Consoles are stealing the best Flash games! Cool!

What do I (Christoph) mean by “game”?

Those of you with $10,000 PC rigs will laugh, but consoles have been my primary gaming systems for a decade — PS1/2/3/P, GBA/Cube/DS/Wii. I recognize that I’m not representative of all gamers but it’s my primary hobby in both time and money terms, so I think I must represent some cross-section of this market. Or not, who cares? ;)

That predilection hasn’t kept me from pouring hours into some amazing Flash games including, of course, the finalists from every Flashforward Film Festival, but it’s usually been a different (and lesser) caliber of experience to me. Chief among my complaints:

- Controls: mouse & keyboard are just awkward (for me) compared to a controller for most types of game.

- Performance: a mid-range Mac has historically not been the best-performing platform for Flash.

- The Browser, etc.: any kind of dramatic mouse movement takes the pointer “out of play” and the whole thing is less immersive when the game is nested inside a div, inside a page, inside a window, inside an application, inside an operating system.

Then something interesting happened: some of the best Flash games began appearing on consoles!

The first one I enocuntered was Alien Hominid — a well-known Flash game that I repsected became a PS2 title that I adored, and is now on several platforms including the 360.

More recently, flOw, a Flash experiment/MFA Thesis (blogged here), became a PS3 experience I played through from start to finish without pause. (And was almost a Wii release instead!)

Last winter’s Flash phenom Line Rider is scheduled to be released on the Wii and DS this spring.

In the past few days, we learned that N+, an evolution of the classic Flash-Ninja game N (also blogged), will appear on the PSP and Xbox 360

We also found out that Wakfu, the new game from the creators of Dofus, will have its own DS complement.

Overall this has been an exciting trend, seeing Flash games ported over to “real” game platforms. And it proves that independent game developers can, by first creating their vision in Flash, get the attention of the Big Boys who might never have taken their concepts seriously otherwise.

For the latest generation of consoles, it’s not always necessary to port your Flash game — for systems like the Wii, PSP and PS3, which have their own web browsers and Flash plugins, it’s possible to create your game in Flash but optimize it for play on consoles. (Examples: Wii, PSP; still looking for a good PS3 portal.)

Flash games are increasingly able to escape their shortcomings on the desktop as well — since the Wiimote and Sixaxis can both be used on desktop systems, it must be possible to use them for Flash games as well (but I’m still loking for good examples of this). AS3 has enabled huge performance gains on all systems (even Macs). And one promise of Apollo is Flash games without the browser, and with more capabilities than SAFlashPlayer or a self-running Flash executable can manage.

And don’t forget Flash Lite games!

All of this leads me to the following conclusions:

If you want to make games, you should seriously consider Flash as a platform — at minimum it’s a great environment for prototyping and developing your ideas; plus it allows you to deploy your game to a vast collection of systems and consoles and, with Apollo, gives you the promise of creating an immersive experience on the desktop as well.

If you’re a gamer, you should pay attention to Flash, even if you look askance at “casual” games — it’s one of the ways that independent developers with limited budgets are able to put unique, groundbreaking work out there for you to experience, and the best Flash games arguably compare favorably with what consoles can offer.

And if you’ve read this far, you probably either have a dozen more examples to support what I’m saying, or two dozen to refute it; either way, please share your thoughts!

PS: I almost forgot! Game industry veteran John Say will be presenting his insights into Flash game development and the game market generally in his session, Video Game Opportunities with Flash, at Flashforward2007 Boston. That will be one of my must-attend sessions, and we’re working on some other game-related topics as well. Stay tuned!

While we’re on the subject of speaking at Flashforward — ever since reading Aaron West’s post earlier this month, “How to be a Poor Presenter,” and then Zeldman’s “Conference Speaker’s Pledge,” I’ve been trying to think of some wisdom I could impart after eight years of watching Flashforward presentations from backstage. Here are a few that seem important to me. Anyone is free to add more in the comments!

• If something crashes, don’t panic. Everyone in our audience works with computers every day — these are your peers and they understand that these things happen. It’s not a magic show where you must keep the strings from showing. If you recover gracefully, it can be pleasantly humanizing.
• Have a graceful recovery plan. Only copy of your source file corrupt? Network card just smoked and you need to be online? Have five minutes to kill while your machine reboots? Think about what sort of calamity could break your presentation, and try to plan a workaround. Run the server on your laptop. Put your files on one of our stage machines, so you can jump over if yours glitches out.
• The screen is large but small. The native resolution of the projectors is 1024×768, so set your screen to the same resolution and get comfortable — save your workspace layouts so you can quickly toggle between different modes, and be sure your code is BIG and high contrast.
• Fill your time. We’ve standardized on 75-minute sessions, which is usually enough to go into real depth about a subject. Please do! If your Standard Conference Outline is tuned for 60 minutes, and you decide to spend the last 15 on Q&A, that’s fine, but if there are no questions, have enough material ready to keep talking. Better still, rework your outline and find the places where an extra example or discussion adds value. (Also: don’t save the best for last, then run out of time!)
• Share your secrets. Everyone in the room is already impressed by your work, or they wouldn’t be attending your session. So do more than just show them your portfolio — talk about the process that led to these final products, the challenges and discoveries, the resources you turned to for help, the best practices you established as a result. Give away your source code, and highlight the cool bits. Attendees should ideally be inspired to stay up all night practicing what they just learned from you. (Seriously!)
• Practice, but not too much. If you’ve never been on stage, or even spoken up much at team meetings, it can be intimidating to present a session. A bit of practice with friends or in front of your webcam can help you identify your worst verbal tics and remind you not to mumble. But on the other hand, our attendees have amazing BS Radar, and if your persona is too brightly polished you’ll lose their attention. We like our heroes humble!
• Party Gently. Getting the Flash community together for some face-to-face fun is one of the main goals of the event, but if you sleep through your session (whether in bed or on stage) then you let everyone down. Give us 75 minutes of your best effort, and the rest of the trip can be fun! (And if you know that 9 am is never a good time for you, tell us and we’ll schedule you after lunch instead.)
• Flash is not a four-letter word. We have one or the most diverse audiences you’ll see at a technology conference: old and young, artists and programmers, students and grandparents, liberals and conservatives, citizens from around the world… even women! They all care desperately about your work, but they may not be quite so interested in your politics, or what you grunt at your fallen enemies in Halo. When the first two rows are filled with your best friends, it can be easy to forget that you’re meeting everyone else for the first time. Politeness != Censorship.

And finally, my Top Ten Tech Tips for the stage:

1. Bring your own power adapter & video dongle.
2. Turn off sleep, hibernate, screen saver, screen dimming, etc.
3. Turn off all auto-updaters (apps, OS, virus defs, newsbots, etc.)
4. Turn off your friends (cell phone, IM, Twitter, email, etc.)
5. Set your video out to 1024×768, 60 Hz.
6. Set your volume to about 75% of maximum and let the audio tech adjust from there.
7. The ethernet is faster & more reliable than the WiFi.
8. Come to rehearsal so we can double-check all that for you.
9. Watch the speaker timer.
10. Hide your “secret files.” Not just the stuff on the desktop, but in recent items, bookmarks, history, etc.

I’m sure I forgot twice as many as I thought of… tell us your biggest onstage mishaps! (Anonymously if you prefer…)

We’ve had many excellent proposals for Flashforward2007 Boston so far — you may have noticed that we got excited and accepted a few speakers already — but this Friday we’ll close the submission form. So this is your last chance to pitch your ideas for this event! (And if you already submitted your ideas, thank you! Please bear with us just a bit longer as we wait for the final proposals to come in.)

Image derived from alykat’s photo of Lawrence Lessig. All her pictures of FF06 Seattle are worth checking out!

Last week, the blogs were abuzz with news of the very successful launch of “Programming Flex 2.0” by Joey Lott and Chafic Kazoun. It even caught Tim O’Reilly’s attention! Not only did Flex dominate the weekly stats, but it made a strong showing in the quarterly charts, as detailed in a series of reports on the state of the computer book market at O’Reilly.

There was some question whether preorders had skewed the numbers for this particular book, but it’s been over a week now, and it’s still in the top 5 on Amazon. Also worth noting: last year’s “ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook” by Joey Lott, Darron Schall and Keith Peters is still (or again?) in the top 15.

Luckily for us, both Joey and Chafic have already been confirmed as speakers at Flashforward2007 Boston! (Joey also has a very popular video training on AS3 in FlexBuilder for the lynda.com Online Training Library.) So be sure to come and congratulate them in person!

(Thanks to Tim, Ted, Ryan, JD and Kevin.)