Art for Flash Games
Author of this post: Rob James | About Blog Authors »
Before making art for Flash games, I spent 9 years working on PlayStation titles in the console games industry. When I first started in games it was fun—teams were small and games were done in 12 months. Usually you had a lot of control over how your levels looked. When I left the games industry, games were 3-year projects, with teams of 50, you were doing collision models for 6 months.
So I decided to learn Flash just in my spare time for something to do. Most people in the games industry seem to see Flash as a bit of a toy—something which doesn’t really make proper games. I have to admit that I shared that opinion but then I started to play a few of the games and decided to make something simple myself. The Blobuloids was my first game—basically a whack-a-mole game but you have to feed the blobs the food they like. It took me about a week’s worth of lunchtimes and evenings, but then it was finished and I put it on my site and submitted it to a few Flash arcade sites.
I came up with the game artwork while looking back through my sketchbook and found a sketch I had made that would be easy to get into Flash. The basic process involved importing the bitmap and then drawing over it in Flash to create the background and the blob characters. It was a really strange feeling to have total creative control over the game and also to have finished in a week. What I was really shocked about was how popular the game was—in less than three months it had been played over one million times and that actually spiraled up. In eighteen months it as now been played 6.5 million times and gets played around 500,000 times a month.
The basic process for most of my games since then has been the same process—go through the sketchbook, find a crazy character, and make a small game around them. This was the case for Robo Pogo, the Flying Platypus, Chooka World, the Game Called Bob, and Starling Golf. None of those were quite as popular as the first one, but combined they still did 12 million plays. I usually scan in my sketches and then drawn over the top of them.
The game was really well received and had good reviews from a number of well know casual games sites (Jayisgames). It also won awards on Kongregate and Newgrounds, two of the top game sites on the Internet. I was also able to sell several licenses to companies including MTV, mousebreaker, freeworld group, bubblebox, and a few others. It was all-stills with animation laid on top—there were several rooms where things animated such as a tube train and a walking robot, which really set it apart graphically from other Flash room-escapers.
A lot of the skills I’ve learn about 3D modeling have played a part in a number of games since. I produced 3D rendered art for a number of other titles, including a top down shooter called Aliens Must Die, a multiplayer tanks game called TankBears, and Gran Prix Tycoon, which was developed as a commission for mousebreaker.
Have I missed making PlayStation games? Not really; I don’t think I could ever go back to long development periods. So many PlayStation games now have 2 years spent on them and at the end they just aren’t fun. The beauty of Flash development is that you can get an idea one lunchtime (like keep a robot balanced on a pogo stick), knock up a prototype in a few hours, and see if it’s any good before carrying on. Even if the game turns out like garbage, you can release it and learn from it.
Almost all the innovation in game play is now coming from the casual developer—there no client to deal with so you get to make anything you want, and there’s no real risk in doing something crazy, which you just couldn’t get away with in a corporate environment.
