Is it because artists with little experience in making games are using Flash to create an endless stream of clones? Is it because despite the new features of ActionScript3.0, it just hasn't had enough time to be taken advantage of yet? Is AS3.0 not enough to make good games in Flash? Is Flash just too slow? What is making it so that on sites like Kongregate.com the highest ranked games they've got are crappy Tower Defense games? Why isn't anyone doing better? I wanted to get into indie game development using Flash because of the instant access to content, removing the download and install layers between myself and my users, but the competition I look at seems so bad. Is it because they are uninspired hacks, or is Flash really that limited? I know not all Flash games are bad, http://www.xgenstudios.com has a number of good ones. The vast majority out there though just make me wonder what the hell these people are thinking.

its probably just a lot of beginner developers are using flash,
i don't think theirs anything about flash itself that forces 90% of developers to make a "defend the whatever" or a "escape room by solving completely nonsensical puzzles" game with it

Quote:Original post by Lone
Is it because they are uninspired hacks...?

Partially. The other reason why is because Flash as a game development environment is still fairly new, and the really experienced Flash guys are using it in animation and RIAs.

Quote:...is Flash really that limited?

Take a look at Cold Hard Flash. It's not the tool.

Flash games are about as inherently bad as games made using any other software development toolkit. The main level of difference is the level of accessibility that Flash has to people in general and its wide-ranging target demographic.

I don't know if you remember or even know of the old "Klik"-style applications, but trust me: there were TONS of terrible games produced using those apps. Now that doesn't mean there weren't awesome ones as well, they were just well outnumbered.

The problem is that anyone can pick up Flash and, with a quick bit of tutorial reading, make a game. Another issue is that for a lot of companies it's easy and cost-effective to produce a game using Flash, and, if quick revenue turnaround is required (especially for Advergames), the best thing to do is to make a game that's tried and true. Hence, clones upon clones.

In a depressing way, it's kind of like spam. For them to have a reason to keep sending spam messages, there must be people buying products. Same with players and clone games. "Stick with what works." *shrug*

But I've seen many an amazing Flash game. For example, anything by The Behemoth.

That's just my 2 cents.

I've heard Alien Hominid re-used code from a game called Heavy Gear. Honestly I don't have a great impression of The Behemoth ever since hearing one of them go on about how the coolest feature in their new game is "pushing kids in front of on-coming buses". They aren't any better than the Tower D guys, they're just going for shock value violence instead of using their position to try advancing Flash gaming.

I'm teaching myself Flash and ActionScript 3.0 at the moment. As in literally - I've got a copy of ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University beside my laptop right now; I dropped by the forums as I was looking something up on the Internet.

My intuition is that the reason there are so many bad Flash games is not due to the language; I haven't got far in my learning but I'm quite impressed with the capabilities that ActionScript 3.0 has. Rather it's because Flash makes it extremely easy to make games, so the barrier to entry is quite low. It's not that hard to make a simple Flash game in a few days.

Since it's so easy to make a game, and easy by design to distribute it over the Internet, nothing really stops a simple game from being made. I consider the speed and ease of development a strength of Flash, and it's why I'm learning it right now.

I ordered that same book, also Sams TeachYourself Flash CS3 Professional, Visual Quickstart Flash CS3, Object Oriented Programming in AS3.0, and O'Reilly's Essential AS3.0.

I feel like you do, that it is a great way of delivering good games. I'm just appalled by the number of crappy ones I keep seeing when I scope the competition.

This little flash game caught Disney's eye.

Flash games are easy to make. And while in other languages people never bring their games to playable state, in Flash they do, and they publish them.

I've made a few really fun flash games, and a few lousy ones (although none were designed by me). All were prototypes though (I don't use flash for final products).

I think the reasons most flash games suck are:

1)Low budget, short dev cycle.
2)Many non-programmers writing the actionscript. "Learning as you go". This lends itself to a lot of copying. "Well...I don't really know what I'm doing, so I guess I can take some code from this Tower Defence thingy...hmmm, not really sure how to use this code to make my game...I'll just change the Asteroids pictures to UFOs".

My personal opinion is that Flash is more than capable of making good 2D games (I've done pseudo-3D prototypes, never happy with the results though. I find it's too much of a pain and just not worth the trouble in the end).

I do think though that Flash has some really confusing basic elements that are integral to making games though. The notion of the timelines, intervals, onEnterFrames, etc. were a bit confusing to me at first and not properly understanding those would be a huge roadblock in making a fun game. If you do OOP using AS 2.0 there's also lots of trouble you can get into with scope when you start mixing up objects with movieclip timelines (I find this is more confusing than it has to be). I can think of ways to avoid all of these problems, but then again, I don't work on flash at home and at work it isn't worth the time and money to modify the flash framework we use since most people using it are familiar with the shortcomings already.

I've never even looked into AS 3.0 yet so I have no idea whether it aims to solve any of these problems, or even what it is.

AS3.0 is a fully fledged OOP language and almost a complete re-write of AS2.0.

The goal was probably to address the things you're talking about.