Create a Flash game in minutes with PlayCrafter

June 23, 2009 by Emanuele Feronato
Filed Under Flash, Game design, Monetize, Reviews • 16 Comments 

Today I am going to talk about a revolutionary way to make quality Flash games: PlayCrafter.

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…

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16 Responses to “Create a Flash game in minutes with PlayCrafter”

  1. Lawrie on June 23rd, 2009 1:23 pm

    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.

  2. Troy Gilbert on June 23rd, 2009 4:02 pm

    If you like PlayCrafter, check out http://playmockingbird.com/designer

  3. Manoj sahu on June 23rd, 2009 4:09 pm

    emanule,
    at least give him some credit who introduced you with playcrafter.

  4. Alex on June 23rd, 2009 4:55 pm

    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.

  5. Cyclone103 on June 23rd, 2009 5:36 pm

    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.

  6. Ilya Shabanov on June 24th, 2009 6:47 pm

    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

  7. Mathilde Pignol on June 24th, 2009 7:26 pm

    Thanks for the kind words, Emanuele!

    Your invite link should be: http://www.playcrafter.com/#invitedBy=17007

  8. ForkliftKid on June 24th, 2009 9:02 pm

    @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?

  9. Francois on June 25th, 2009 5:57 am

    Hi EF, your invite link to PlayCrafter doesn’t work thought you might need the heads up.

    http://www.playcrafter.com/&invitedBy=17007

  10. games on June 25th, 2009 7:44 am

    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

  11. Emanuele Feronato on June 25th, 2009 4:57 pm

    I just cut/pasted the link I found on the site.

    Seems I’ve lost a lot of coins (hint hint)…

  12. Dave Chonurous on September 18th, 2009 2:36 am

    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

  13. JTainos on November 29th, 2009 4:24 am

    @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.

  14. Playcrafter User on December 27th, 2009 9:46 pm

    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

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