How to try to make money from flash games

I said “try” haven’t I? Well there is a reason for that. Flash games earn money. The interesting part is what you earn from these… but let’s start from the start. There are two ways to earn money from flash games. Advertisements (ads) and licensing ( or sponsoring ). I’ve so far tried out only the first one, but I’m into trying licensing when I get the chance.

To sum up licensing, it is the part where you sell your flash game to a sponsor. For that they pay you an interesting amount of money, and if they have it exclusively your earnings are more. What you are supposed to do is add their logo and their link into your game, and give the swf to them. They also may accept your ads. The fact is that licensing is a one time pay job, but it has the potential of big earnings. It also needs a lot of waiting time, about 2 months, to get a fair offer. If you happen to get interested check out Flash Game License. That’s it for licensing.

Ludum Dare – My experience

The past weekend I participated in 22nd Ludum Dare compo. For anyone who doesn’t know Ludum Dare is a game creation contest (more like a festival actually) where game developers who want to participate must create a game within a certain theme in 48 hours and release it as Open Source. The theme for the 22nd Ludum Dare was “Alone”. What do you earn by winning? Well, fame, and only fame.

48 HOURS? R U SERIOUS? NO MONEY? OPEN SOURCE? Well yes. 21 times now it worked, why not now :P ? It’s a really well known contest. The famous Notch (creator of Minecraft) is taking part in the last ones, and others like Chevy Ray, Sophie Houlden and other known indie developers. I always expected those taking part in the contest writing endless hours code, not eating, not sleeping, just CODE. Many times I have wondered the feeling of it, so I decided to take part in the 22nd contest. Unfortunately, things in my calendar didn’t go exactly well, and I lost the Saturday. Not until late Sarurday did I find out the the contest was running….

Learning art as a programmer

Recently I’ve read a post on Gamasutra about 2D Game Art for Programmers. Very curious about it I’ve read it all, and the second part (and i’m not used in long articles and graphics tutorials). I was really astonished by the result I’ve achieved. You can check here my deviantART profile.

I’ve used Inkscape, and what  I really liked is the part that vector graphics can be easily manipulated to any dimensions without worries. Rotated, scaled, positioned with lossless quality, easy, thanks to Inkscape. I’ve grown to love it in a matter of hours (yeah, I was free that day).

Menu system for ISS

ISS started with an arrow driven menu designed by Abel Toy for indie(Magazine);, but when i decided to release it I changed it all for mouse clicks. It was just better, to control it with mouse. I did it with no entities just text and here’s the code.

Final week of ISS development – release – lots of crying

Well at that time I didn’t have any time for myself. I had other plans for tons of gameplays and features but real life has overwhelmed me. So after a big frozen period I decided to make the release now or never.

Some things changed during the last release. The assets were changed again to make the game have one solid graphic style (thanks to Theodore Barlas). I made menus clickable with the mouse, and added a back button at the bottom left. I had plans to make a button that would mute the sound but I decided not to, and I can’t remember why…. After that the time came to upload it.