Why are Flash games so bad?

Every so often I get a little bored and start perusing the Flash games sites. I don’t know why. All the games are the same and have a distinctly home-brewish feel about them. I’m no stranger to home-brew, I’ve been a fan since my Vic20 in the 1980’s, and my interest heightened with my Amiga 1200. My problem though, is that many of these games are commercially made.

One game that has caught my eye recently is Machinarium. The developers have done a wonderful job, they really have. After playing through the game twice I only have a couple of complaints. One is that you have to move the character close to an object you want to interact with. Why can’t he just walk there for me. That’s what most Graphic Adventures do. It’s only a minor annoyance though. The second complaint is something that all Flash games fall victim to, it’s far too short. It took only a couple of hours to complete. I can see that they already pushed the story as far as it would go, but for €15,12 I was expecting more.

Twenty years ago you could get a game for around the same price as that of Machinarium and it would take you weeks to complete. For that price you also got a box, manual, disks, and possibly some extras. Sure the graphics were of low resolution, but I would never say they were bad. What they lacked in fidelity, your imagination more than made up for. Playability was what games were about.

Back then storage was sparse and expensive, hardware wasn’t any cheaper, and games required rewriting in order to play on different systems. Games were squeezed in to 1/100th of the space of modern games, and to get decent performance, developers had top push the hardware to the max, and hardware pushed developers to breaking point. Optimisation was a must.

Teams of developers laboured arduously for years. At the same time, one man in his bedroom could craft a masterpiece in a matter of months. The gaming industry was booming.

I mention this because you can easily draw a parallel between those times and developing for the Flash Player today. There are both professional teams and bedroom programmers out there, and there are more games out there now than there even was. The Flash player is limited in its performance, and although bandwidth is increasing daily, downloading 350Mbytes just to play a game online is still out-with our grasp. Flash games have to be small.

What’s the problem with Flash games?

My problem really is the lack of recognition for the platform. If Flash was respected in any way as a platform for commercial gaming then we would see a lot more investment by game studios and publishers. There is no reason we can’t make games like the early 1990’s classic Monkey Island. The language and player are more than capable, the hardware is better, we have twenty years of lessons learned, and it’s now cheaper than ever to advertise and distribute games. Just because the games have to be small, doesn’t mean they have to be lacking anything.

If the platform isn’t the problem, what is?

he entry requirements are low, there isn’t a financial barrier requiring expensive software to start developing, tutorials and forums are plentiful. This sounds good, but many people barely grasp the basics of the language before not just working professionally, but gaining senior positions. I’ve heard developers spout such rubbish as “this is highly optimised” without even testing it (or even knowing how to test it), and basing their assumption solely on what they think they know. I’ve also worked with a head of development who didn’t know how classes worked. If a developer thinks he’s the best and has nobody to look up to, then all hope is lost for that developer to improve and evolve as a programmer. And if these people are helping other people then what hope does anyone have?

Who’s to blame for this lack of talent?

Adobe. Recently, a man who doesn’t even need to say anything to be quoted, Steve Jobs said “Adobe are lazy.” While I believe Adobe are lazy in some respects, I think that Mr Jobs has laziness confused with lack of focus. Adobe are too busy trying to please everybody. For the past few years they’ve been trying really hard not to alienate designers, as they were the ones that first bought in to the idea of Flash. By pandering to the lowest common denominator, Adobe have kept a majority of these non-programmers using ActionScript and prevented the language from maturing and attracting highly skilled Software Engineers from other languages.

But the buck doesn’t stop at Adobe. Once a game is complete it can be put on any number of Flash game sites (excuse me if I don’t mention them here) with the added allure of instantly earning the ever desirable Mochi-pennies. This ease of publishing promotes a try anything attitude which, unfortunately, is to the detriment of overall quality. It also promotes a revenue hungry clone war, where popular games are cloned to death to try and attract some of the attention and pennies away from the original. Tower Defence is just one such example. We could do without encouragement like this.

Summary

The problems with Flash today can be accounted to: the low entry requirements set by Adobe saturating the market with under-qualified developers; over cocky developers making it difficult for employers to cut the muster while performing interviews; and Flash games sites encouraging anyone to upload anything in the search for profit.

I really think Adobe should just let the non-programmers go. ActionScript is for programmers, and that’s not a bad thing, it would allow the non-programmers to stick to what they’re good at. If such an event was to occur, the quality of developers and what they produce would surely increase.

I dream a future of high quality Flash titles that kids will be talking about twenty years from now as I talk about games like Monkey Island today.