Summary of the Flash MindMeld

Summary of the Flash MindMeld:

Did you enjoy the Flash MindMeld?

If you want a brief recap of the conference, or you’re simply too lazy to listen for a 60 minutes speech, Chris Moeller from chrismweb.com listened all the tips and provided us a nice recap ready to be used when you are about to develop a game.

« I just finished listening and taking notes on all the sounds bites, and wanted to provide a summary of what I had heard.

I was happy to see Emanuele on there, but there were also some other big names, such as JIM GREER from kongregate, Sean Cooper who started game development in 1987, and worked on the PC title ‘Magic Carpet’ at bullfrom games, Tom Fulp, creator of newgrounds.com, alien hominid, Catle crashers, and many other developers, a lot I hadn’t heard of, but had seen their games.

Good Advice

Here is a bullet point list of what some of the developers said that I found useful:

• Make games that are simple and quick. Don’s plan on spending a lot of time in development before seeing what people think of it. The advice ranges from spending 2hrs on programming, to spending two weeks to a month. This is good advice because you can find out whether a concept works relatively quickly, and can get feedback from people testing the concepts early on.
• Make games re-playable by giving in game achievements and unlocking content- reward players for playing through multiple times. I think this is a good way to add re-playing because it gives casual players a way to get through quick, but also wonder about extra things in the game, and come back to try to find them, or even to have them feel like they ‘completed everything in the game’. Achievements aren’t too hard to add, but they can give a lot more for the player to do ‘if they chose to’(important part).
• Make games social. Not just in trying to add in facebook API to ‘compete high scores with friends’, but also advice as throw something memorable in the game so your game stands out. make it easy for someone to describe your game to a friend, instead of it just being ‘another shooter game’. One example was a developer that made a game where a slug crawls into a cat box and explodes – since it was ‘unique’ crazy, it might be more memorable.
• Have a good team. If you’re a great programmer, find a good artist and musician. This is something I’ve discovered is true in all sorts of business- outsource what you suck at, and work on what you’re good at. Sure, you can be good at everything, but it will save time, and allow each piece to be perfected by each person a little more if you can offload some of the work. Plus, spending a month trying to get a concept created and beign tired of the game vs. a week with a team means you’ll be less tired of the design, and able to think more creatively on your specific specialty.

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