Flash games have come on leaps and bounds in recent years. Once the domain of the bedroom geek, Flash games as a source of online entertainment are now well and truly mainstream.
At a recent conference Raph Koster, designer of Ultima: Online and president of Areae said, “The web is kicking the console industry’s ass”. That quote actually has a lot of truth in it – there are more installations of the Flash player worldwide than all the Playstations, Wiis and Xboxes combined!
With this increase in player interest comes increased demand. More and more companies are looking to Flash game developers to create new and exciting games for them, and more and more developers are learning Flash specifically to develop games.
Typically learning Flash game development is a slow and time consuming business. While there are a few online courses starting to appear, most developers are forced to learn from books. Since Flash game development is very hands on, yet highly technical at the same time, learning from books and articles is far from ideal, and so the learning curve is steep.
Another way to learn is by สล็อต pulling apart existing Flash games source code, seeing how it was written, modifying it, and using the source files as learning tools. The problem is that it’s very difficult to acquire decent Flash game source code since most developers guard it closely.
Open source Flash games
While most developers choose to keep their game source a closely guarded secret, some developers adopt a different approach and make the source for their games available. “Open source” is term usually meaning that source code is freely distributed, and maintained by a community of developers with the aim of improving the code and adding features, normally of complex software such as operating systems and desktop applications. In a more general sense, open source just means source code which is available to use.
With the Flash game source code a developer can both use it as a learning tool, and use it to quickly create derivative works. From simply rebranding the game with a different logo, to making fundamental changes to the gameplay, editing open source Flash games is much faster than starting from scratch. The same FLA file can be used again and again to make different versions of a game, or parts of the code can be used to speed up development of a new game.