There’s no formula anyone can tell you to make make a really successful Flash game. A great game doesn’t have to have good artwork, be complicated or even be hard to program. However, there are a number of things which you can do to make your game more appealing for selling your game for sponsorship or convincing game portals to add your game.

One of those is doing a professional job on the look of your game, the easiest thing to do is make nice game characters. Too many people make a simple game and just use either primitives (squares, circles, etc.) or stick men. That’s fine if your game is amazingly good like Fancy Pants but it doesn’t really make your game stand out from the crowd. The game will get overlooked by a lot of sponsors and will make a more memorable first impression if they see a nice character instead of just another stick man or ball.

A lot of people just say “but I can’t draw” but of course you can! Drawing is just practice and keeping things simple to start with. I like to use a sketch book to draw all my characters before committing to Flash. Two reasons for this: first, it’s quicker and second, if you have the sketchbook with you over time you can build up a bank of characters to use in future games. You never know when a good idea will pop up.

Here’s one way of making a game character.

First, start off with a circle for the head, and 5 lozenge shapes for the body, legs and arms. Most game characters can start off with this as the skeleton; if you’d like, you could also add more arms, have no legs or perhaps 3 legs. The beauty of game characters is they don’t have to look like anything real. For this guy I decided he should have a squid like head, so I drew on some tentacles and some facial features. Again you can do what you like, 3 eyes, 2 mouths, an extra ear. I was once on a strange project where the client asked for two beards! The third stage is just cleaning up the lines a bit. Don’t worry about details at this stage, this is just the framework to get the character into Flash. Once the sketch is complete, the image is then scanned and imported into Flash.

In the image above, I imported the sketch of squid boy and turned it into a movieclip. That way, I can put it on a layer and make its alpha 50%. This just makes it a bit easier to trace over. Initially all you want to do is draw lines between each curve point. Try and use the fewest amount of points you can get away with. The next step is to grab each of the middle of those lines to create the outline of your character. You now have a perfect outline to work with.

The next thing is coloring. I don’t know why but a lot of people think blue is #0000FF, you should avoid colors which don’t contain a good mix as they just don’t look nice. Also try and pick colors which complement each other, i.e. purples and yellow, blues and oranges, reds and greens. Avoid colors which are too bright unless you want your art to look like a kids drawing. Squid boy I decided to be mainly shades of blue with details in orange. I then filled all the outlines with flat colors.

He looks okay at this stage but still a little flat. You can sort that by using 2 tone shading, you have to decide which direction the light is coming from in the case from the left. So you have to add some more lines to the left and right of his head, body and arms. These are then filled with a darker colour on the right (shadow) and a lighter colour on the left. The lines can then be removed and he’s starting to look pretty cool.

The final thing is to add a few details, highlights in the eyes, I also don’t like black outlines on characters very much. A lot of animators use a colour which is a darker shade of the character to do the outlines, and in this case I’ve used a Navy blue. The only thing left is to separate his limbs/head so you can animate him in game.

The whole thing probably took about 20 minutes from start to finish, and you’ve got yourself a decent looking game character, which will make your game easier to sell and far more likely to do well.