Be my fan on FacebookThe perfect size for a Flash game
- April 20, 2009 by Emanuele Feronato
- Filed under Flash, Game design | 19 Comments
When you are about to design a Flash game, one of the first things you must consider is the size of the stage.
Those “width” and “height” parameters must be set carefully. A size too small allows limited gameplay, while a big one can cause problems to users playing at not-so-high resolutions on not-so-powerful computers, such as netbooks.
While you should set the stage size according to the gameplay (a Tetris clone should have a portrait size, while a Metro Siberia Underground clone should have a landscape size), it’s interesting to have a brief overview about other games’ size.
Thanks to my MochiAds plugin for WordPress I collected the sizes of 7,873 games and made some queries to obtain some interesting stats.
This won’t tell you the perfect size for a Flash game, but it will help you to know the most used game sizes
| Width | Height | |
| Average | 617 | 469 |
| Max | 1280 | 900 |
| Min | 300 | 207 |
| Most used | 550 (23%) 600 (15%)640 (13%) |
400 (31%) 480 (12%) 600 (10%) |
And this is the top 5 chart of the most used resolutions:
1) 550×400 (18%)
2) 640×480 (11%)
3) 600×400 (6%)
4) 800×600 (5%)
5) 750×530 (2%)
What’s your favorite Flash game size?
(14 votes, average: 4.93 out of 5)
Loading ...They can be easily customized to meet the unique requirements of your project.
Well, i usually base my flash game size (unless it is a tetris or metro game or the like) by the golden ratio, which is the most comfortable size for the human eye. if the height is x, the width is 1.61x
[...] Emanuele Feronato hat sich Gedanken darüber gemacht was wohl die perfekte Auflösung für ein Flash Spiel ist. Dazu hat er die Auflösungen von über 7,873 Spielen gesammelt und ausgewertet. Seine Analyse hat folgendes ergeben: [...]
[...] Update: Emanuele Feronato has posted a breakdown of the most commonly used game sizes on his blog here. [...]
Nice idea Xodus, I’m going to try that with my next game I think.
What’s with the music on the mainpage oO
I use 750×500
Mine is 640px width * 480 px height.
If you want more resolution data, check out http://mochiads.com/zeitgeist
The music is from the “Designing the structure of a Flash game – AS3 version – Part 6″ post.
No surprise that 550×400 is at the top. Lazy people :)
I use 640×480 almost exclusively.
Thanks for doing this research. It’s spooky – I just posted this analysis of the topic on my blog today:
http://blog.iainlobb.com/2009/04/flash-games-dimensions-resolution-and.html
I like a size of about 700 x 400 – but read my post and let me know your thoughts.
The bigger it is the worse, both for Websites and users. This has not occured to some people, but maybe your guide will help. Thanks!
I’m 780 x 600 and 35 fps all the way.
There are two trends:
1 for users to have bigger monitors for desktops
2 for users to have laptops instead of desktops
I find 780 x 600 is suitable for laptops (as long as the user doesn’t have five toolbars). And also, I’m personally not a fan of small-stage games. As a developer, I find the small stage limiting.
I am surprized! Not one of the popular dimensions follows the “Golden Rule – 1:1.6″ … maybe moderns prefer unbalanced instead of nature’s perfect shapes?
I’m a fan of 500×400, 400×400, 400×300, 300×300 and of course the lovely, lazy 550×400.
Of course, the stage size is something to expermient with. A smaller stage size leaves less blankspace you’d otherwise have to fill. Less clutter!
I was looking for common resolutions a couple weeks ago when deciding the resolution for a new project. In the end, I settled for 480×600 because it fit best with the type of game and seemed to be a somewhat common resolution. Looks like I might’ve had that backwards, though.
A question about resolution; does processing required for a flash movie go up linearly or exponentially as you go up in pixels? An 800×600 flash seems like it would be very intensive.
Ezion: Yes. Bigger dimensions = slow rendering for the Flash player. However, if you code in AS3, this is less of an issue.
550×400 is most popular eh? That’s the default stage size in Flash. Haha
I am making a dress up game.It has quite a lot of parts so 1024×748 works best for me since all images are photoshop imported and have their own dimensions and resolution…I could go smaller but not too much.
I have trouble when testing flash movie because it only shows part of a whole thing, like 1/4. I can expand it a little with window expanding but not nearly enough.
What to do?
[...] mijn research naar resoluties van Flashgames stuitte ik op deze blogpost van de Italiaanse Flashprogrammeur Emanuele Feronato. Hij presenteert een aantal statistieken over [...]