Why Online Gaming Industry Heavily Uses Flash?

By Author: richard judd
Total Articles: 16
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Online gaming industry has been growing exponentially since the 90s when it became very popular. As of 2011 the worldwide online gaming revenue was around $11-12 billion dollars, which shows how serious a business it is. Lot of companies is into developing online games and the easiest and preferred technology used for building games is Flash. We at Mindfire have been involved in games development for a long time now. The online game development team at Mindfire has developed a wide variety of Flash based games.

Given below is a small write up on 2 basic areas of game development – Key components required in a game AND basic game development workflow.


Key components required in a game

The following are a few key components required in a game:

Input: Input refers to how the game is controlled by the user. Typically simpler games are controlled with the mouse, the keyboard arrow keys, or both. For mobile device based games, touch gestures are the most common input method, and the Flash Platform has robust touch support.

Sprites: ...
... Sprites are the visual elements on screen, such as a MovieClip of a spaceship or a biplane in a flying game.

Sounds: Good sounds for specific events in a game are a very vital part of any game. They just add tremendous value in terms of user engagement in the game.
Collision detection: This is the code that senses when any two sprites touch on screen, which is crucial for most action-oriented games.

Game loop: This is a term sometimes used by game developers to describe the programming logic that controls the game experience. ActionScript is the programming language used to execute the game loop in Flash games. In ActionScript 3.0, there are two ways of calling a function at specific intervals. The first approach is to use the Event.ENTER_FRAME event dispatched by interactive objects (InteractiveObject). The second approach is to use a timer. The ENTER_FRAME event approach is more common, and is best used for very frequently updates such as animation, other rendering updates, and artificial intelligence (AI) routines. A timer can behave in a similar way to an ENTER_FRAME event, but an event can be dispatched without being tied to the frame rate. Timer is best for periods of time that are several seconds or more in duration. Like other programming languages, ActionScript also provides numerous other techniques to accomplish the game loop, such as for and while loops.


Game development work-flow

Given below are the simple basic steps that every game developer adheres to when developing a new game:

Brainstorm. Ideate, discuss and debate till a final conclusive idea for the game is developed.

Develop. This is the phase when the actual game is developed. The major chunk of the time is spent in this phase.

Test and optimize. Continuous testing is required to ensure that the game is bug-free and fun to play. Performance improvement is one thing that is taken care of in this phase.

Distribute and monetize. After the game is finally developed it needs to be marketed properly, so that real players (users) get to know and play the demo version and finally buy it.

Use analytics. Analysis of user feedback and metrics such as game plays, duration of game play, and more needs to be done regularly to improve the game further.

Update. All the above steps except step 4 needs to be done regularly to ensure the game quality keeps improving and more and more users start playing and enjoying it.

At Mindfire we follow the above mentioned approach to build games, have a look at the projects page to see some of the games developed by us. The Flash Game Development team at Mindfire is a group of enthusiastic programmers who are crazy about games and don’t lose an opportunity to grab one to play with or get started to build one.