Be my fan on FacebookCreate a Flash game in minutes with PlayCrafter
- June 23, 2009 by Emanuele Feronato
- Filed under Flash, Game design, Monetize, Reviews | 17 Comments
Today I am going to talk about a revolutionary way to make quality Flash games: PlayCrafter.
I must admit I am overhelmed by the enormous amount of options of this tool, but I’ll try to be as much clean as I can in my review.
Tired of making online games? Make a game online
First, PlayCrafter is an online tool. You don’t need to install any software in your computer. And this is the first great feature, because this means you don’t even need a computer to make a Flash game, you can just sit in an internet cafè and make your game in a matter of minutes.
The power of drag & drop
In PlayCrafter, you don’t need to write a single line of code. You just drag and drop elements to the stage, designing your level in a few clicks.
Any element has its own features, so a turret will automatically fire, a car will skid, a space trooper will jump and fire bouncing bombs, and so on.
The engine that handle physics is the famous Box2D so expect accurate physics simulation.
New elements are added frequently so you’ll never run out of ideas.
You can even edit your element or import your own graphics.
The Community
There is a quite big community behind PlayCrafter. You can play, rate and even edit games made by other players.
When you game receives a good feedback from the community, you can export your Flash game and publish it on game portals
The price
PlayCrafter is free to use, but you can pay a monthly fee ($4.95) to upgrade your account to “Premium” and unlock exclusive features such as raising the limit of levels to 100 and exporting the games to Flash portals.
Moreover, some assets in the game cost an a mount of Pips, the PlayCrafter‘s currency. You can buy Pips with real money or you can have for free if your refer users.
The limits
At the moment, the most important limits are the fixed stage size and the lack of scrolling. In my opinion, if PlayCrafter guys do not add more and more assets this will cause a large number of games with no difference among them.
Monetization
I am going to test the monetization of this tool very soon, meanwhile play Matcheroo to see a nice game made with this tool.
Final considerations
I strongly suggest to try PlayCrafter even if you are an experienced developer… you know… at school or at work you can’t install Flash… so why don’t you make a game between a task and another?
Expect a game made with this tool very soon…
(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...They can be easily customized to meet the unique requirements of your project.
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Looks interesting – I’ll give it a go. See also – http://playmockingbird.com/ which is a similar idea.
PS – your &invitedBy=17007 on the link doesn’t seem to work.
If you like PlayCrafter, check out http://playmockingbird.com/designer
emanule,
at least give him some credit who introduced you with playcrafter.
looking for people to create levels to use in our new game
http://www.matica.com/free-flash-games/42/Matica-Air-Race-Construction-Kit.html
best levels will be put into the real game.
I think it looks interesting, but the games would all be so similar that they are not original at all.
I think that its a nice idea, but after enough people make their games and post them on flash portals we will all be sick of playing the same game made 500 different ways.
What would REALLY be nice is an online version of flash itself.
I think tools like this will just decrease the overall quality of games.
I don’t think it’s right for everyone to be able to make everything. If you compare the game quality ( and originality ) of games back in the 90′s with todays flash games you will notice that the percentage of crappy games increased exponentially. This gets even worse with the possibility to monetize everything which ends on “.swf” using mochiads and numerous portals.
This all makes game quality worse and for the better games just more difficult to stand out.
Games for the game developers!
-ilya
Thanks for the kind words, Emanuele!
Your invite link should be: http://www.playcrafter.com/#invitedBy=17007
@Cyclone103:
Many of the games at PlayCrafter are intended as personal expression, rather than an attempt at innovation, and that’s fine, but we absolutely look for distinctive qualities in the games that get posted off-site and featured on our front page.
As for an online version of Flash itself, I’m not sure what you mean, but have you checked out wonderfl.net?
Hi EF, your invite link to PlayCrafter doesn’t work thought you might need the heads up.
http://www.playcrafter.com/&invitedBy=17007
i think with a tool like that all the games will be the same, just with diferent graphics
PD you have a & instead of ? on your links
I just cut/pasted the link I found on the site.
Seems I’ve lost a lot of coins (hint hint)…
[...] I was impressed by “Games for the game developers!” comment on Create a Flash game in minutes with PlayCrafter. [...]
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I think the easiest and newest way to create flash games is with HaXe. It’s free and open source software that exports to .swf (flash) files. Check out this addictive game programmed entirely in HaXe: http://gumbota33.mybrute.com
@Cyclone103 If you’ve ever been to Playcrafter, you can tell the games are extremely different. That post just proved to everyone from Playcrafter who reads this site that you’ve never been there.
Ive used playcrafter for months, and nowadays its a very good tools and you Can make somthing very original by creating your own peices, a wonderful new feature im Lamprider im level 45 right now heres a link to the site with my code http://www.playcrafter.com/#invitedBy=26201
Can someone tell me how to get the SWF for Moon Child?