Category: Flash Games

Flash Not-Really-MMOs

Over the past week, I have responded to quite a few requests, ads, etc. for F2P browser-based “MMOs,” CCGs, etc. They have been, to a one, poor. The winner, though, is Call of Gods, a game that applies the Evony/Civony/Travian economic model to what looks like a mostly PvE game. Combat plays out automatically with no player intervention. The developers recognized that this was really boring, so they added a button to skip it … which demands the RMT currency. Yes, it is a game that invites you to play and then offers to let you pay for the privilege of not doing so.

: Zubon

Improving Their Respectability

respectable ads
If I told you that a browser-based “strategy” game was advertising itself with ad banners reading, “One Click for a Roman Orgy! Click Now!” could you guess the game? I cropped the name out of the picture, to avoid giving them that bit of free advertising, but… wow. The big surprise, really, is that they are still in business.

: Zubon

Advertise discreetly, my lord.

Not To Scale

Not To Scale is a little flash gem. It takes a simple game mechanic that you know (swap the tiles to assemble the picture) and adds a twist (the “squares” are different sizes, and the tiles stretch themselves to fit). I don’t know that I see anywhere further to take the idea, but it is a novel variation on a classic puzzle that utilizes the strengths of the computer, the way that Elements does for collectible card games with mechanics that change and duplicate cards in ways you could not with physical cards.

: Zubon

Portion Size

There is little silliness quite like using a souped-up, thousand-dollar PC to play flash games, but I tend to enjoy them when MMOs run stale. As I have heard many say about no cover charge DDO, it is a low commitment, short duration, high yield gaming experience. They are intended as self-contained blocks.

Most flash games do not feel the need for padding. If you are selling a game, you add in grind, repetition, fake difficulty, and other playtime extenders, because your players expect 40 hours of play for their money. If your business model is “none” or “ad revenue plus tips,” adding in an unfun hour benefits no one. So you get not only smaller portion size but higher content density within it.

The downside is that independent trials lead to quite a few failures. If you log on WoW and run your dailies, you know what you are getting. If you play the latest featured flash game, it could be really horrible. But there again, they are self-contained, so lousy parts are not defiling a larger game/world.

: Zubon

Flash Games as Proof of Concept

You can have high-budget flash games, but I like that they are often a quick and inexpensive way to explore part of design-space. You can base an entire game around one simple idea or see what happens if you take that idea to its logical extreme. I have highlighted quite a few as they relate to my thought of the day.

This weekend, Kongregate had Ultimate Assassin 2 as a featured game. This is not a particularly good game. It instantiates something I have discussed a few times lately: randomness plus difficulty yields an unsatisfying experience. It can become completely impossible, although in this case it more often becomes tedious (you can wait for 10 impossible minutes to pass for your opportunity to come, although sometimes it really is impossible because three enemies will converge on you and wait). Other times, it is trivially easy, because the enemies’ random pathing works in your favor. You never know if you are doing well or if the game was randomly in your favor, if this level is more difficult than the last or the randomness is just being perverse.

As I said, the randomness is rarely so perverse as to make it completely impossible. If you wait long enough, it will eventually hit a trivially easy configuration. Sitting and waiting for that is not compelling gameplay, any more than repeatedly throwing yourself into the teeth of whatever randomly happens in case this one randomly works in your favor. Either way, you are waiting a fair while before the stars align and you can do anything. I like the concept and the outlines of the design, but the specifics are appalling. Not that non-random would be a lot more fun, since it would be an exercise in memorizing the guards’ pathing patterns, but at least the difficulty would be known and could be progressively increased, rather than leaping about chaotically with a fair amount of “not no way, not no how” mixed in.

: Zubon

If only the “ultimate assassin” thought to bring a gun, like all those guards did.

Balancing for Upgrades

I have frequently cited the difficulties of balancing a game in which the players have upgrades. Either you assume that players will be mostly/fully upgraded, in which case the base content is nigh-impossible without them, or you balance it so that players can beat it without grinding in-game cash for upgrades, in which case it will be face-roll easy for anyone upgraded.

The clearest example I have met yet is Notebook Wars. Flying into the last mission without a fully upgraded weapon, the final boss took 15 minutes. Its attack pattern is about 5 seconds long, so you might imagine those were not the most exciting 15 minutes of gaming I have, but you know the bloody-minded need to finish it when you’ve gotten that far. For bonus fun, the shots you dodge in that fight have a slightly larger hit box than the graphics for them.

There is a downward spiral to this. I upgraded for defense before offense. The cash for upgrades comes from killing things, not surviving or beating missions. On the second row of missions, I saved up for the best ship (defense), so on the third row, enemies were flying off the map before I could kill them. It was ridiculously easy because I did not need my new ship’s increased speed; its increased hit points let me turn on autofire and go AFK during the level 11 boss fight. (That fight, by the way, would be a great place to farm money if you were so inclined, because the boss spawns enemies that are worth a lot.)

Or maybe the designer meant to have a 15-minute long boss fight on the idea that really long fights are epic.

: Zubon

[Update: the latest Zero Punctuation addresses this same topic in a game that has a budget.]

Bunny Flags

I recently had an unhealthily long binge of Bunny Flags. Bunny-themed tower defense? Score! The attacking enemies are fingers and hands (who start to acquire football helmets and suicide vests), so it feels like “Little Bunny Foo Foo goes to war.” Your towers are bunnies in teacups. You can also choose to specialize in towers or your hero units. The maps remind me of Desktop Tower Defense: the obstacles are things like calculators and tomatoes.

I recommend playing at the highest difficulty possible, because the bonus for barely surviving that is greater than the bonus for doing any lower difficulty perfectly.

: Zubon

“Unhealthily” passes spellcheck, score. But “spellcheck” doesn’t, huh.

Behind the Black

… or, “UI vs. Player” (not a FFXIV review).

You get used to playing with games that have first-person view or an adjustable camera. Playing some old school (-style) games, I am reminded of how the third-person camera and the interface was used against the player. It is like my earlier post about how the game abstracts, you suspend disbelief, then you are expected to forget that abstraction at some point.

The particular example I am thinking of is having things visible to the character but not the player. We all take advantage of this in third-person view games, looking around corners, above the ceiling, etc. You can see the entire screen, even if your character has a blocked view. But there can be a six-story boss just off-screen, with only a flat plain between you and it, and you will never see it coming. Many game reveled in having power-ups hidden just a bit to the left and right of the screen.

The game of the weekend at Kongregate is Epic Battle Fantasy 3, a Final Fantasy-esque game. There are chests and secret passages hidden behind foreground objects on almost every screen. Some of them are partly visible or have a hint that there must be a secret passage, but others are just invisible. Some of those chests hold equipment you cannot get elsewhere, and there are in-game medals for finding them all (and you need x medals per zone to get to a room with more chests with more exclusive equipment…), so the game encourages a mini-game of pushing up against everything and trying to open invisible chests. Your characters can see the chests and secret passages open in front of them, but they are powerless to tell you. They cannot even cry as they pass by the loot they so desire.

It had not struck me at the time that this is a related issue in Desktop Dungeons. Exploration is very important, but your character can only see next to itself, not down a hallway. Maybe you carry a very weak torch. I proclaimed a fondness for seeing the whole level so you would know if it was worth playing, but of course that is the other side of the absurdity: you can see the entire level, even though there is no way your character could.

Either approach works, first- or third-person view (or third with flexible camera), but it is annoying to have it used against the player. And it feels harder to use first-person view against the player.

: Zubon

Elements Breakthrough

The critical threshold, for me at least, was getting around 30,000 electrum. Once my Elements deck was about half upgraded, it started doing reasonably well against False Gods, which lets you start winning upgraded cards regularly, which lets you finish upgrading your deck and work on other options.

This is a good thread to show you what works well against the T3 Elders. To get to False Gods, I started with an unupgraded rainbow transitioning to an upgraded rainbow, with changes as appropriate for playstyle.

: Zubon