Real-World Flash Game Development (Elements)

Abstract

Game development is a strange hybrid of many skills and styles merged together. One can argue that games are the most compli-cated form of entertainment to create. They not only require solid coding, attractive design, and sound user interface decisions, but the best games all share one particular aspect they’re fun to play. This “ fun factor ” can be especially elusive because it is so subjective. Different genres of games appeal to different people in different walks of life. Very few games, if any, are going to appeal to everyone, everywhere, all the time. That said, the most popular type of game for players on the Internet are what have been termed “ casual ” games. If you’re not familiar with this phrase, casual games are meant to appeal to a wide audience and focus on simplicity and approachability over depth and realism. This is not to say that some casual games are not deep and realistic, but the audience for a complicated tactical simu-lation on a console is very different from someone killing 10 minutes on their lunch break at work. Casual games can fall into any nu MBer of genres, from classic arcade-style games like Pac-Man to puzzle and logic games like Tetris. In fact, both of the titles I just mentioned have one thing in common, they are both products of an era in game development (the late 1970s to mid-1980s) when the focus was not on spectacle and movie-quality graphics and audio but rather on creating games that were fi rst and foremost fun to play. Games in Flash