The most famous Emanuele in the world

Even if Google punished me for selling links by dropping my pagerank by 3 units (from 7 to 4, and several days after I believed I was untouchable), this didn’t stop my blog to gain popularity day after day.

I don’t know for how long will it last, but today if you search for “emanuele” on google.com, I am first.

This means I am the most famous Emanuele in the world. To tell you the truth, it does not mean anything, but I like to think this means I am the most famous Emanuele in the world.

All in all, being in 1st place on a search with almost 12 millions results has to be something to be proud of…

Experiment: monetizing a Flash game - Part 3

Multipart tutorial: available parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Another week passed and here I am with the experiment update. Read part 1 and 2 if you haven’t done it yet, then it’s time to know how it’s going.

Last tuesday I submitted Circle Chain to some other Flash portals. And, in my opinion, the promotion is over. With my game submitted to over 20 portals, I’ll wait for the viral marketing to work for me until the experiment is over. This make me ask a question:

When will the experiment end?

Although your Flash game will be listed “forever” in Flash portals, you must set a condition that will define that your game is not longer played, even if someone around the web still play your game. My end condition is: “Circle Chain experiment will be over when it will show less than 10,000 ads in a week”. I forecast this could happen in a week or two, unless some “big name” notices my game and put it on its frontpage.

Sites where I submitted the game

This is the list of sites where I submitted the game. Some of them published the game, some others did not. If you know a good portal that is not in this list, please leave a comment and I’ll provide to submit it.

In most sites you have to register and provide a short description of your game along with a snapshot. To optimize your time, write a short description of your game save it on a txt file. Then take a couple of snapshots and save them in different formats (gif, png, jpeg). This will make you save a lot of time when you’ll have to submit your game.

Another problem I found is that every site has a submission button in a different place. To quickly find it, search for “submit”, “add”, or “upload” in the page. Read more

Useful Flash custom functions

If you code a lot with the same language, no matter if Java, Php or Actionscript, sooner or later you will find yourself writing the same code you already wrote in a previous project.

This is extremely time-wasting, because forces you to spend your time writing routines you have already written some time ago and does not let you totally focus on the script.

That’s why most programmers develop custom functions performing tasks they have to solve in almost every project

Andre Marianiello decided to share with us some useful Flash custom functions.

This is what he sent me by email:

I have compiled some useful functions for flash, and I was wondering if you would like to see them or put them on your blog for your readers. I can provide the .as file with comments and create examples if you want.

These functions include:

- line collision detection
- a useful replacement for the Object.toString() method
- cloning function to copy Objects and Arrays
- plus some trig functions that are often used in your tutorials

All functions come in a .as file plenty of comments. Let’s see it: Read more

How to teach players how to play your Flash game

Ok, you made your game, it’s awesome, and you enjoyed a lot playing it.

Now you have to face a problem: you are the only one who knows all game mechanics. And it’s quite obvious that a player can’t enjoy your game like you did, if he doesn’t know how to play it.

A successful game designer has to manage this problem and try to solve it. You can do it with a manual, with some tutorial levels or with in-game hints. But above all you have to do it with gameplay

There are some interesting thoughts in Casual Game Design blog:

Civilization is quite a complex game, but it’s still not hard to pick it up and play, even if you only fully understand its inner workings much later

That’s right… I played Civilization on Amiga in early 90’s and I did not read any manual, but I enjoyed the game from the first minute and I was able to manage all its mechanics after a week of hard core playing. And we are talking about Civilization, not a “use arrow keys to move, space to jump” Flash game. This is the power of game design.

On the other hand, the casual browser player does not want to spend more than one minute to understand your game, and if you don’t tell you to use arrow keys to move and space to jump, he will quit your game.

So you must introduce the rules before the player hit “play”.

Just because your game has complex rules, doesn’t mean you need to dump all of them on the player at once. As long as the player can have fun in the first few minutes of play, it doesn’t matter one bit whether she already knows all the rules or not. You can always introduce the more intricate rules later on, or let the player find them out for himself, as Civilization 1 does.

This is the key. If you have two (or more) different types of enemy, or block, or bullet, or whatever, don’t introduce them all at once: you will frustrate the player and he will quit the game. And don’t force the player to read 20 screens to know about features you will introduce only from level 50.

If your game is quite simple, just introduce new features with a box between a level and another.
Should it have hard-to-find-out-on-your-own information, provide an help page but don’t make your game unplayable if the player does not read it. The player should play and easily win (and enjoy) the first levels, and when things get harder, at some point the player, intrigued by the game, will browse the help page.

Don’t provide your game with boring, senseless tutorial levels forcing the player to read tons of text and press an almost invisible “next” button to go through all information.

A Flash game must be immediate.

Outside Flash world, I want to bring you GTA Vice City: you can enjoy it from the first minute, you can steal cars, kill pedestrians, and ride through Miami yelling “born to be wild”. Then, and only then, you can start playing seriously, learning how to control motorbikes, how to paint your car, where to perform the best jumps, how to restore your starmina by night…

What do you think about? (I mean about the post, not about Vercetti restoring his stamina…)

Photoshop action to create an arcade stone background

Today I was playing a bit with Photoshop to create a stone background for a one-week game I am developing for the experiment.

I wanted something random, with a style that reminds old style arcades.

I found this tutorial and I modified it to fit to my needs.

Then I developed an action to optimize and speed up the entire process.

This is the result of the action, obviously always random.

It’s not a state-of-the-art action but is what I need, and you can custom some level styles to use it in a profitable way.

Download the action and give it a try

Make a Flash game like Flash Element Tower Defense - Part 2

Welcome to the 2nd part of this tutorial. I recommend you to check part 1.

In this tutorial, we will place our first base, and it will start to fire.

Let’s have a look at the objects:

base: it’s the base

bullet: it’s the bullet the base will shoot

cant_build: it’s the area where you can’t build a base

minion: already explained in part 1.

path: already explained in part 1.

range: it’s the firing range of the base Read more

Experiment: monetizing a Flash game - Part 2

Multipart tutorial: available parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Exactly a week after the beginning of the experiment (that I suggest you to read), it’s time to resume what I have done, what I haven’t done, what I should have done and what I shouldn’t have done.

I want to begin with the critics moved to the game and to the experiment.

Music: A lot of people complained there isn’t any “mute” button or an option to turn off sound. They are right. People may want to play without any sound or with their favourite music in the background. I completely forgot to include this option. This is one of the cons of making a game in a few hours: you will forget something important. So add in your “to-do-before-release” list to give an option to turn off sounds

Goals: I received some emails saying this is an experiment that I want to fail because I set the goals too high for a one day game. In one mail a boy said he would be happy if he manage to earn $20 from a one-day game.
As said, goals depend a lot from the Country you live in, and its currency change with United States Dollars.

Capitalism: Some people pointed their finger at me saying I am doing “capitalism”. Let me explain one thing: monetizing a Flash game is not capitalism. It’s almost an utopy that reminds me the early 80’s when lonely programmers in their rooms/garages made games that we still play today, in some retrogaming sites or with new fancy graphics.
Thanks to Mochiads, Flash portals sponsoring games, Google and Macromedia (now Adobe) everyone can sit in his garage with his entry-level computer and produce a games that thousands - if not millions - people will play and enjoy.

Ok. End of the boring part Read more

Creation of a platform game with Flash - step 2

This is a quick update to the tutorial/engine started with Creation of a platform game with Flash - step 1.

I fixed some bugs and added a ladder object (the one defined in the array with “2″ and painted in light purple).

Use arrows to move and space to jump.

I won’t explain the script line by line at the moment because I want to add more features before writing a complete tutorial.

But the source code is someway commented Read more

MochiAds Flash Game Contest: over $5,000 to win

MochiAds, the company that launched the avertising network just for game developers, to celebrate its launch, the holidays, and the new referral program, is currently hosting a Flash game contest.

There are 3 ways to win:

1) Create an awesome game and make MochiAds judgeds admit it’s awesome

1st place: $1,000 + a custom MochiAds skinned DS Lite + a T-shirt
2nd place: $750 + a custom MochiAds skinned DS Lite + a T-shirt
3rd place: $500 + a custom MochiAds skinned DS Lite + a T-shirt
4th place: $350 + a custom MochiAds skinned DS Lite + a T-shirt
5th place: $200 + a custom MochiAds skinned DS Lite + a T-shirt

2) Create an awesome game and have the most traffic in the first two weeks of its release

1st, 2nd and 3rd: place: $400 + a custom MochiAds skinned DS Lite + a T-shirt

3) Refer your friends to MochiAds.
If your referrals submit at least 5 approved games before mid-December (15th? 16th?), you’ll get a $50 bonus.

The MochiAds skinned DS lite is positively something a Geek should have… hmmm…

I noticed there is not a link to the contest from the homepage, so I am giving you the link to the direct page http://www.mochiads.com/contest/.

Edit: there is a link on homepage now

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