorrow with some of the dev sessions. It’s still a little hard to watch videos for any length of time on the internet – maybe it’s just me but it’s just too darn easy to hop over to another site the second there is a lull in the session. It’s worth it though – but it does bring home the true value in paying for the conference and seeing these folks live.

Ok, after a proofreading of this post it looks like I’m an adobe squawk box in some area’s…I’ll buy that but I really just don’t see any other technology really able to deliver like flash is right now (yes, I’m looking at you silverlight, don’t turn away from me!)

For the longest time I’ve wanted to make a flash game and just never had to time or will to actually do it, in the last week however, I finally made the time. It’s currently in that 90% done phase but for some reason it seems to take as much time to go from 90% to 95% as it did to go from 0% to 75% – I’ve been knee deep in character animation, tweaking gravity, choosing colors (not an easy task for me btw) and a whole other assortment of other less glamorous tasks. I’ve learned a couple of things from the whole process…

1. I’ve been in the Flex world way too long – I forgot how fun (and frickin convenient) it is to just put code and graphics right on the timeline and never look back. Yeah yeah the action panel in cs4 blows but using Flash and Flex together proves to be a really helpful little workflow.

2. Drawing is easy – animating is hard…and long…and tedious. It’s rewarding when it all comes together but it does take some effort to get there.

3. I had the “This is a great idea” euphoria from the 0% to 30% mark and for a few days there I thought the whole project was going to be a real stinker. I just wanted to stop and throw everything away and move on to something else with much more…well, awesomeness i guess. I kinda forced myself to stick with it though and I broke through the horrible feelings of abandonment that I was having. Amazingly, I actually like playing it now.

4. gotoAndPlay() – oh how I’ve missed you.

5. I originally planned for this thing to take one week, no more. Well, coding a project with a couple of hours late at night doesn’t lead to the fastest development cycle. This week will be more of a polishing and I’ll probably send it out to some friends for them to try it out but Thursday is my deadline. All in all this whole thing would have consumed around 20 hours – probably a little bit much for a flash game but worth it in my opinion.

I think that’s it for now, I’ll write more detailing the actual game and not just my late night ramblings – hope you like the (unfinished) screenshot!