Robertson Auditorium Presentations

• Opening Keynote – Jameson Hsu, CEO, Mochi Media
• Panel: 4 keys to a successful social game
• Panel: Money in Flash: Next Gen Monetization Games
• Adobe Tools and Services for Flash Games
• The Mochis Award Show
• Panel: Monetizing Your Game Outside of Sponsorship
• Panel: Everything About Sponsorship & Licensing
• The ups and downs of getting a premium flash game to success

Fisher Room Presentations

• Canabalt: Behind the Skyline
• From Bedroom to Medium Sized Office… The Nitrome Story
• PushButton Engine 101
• Flash Games Invade the 3rd Dimension! Papervision3D
• haXe for Flash Game Developers
• Boxhead (unreleased) Deconstruction

Photos

Hop on over to Flickr or watch the slide slow below.

Coverage

• 3D engine in 10 lines* – Seb Lee-Delisle’s 3D Particle code from FGS preso
• Monetizing Your Game Outside of Sponsorship – Great panel transcript and recap by Adrian Crook of FreeToPlay.Biz
• Haxe for Flash Development – GameDev.net
• Adobe Tools and Services for Flash Games – GameDev.net
• Pushbutton Engine 101 – Ben Garney – GameDev.net
• Panel – 4 Keys to a Successful Social Game that All Game Developers Should Know – GameDev.net
• Addicting News: Flash Gaming Summit (The First Three Hours) – AddictingGames.com blog
• Flash Gaming Summit 2010 – Untold Entertainment
• Flash Gaming Summit Report #1: The Longest Day – 8bitrocket
• Top Flash games honored at The Mochis 2010 – Gamezebo
• The 7 Elements Of Social Game Success – Social Times
• Flash Indie Game Interweb Mash-up: March 9, 2010: Flash Gaming Summit Edition – 8bitrocket
• So, How Was The Flash Gaming Summit? – ActiveDen
• Flash Gaming Summit: Retrospect – Jmtb02

Until next year, follow @fgsummit on Twitter and also subscribe for updates to the mailing list (right side-bar) on the Flash Gaming Summit website.

© ada for MochiLand, 2010. | Permalink | 7 comments

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© Vadim Starygin for MochiLand, 2009. | Permalink | 28 comments

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Visit the Triqui MochiAds Arcade plugin for WordPress official page for more details. Note that this plugin was independently developed (kudos to Emanuele!) so please direct any questions you have about it to him.

© ada for MochiLand, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments

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What were we trying to achieve?

The game portal we wanted to build was slightly different from the usual. Rather than grabbing an RSS feed from somewhere like Kongregate and re-publishing everything they publish, we wanted to hand-pick our favourite games and just publish them. Quality over quantity; unless you’re talking about cupcakes.

Naturally we still wanted all the normal things that game portals do (categories, RSS feeds of games, ratings, comments etc). Both of us being programmers, we considered writing our own game portal software for, oh I don’t know, maybe 6 seconds? We ultimately decided against this because it would take too long and maintaining the code would be a bit of a nightmare (seriously, you have never seen my code).

We took a look at the portal software that was already out there. The two main players were Arcadem Pro and PHPAS. They both had some neat features alright, but overall the solutions seemed too messy. They did way more than we could ever want or need, and it really just seemed like way too much effort to apply our own design to either theme. In our search for simplicity and flexibility, it turned out we had been looking at the solution every time we visited our blog.

WordPress: The Unlikely Hero

WordPress is a blogging platform that I’m sure many of you are already familiar with. It powers millions of blogs all over the Internet, but we were able to take many of the features it offers and use them to build our portal.

So, what makes it great for a game portal?!

Our basic need was simply to publish games that we had hand-picked from various sources, and include a few details about the game and our own mini-review. We thought about it for a little while and realised that the process of publishing games for the portal was very similar to how we published out blog posts. The features that WordPress offered also made many aspects of managing the portal a lot simpler.

• 1. RSS Feeds: WordPress automatically creates RSS feeds of content published through it, so we had a ready-made feed where people could subscribe to see game releases right in their feed reader.
• 2. Pretty URLs: They’re nice to look at and it’s easy for users to remember them. Google is pretty fond of them too. All these factors make games on the portal a whole lot easier to find.
• 3. Scheduled Posts: This one’s a beauty. You could spend one night queueing up your planned releases for the next couple of months and then fly out to the Bahamas while WordPress sits at home in the rain, busily publishing out your games just like you told it to.
• 4. Comments: WordPress makes it very easy for your users have their say about each game that you post.
• 5. Categories & Tags: It’s super simple to add games to specific categories or tag them with specific keywords straight out of the box.

A little help from our friends

Of course, WordPress didn’t bow to our every command straight out of the box. We wanted our users to be able to rate the games that we published, and, being the Twitter nerds that we are, we wanted to announce the launch of each game via Twitter on our dedicated Gambrinous Games feed. Luckily, all of these issues were easily rectified by the vast WordPress developer community. We added the following plugins to help us along the way:

• Twitter Tools: A nice a simple plug-in that will automagically add new posts to Twitter.
• WP-PostRatings: Add ratings to each post in WordPress. It also has a nice feature to allow you to customise what information gets displayed around the star ratings.
• Akismet: This comes with WordPress and is a must for any blog that accepts comments. It will filter out all those nasty Viagra ads.

Already at this point, we had the bones of our game portal. There was one more feature in WordPress that came in handy, and that was Custom Fields. There was certain information that wasn’t easily conveyed through WordPress’ default functionality or through plug-ins. Certain things like setting the width and height of the flash game or setting thumbnails and screen-shots of each game we publish.

To get around this, we added a few custom fields to our blog posts for each piece of information that we needed, then added it to our WordPress theme where required. It really was remarkably painless.

The Science Bit

We brought everything together in a WordPress theme. We took the default Kubrick theme and modified it to fit our needs. The excellent WordPress Codex served as our guide throughout this process, required reading if you’re going to be making your own templates. The first thing you need to understand is the anatomy of a WordPress theme. All themes are stored in individual folders named after the theme. If you created a theme called “My Super Game Portal”, it would be found here:

/wp-content/themes/my-super-game-portal/

Another handy feature of WordPress themes is the functions.php file. Simply create a file called functions.php in your theme folder and add any custom functions to it. Everything you put in there will be available to your theme automagically. We have custom functions for pulling our top rated games and our newest games out of the database.

The final technical detail you really need to know before being able to customise your own WordPress theme is how to use those custom fields I mentioned earlier. One way we use the custom fields is to set the width and height of each game that we publish.

To use these fields in our template, we simply use the following code on the game page (single.php):

<?php
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'game_width', true);
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'game_height', true);
?>


That should be enough to get you started. For more information, you should check out the Theme Development article within the WordPress Codex.

Finally and in Conclusion

So, that’s how we did it. It was quick and simple, and all made possible by our new friend WordPress. What are you doing still reading? Go and use WordPress to build that game portal you’ve been talking about for the last 2 months!

© Peter McKenna for MochiLand, 2009. | Permalink | 45 comments

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This week’s Flash Game Friday winner is Retroshoot! This game pits the player against waves of enemies in a horizontal/vertical (it changes depending on the wave) shooter that reminds of “shmups” of yesteryear! One of the features I liked in the game was the fact that the game did all the shooting for me. I didn’t have to rapidly click my finger over and over again, nor did I have to keep my finger down in a cramped like fashion to keep the ship firing. This allowed me to focus my time and energy on dodging enemies while blowing other ones out of space. Couple that with really nice special effects (that purple lightning gets me every time) and you’ve got yourself an exciting time drain. Take that, you frakkin’ toasters!

Play the Game: Retroshoot
Developer: mostfreebies

© Alexander Shen for MochiLand, 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments

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During the existence of Elite-Games.net, I have received created eleven sponsored games in total. Successful sponsorship of games hinges on effective distribution, so I decided to write a short tutorial on the method I use to distribute Flash games.

So… once you’ve made a game, found a sponsor and received money from him, what do you do after that?. After the sponsor has reached his exclusive period, usually a term of one week, here are a few things to remember:

1) Track Your Success

Your first assistant in distributing your game should be MochiBot. MochiBot is an invisible and free embed in your game that enables you to track how many people are playing your game, and where it’s being distributed across the Web.

2) Make Your Game Easy to Spread

Before releasing your game, make sure you add a link to your game’s main menu to make it easy for the player to download or embed your game. In my game Elite Forces South Esetia, I added the link “Add to your blog or site”. See the example.

3) Use In-Game Ads and Popular Game Distribution Programs

This goes without saying, but don’t forget to insist on having your own in-game ads for the game.

If your sponsor allows you to use the service, you can use the MochiAds Distribution Program, FGD , and GJ to help push your game across websites through their game distribution feeds. It’ll take you about an hour and your game will be taken by 100 + portals.

You will have to make 2 different versions of the game. For the MochiAds, create a version with MochiAds advertising only. For GameJacket, you can use MochiAds inter-level ads but they do not allow advertising in the pre-loader. If you’re able to, include the MochiAds Leaderboard in your game because it leaderboard-enabled games perform better in distribution. Make sure that using these programs works with any sponsorship contracts that you have agreed to.

4) Upload the Game to Major Portals

I recommend uploading your game to NewGrounds and Kongregate. Once you’ve uploaded both games, send the 2 links to all your friends with a request to give you 5/5 points. Your task is to establish a high rating with points at least in the beginning. There is a network of portals that will take games from those portals, so long as they have a good rating. Don’t forget that your sponsor is your best friend in all relation as to your game. Send him a link to your game from NG and K, ask them to vote for it (and HIS friends too). Receiving a high rating and distribution are as important for him as to you.

5) Communicate with the Gamer Community

The previous steps will take you about 5 hours, but afterward make sure you take part in the discussion of your game. Be polite. Don’t insult anybody, don’t take comments personally and don’t pay attention to the stupid and offensive comments. Learn from the feedback where it’s worthwhile and use that to improve your next game. You can create a lot of fans when the creator of the game is actively responding and taking part in a conversation.

6) Get Your Sponsor To Help

Your sponsor is your friend in the task of distributing your game. He also has friends with the portals. Remind him to ask his friends to post your game and if possible to get a featured position on their site. Some portals do not work with the developers, but only with the other portals – Ask your sponsor to contact these portals as well.

7) And now the difficult part – submitting your game to other portals

Here is a list of game portals you can submit to 45 + .

Tip: Check your MochiBot. Don’t spam those portals when they already have your game up, so you don’t irritate the portal owner when they already have your game up. You can also email portals from this list .

Do not forget to exclude portals where your game is already available.

8) Submit your game some more.

If you look on forums and other sites, many other developers have shared access to their MochiBot stats. Look at their data and pay attention the top 20 domains. Noticed some high-traffic portals where your game hasn’t spread? Contact them and correct the situation.

If I’ve forgotten something or made a mistake, please let me know what you think by commenting please!

© Vadim Starygin for MochiLand, 2009. | Permalink | 11 comments

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Ada asked me to give a few pointers on how to get things on to the front page of Digg.com. Though I don’t really consider myself an expert (Though at one point I had a 65% popular ratio with over 100 stories submitted), I’m happy to help out however I can. I’m going to try to paint as complete a picture as possible, so some of it might bore you. Skip to wherever you want out of the article.

What is Digg?

Digg is a social media site based around users submitting and voting up news. It has hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, the vast majority of which don’t go any further than the homepage.

Why Get on Digg?

Well, if it isn’t obvious already, the main appeal of getting on Digg is sending its users over to your site. In my experience, getting to the front page of Digg sends no fewer than 15,000 people, and as many as 150,000. I’d say you get around 50,000 average. The Digg traffic alone is not main appeal, however. The site acts as a gathering point for Internet power users, who take what they find on Digg and distribute it elsewhere, usually forums or blogs, which in turn sends a large amount of traffic.

So How Do We Do It?

There’s no simple algorithm to getting on the front page Digg, and the complex algorithm that DOES power it is secret. Here’s a list of the commonly assumed factors, as well as what you’re aiming for in parenthesis after them:

• The number of Diggs (more is better, obviously. Note, however, that digging from the same IP counteracts diggs and can get you banned)
• The amount of time a story has existed (The more diggs in a shorter amount of time is better. Also note that most stories CANNOT get to the front page after 24 hours)
• Where the diggs are coming from (It seems that Digg users that have been registered for a long time but have very few diggs have the most powerful diggs)
• From whence are they digging the story? (Most people believe that diggs coming from outside the site going in hold more power than internal diggs. It’s also widely believed that a digg coming from an embedded button is the most powerful)
• What category is the story in? (Less popular categories require fewer diggs. Playable web games is a very unpopular category :D )
• What domain does the story point to? (There seems to be a threshold here. For a long time my site required ~100-120 diggs to get on the front page, and then one day it dropped to 40, after which it started climbing again.)
• Is the story being buried? (If so, who’s burying it and why they say it should be buried also affects it.)

These are just 7 of the many factors that affect Digg. Almost all of them are under your control and pretty exploitable. Unfortunately the first requirement isn’t completely under your control. So now let’s take a look at…

What People Want to Digg

Unfortunately there’s no clear cut answer to this, either (May I be praised for writing an informative article that delivers no information.) I will give my experience though:

• Something that gets started within 15 seconds of getting to the page. No long intros or credits.
• Something that doesn’t last more than 10 minutes (Or has a breaking point within 10 minutes of starting).
• Something that relates to topics already popular on Digg (Usually the same topics that’re popular anywhere else on the internet where people consider themselves well-informed: Atheism, Linux and Libertarianism.)

But even a story that contains all the right things will be lost in the crowd, unless you know how to…

Title Your Story

Titles should be either extremely short or extremely long to be eye-grabbing around average-length titles. Diggers love to see numbers, celebrity references and pop culture references in Digg titles; they’ll click them just because they’re something they already know. For example “15 Ron Paul Look-Alikes on American Idol (Made from LEGO!)” will go extremely far on Digg just by the title alone. For a long time we directed our content based on good Digg titles, we’d pick a title and then create content that could be made that fit it. However, even with the ideal title you still need diggs, and to do that you’ve got to get the right stuff in front of the right eyes, so you should…

Be Powerful on Digg

What does it mean to be powerful on Digg? It means that the Digg community is interested in things that interest you. And that means making lots of friends. Here’s a list of tips on making active friends:

• Be active yourself – Digg lots of stories, particularly in the category in which you want to be powerful.
• Seek out other power users – Friend everyone you see digging stories from your category, particularly if you’re getting them in Upcoming.
• Make powerful friends – Friend all the diggers that get to the front page consistently, particularly if they’re in your category.
• Impress people – Leave funny/informative comments on stories and people will follow you.
• Be notable – Have a funny name and a funny or eye-catching avatar.
• Give diggs – Answer shouts from your digg friends. They’ll notice your diggs and help you back.

Eventually, once you start getting some stories on to the front page, people will start coming to you to be your friend, and you won’t have to worry about this anymore.

What to do once you’re on the front page:

First of all, hope that your server doesn’t go down. Digg traffic can put a real load on. Second of all, set up the page in such a way as to keep those people there and clicking. The big shortcoming of Digg is that often people want to be in and out as quickly as possible, so they’ll come to your site, play your game, and immediately go back to Digg. You have to find out how to keep them there, such as offering them a free full downloadable version of your game if they register.

© Jeff Gorndt for MochiLand, 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments

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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.

© Rob James for MochiLand, 2009. | Permalink | 12 comments

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Pushori

This week’s Flash Game Friday winner is Pushori! This deceptively simple block pushing game has put me in a very strange place: I understand the concept fully, but am extremely bad at it. For some reason, that careful mix just pushes me to want to play again so I can get better. Not an easy task and not something a developer can just “program” to do. Also, the level of polish (a great example of using simple graphics to get the point across) and strong color choices make this a winner!

Make sure to congratulate Tonypa and give the game a go!

Play the Game: Pushori
Developer: Tonypa
Forum Post: Link

© Alexander Shen for MochiLand, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments

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Ever wondered how people are able to have all their AI walk around walls, water or even other players? Here I will cover one of the many sorting algorithms out there that could manage this, and once you understand it the possibilities are endless!

Introduction:

Ok, so after much thought about what to do next in flash I decided that a wee break from it might be in order, so I’m going to write a tutorial with the hope of educating people on shortest path algorithms, and at the same time hopefully give something back to the Mochi community.

I’ve seen so many flash games make use of them that are simply directly copied off someone else’s tutorial, so a little word of warning: this tutorial will NOT give you any flash code what so ever, I have no intension of educating people who are trigger happy with ctrl+c/ctrl+v. I want you to understand the algorithm, so you can build on it and adapt it to new problems and create some new and interesting never-before-seen games.

There are some truly amazing games out there that make use of shortest path algorithms, probably the most popular being Desktop Tower Defense, and it’s games like these that have inspired me to try and get up-and-coming flash developers to understand some important algorithms.

As stated in the title, this tutorial will cover Dijkstra’s algorithm. Unlike algorithms such as the A* Algorithm (which I will hopefully write a tutorial on later), Dijkstra’s algorithm can compute the shortest paths from a given start point to all other nodes without effecting the runtime – which does have many advantages depending on what you’re programming. Make sure you have a read around google for ’shortest path algorithms’ if you’re unsure about which to use – that or do something outrageous and buy a book :o Don’t run away quite yet though, pictures coming up ;)

Background on Pathfinding Algorithms

:

Shortest path algorithms, for those of you that don’t know, are used to find a path between two vertices such that the weight of the constituent edges chosen are minimised.

Dijkstra’s algorithm, was created by Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra in 1959.

I think that enough background, I’ve never been a fan of writing huge amounts of text about it :)

Helpful notes on the algorithm we’re about to look at:

s, v, and w are all verticies, with three properties attached to them:

• Known
• Path
• Distance

s is the initial vertex
v is the current vertex being used
w is the current adjacent vertex being used

Algorithm:

Set all verticies as not known, and with infinity distance
Set s.distance to 0
while true
	set v to be the vertex with the smallest distance, that isn't known
	if v is null
		break
	set v.known to true
	for each w adjacent to v
		if w.known is false
			//costVW is the distance from vertex v to vertex w
				if v.distance + costVW < w.distance
					w.distance = v.distance + costVW
					w.path = v

Look a little confusing? Not to worry, I'll try my best to break this down to explain it further with the use of some helpful pictures. Here's the initial graph that we will be applying the Dijkstra's Algorithm to:

As you can see the graph consists of 5 nodes: A, B, C, D and E, and a total of 7 edges: {AB, AD, AC, BD, CD, CE, DE}, all of which have been assigned weights.

There are many different reasons you might want to have different weights between nodes when applied to a flash game. For example, when travelling from point C to point D, there might be water directly between so it will be hard to walk this direct path (a higher weight could reperesent this), so it might be quicker to simply walk around the water. Other reasons could include something as simple as a wall, the weight between C and D could be set so high that the character could never walk this path. I'll let you decide how to apply it to your own work though.

For this example I have chosen that I want to figure out the shortest path to all other nodes from point E, so let's get started.

Table:

Now I hope after looking at all the nice pretty pictures I took the time to draw, that you were making a table to represent the data at the same time? ;) No? Oh well, here you go.:

• K = known
• D = distance
• P = path

This table shows the data after each path, it coincides with the diagram so if you're still not sure about what is going on relook over the diagrams and compare it with the table. For those of you still programming in a procedural way might find this harder and messier to implement than those of you that have took the time to learn an object orient way to programming. Although there's nothing wrong with programming in a procedural way, I find it much easier to keep code all neat, tidy and reusable with an object oriented approach. Don't know what I'm talk about? Wiki it :p

End note:

That about covers what you need to know, I have taken the time to create an example with a table and diagrams, and on top of that provide the algorithm - which more than enough to let you understand Dijkstra's Algorithm. Hopefully I'll have the time to create some other tutorials in a similar fashion to cover all the other great sorting alogirthms out there. If you're stuck trying to implement it then message me through the community, or comment on this post.

Good luck!

© Rhuaridh Clark for MochiLand, 2008. | Permalink | 7 comments

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