Online Games Development in Flash - A Brief History

This is the first of two articles that will outline a little of what you can do in the realms of online games with Flash MX.

In this article I’ll review the guidelines, and some tips you can use to make your games Web-friendly through Flash Player. The second article will look at how to build a Snowboarding game with Flash MX.

In this article, we’ll explore the game process as a whole, and discuss why you need to think about using Flash MX to develop your games.

Flash is a very flexible tool for building games that are both entertaining and educational.

In the Beginning…

In the beginning there was Pong. And it was good. And it went PING! Unless, you lost, in which case you got only a grunt from the console.

The year was 1975, I was just a kid and was living in Flint, Michigan. My dad, an early computer junkie, had just scored big at the latest rummage sale and had come home with a game console. He brought it into the house very much like the Neanderthals probably did with their first dead Ox a few thousand years ago – it was held high over his head as he let out a roar of triumph. We spent the whole weekend playing Pong and Tennis on the TV. Man, that was cool!

Since those dizzy days, game systems have gone through massive changes. In the UK we saw the Sinclair Spectrum (see following figure) in 1981, quickly followed by the Commodore 64. Both systems allowed users to write their own games and save the game to an audio tape. I can still remember typing in Basic and trying to get the simple game of Break Out to work.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum, above, boasted 8 colors and 48Kb of memory!

Companies such as Nintendo and Sega quickly changed the game console business with the introduction of the Nintendo Family System and Sega Genesis. A whole new level of graphics, sound and interaction were introduced to users.

The next big leap for game users came with the PC. Quake, Wolfenstein, and Tomb Raider re-wrote how we play games not just on a PC but against each other across Local Area Networks. Today, systems such as Microsoft’s X-Box, Nintendo’s Game Cube and, of course, Sony’s Playstation II are delivering mind boggling graphics that aim to simulate reality in their detail. And Sony is bragging that we have seen nothing yet.

Using the Web

So… where is Flash in all of this?

You have to look to the Web. While everything has been moving along very quickly for the game console world one significant flaw has remained. To play a game developed for the Playstation, you must own a Playstation. The Web, on the other hand, only requires that you have a connection to the Internet, a Web browser and the Flash Player.

Flash is the de facto plugin for all Web browsers. Flash comes installed on every new PC (it’s part of the default Windows XP installation) and Mac. In fact, Flash has been there since Windows 98. You will also find Flash installed on most PDAs and many interactive Cell Phones such as DoCoMo’s media phone, which is sold in Japan. What I’m basically saying is that Flash is everywhere. In fact over 520 million unique installations of Flash have been recorded, accounting for 96%+ of all Internet Users.