For a long while now, I’ve been considering where to go next in my Flash career. Some of the very early goals I had when I started with Flash were to get a full time job doing Flash, and to be in the New Masters of Flash book. Well, I’m working in one of the top companies doing Flash (Brightcove), and in addition to New Masters, I’ve written or contributed to about eleven other books, a few of which were best sellers. I’ve won awards, done high profile work, traveled around the world for free, speaking at conferences, started a user group, etc., etc. The point here isn’t to brag, but to say that you get to a point where you’ve done what you set out to do, and then some, and you say to yourself, “OK, self, now what?”
For quite a while, probably the last couple of years, I’ve been asking myself that, and have not had a really satisfying answer. Part of my struggle has been with the inception and popularity of Flex. Don’t get me wrong, Flex is great. But I haven’t really seen myself becoming a Flex developer. The idea of making Flex applications day in and day out is, for me, BORING!!! Ooooh… buttons, data grids, HBoxes! 😉 I mean, it’s fantastic that you can build an app in Flex SO easily, and put it on the web. And AIR compounds that fantasticalness. But building those kinds of apps is NOT why I got into Flash. Laying out components and writing cell renderers is NOT what had me freaking out excited back in 1999. It was MAKING THINGS MOVE! It was drawing some shape on stage, converting it to a movie clip, and puking up a big wad of math code into an onEnterFrame function that made it do all kinds of funky stuff as I sat there grinning stupidly at it. That’s what gave me a “Flash On” (to quote John Grden).
Now, back in those days, it really was pretty close to “puking up a big wad of code”. Since then, I’ve put a huge self-educational effort into learning how to really code. Best practices, architecture, patterns, testing, etc. And while all that DOES somewhat detract from the pure, impromptu, “happy accidents” that come from puking up code, it’s necessary for anything beyond an a simple experiment that serves no purpose but to look pretty. So I don’t regret learning that stuff at all, and will continue to do so.
But still it comes back to the question of what am I going to do with all this knowledge. The answer has been sitting in front of me the whole time – GAMES! They’ve got all the cool physics and math making stuff move around, all the cool interaction, and require all the same serious architecting and best practices that a “real app” needs. I’m not sure why I resisted getting into game development for so long. I’ve done a few games for clients too. It just never clicked. But a couple of months ago I thought it all over and it just made the most sense as a place to put my efforts. So, I started putting together a couple of games, and wow, I was hooked!
So, over the last month, I’ve been developing my first fully developed, end to end game, titled “Gravity Pods”, a physics-based, vector-styled, puzzle-shooter-themed game.
I have a few other ideas in the works as well. So I decided to create a new home for them. Welcome, http://www.wickedpissahgames.com!
The intention is to have the games be free and ad supported. This doesn’t mean that I’ll be quitting my job, taking down BIT-101, or anything drastic like that. But, I’m enjoying making the games, and if people can enjoy them, and I can make a few bucks from them, fantastic.
So there you have it. Wicked Pissah Games. Play the first game, Gravity Pods, enjoy it, and digg it if you like it. There’s a button to do so on the game’s launch page. Thanks!
Nice game, I miss some scores maybe, something that keeps me hooked. To many ADs tho :/
hey keith
neat looking gaming. where did you get the idea for that from? cool stuff.
Congratulations, Keith! Creating games is INFINITELY more rewarding (in a non-material sort of way) than creating web applications.
Sweet! Dugg!
A word about ads.You might already know this, but Mochiads seem to be a better choice to monetize the game than Google Adsense.
Mr. Doob, yeah, ads are a bit nuts now. Just slammed a bunch of Google ads in there. Hopefully will be more subtle and targeted soon.
Fenin: Yeah, just signed up for mochi and got approved. The AS3 implementation seems pretty buggy though. It looks like a straight port from AS2 and is pretty ugly. I might clean it up and submit it back to them.
Wow, that didn’t take long- you’ve already made the front page of digg.
I’ll leave out the witty retort about writing Flex apps, because I can’t think of a good one. 🙂
Dude, I digg your gravity game. It’s the kind of simplicity that get’s you hooked within seconds and next thing you know the clock skipped an hour or so. Would enjoy seeing more of your wpg’s.
I would advise you to take a look at the interaction with mouse/keyboard to make the game feel a little more tweaked, if you’re still tweaking it. Aiming up and down with the keyboard works well for small changes, but the interval when going all the way up and down feels a tad clunky. Also, when progressing in the game (I gave up at level 34 :D), positioning the gravity influencers gets kind of hard with the mouse (or in my case: notebook-finger-thingee). Maybe selecting the item of choice and then positioning it with the keyboard could work too?
Anyways, hope to see more of where that came from.
Cheers,
EP.
Nice game. Also, to intensify brain “gymnastic” you could add few more variables, such as mass of the bullet, mass of the gravity pod, and even an initial speed of the bullet.
But frankly, I have much more appreciation of the efforts you put into writing the books.
IB
Hey Keith,
nice game – good twist on the laser/mirror reflecting style of games. It might be nice to introduce a level editor – build a bit of a community around the game.
A few comments on making money from flash games:
Ad revenue can be a hard way to make money – there are thousands of flash game portal sites – so it may be a challenge to stand out. Your own records will tell you if this is working for you or not.
Some other options for making money from flash games:
Casual games: sites like popcap.com offer games that you can play online, then download try and buy. 90% of these games aren’t successful but then there are also games like Bejeweled that break through and are hugely successful. The indie game developer forums are good resource for this sort of thing http://www.indiegamer.com
Game Licensing: this is what has worked for me. I license customised versions of games to corporate clients. To be honest Im rather surprised at how well this has worked – there are games I developed back in the flash 4 era that clients are still interested in licensing.
David
I was stuck at lvl 31, closed the window, and realized we cannot get back to the level we were unless you want to redo it all.
it’s a bit of pity, but the game is really cool … once 🙂
i agree with eskimo! i just had a crash on level 43 (!!) and would love to keep playing but not sure i want to start over…
Dude, what happened.. I came back to play the old gravity, push-pull game but your site has gone along with the game. Is it online anywhere else?
Id love to have another play now, I completed it once before after hours of amusement and feel I should have another go 🙂