Flash The Ripper

On December 5-6, 2009 in Kyiv, the third conference of flash game developers, Flash GAMM Kyiv 2009 will fountain to encourage the Flash Games movement again, as it used to to two times before.
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When some of Soviet adults played big and serious Cold War Game, the happy children of U.S.S.R. were spending their time in different way. The culture of arcade machine games was blossoming in both city and country side. To be honest, not every village have got its electronic playground made on military factories, but there was pretty plenty of, and I was one of that happy children who has access.

That time has gone as soon as Iron Curtain fell and cheap game consoles (Mario, we remember you too) and then PCs became available to the regular families. But memory lives, and there are people in Moscow who does remember the old-school Soviet Arcade games, a big metal boxes with fancy, colorful reality inside, with controls and buttons, with a lot of fun. Alexander Stelmakh have founded the Museum, there are some details in the Wired’s Soviet-Era Arcade Games Crawl Out of Their Cold War article.

Now, some of the Soviet Era Arcades are online and playable

And now anyone can visit the Museum of Soviet arcade machines, that just opened today! At the moment, only its Russian version is fully functional. But you can actually play the favorite arcade games of Soviet kids. We thank the Flash Developer of Artemy Lebedev Studio, Dmitry Bezverhii and Anton Sidorenko, we also want to respect the whole ArtLebedev Studio for this cool work. These games probably not for everyone, but here they are, virtual Arcade Mashines of the U.S.S.R. At present, only four have been created in flash, but I hope more to come:

• Play “Magistral“ (eng: “Thoroughfare”), read its translated description.
• Play “Morskoy Boy“ (eng: “Sea Battle”). This game seems to be a clone of “Midway’s Sea Raider”. Read translated description.
• Play “Gorodki“, old Russian Game, here’s translated description and article in Wikipedia.
• Play “Avtoralli“ (eng: “Rally”), read its translated description.

Also, there are a huge quantity of nice illustrations of the development process.

The question is, can these games be popular in wide auditory, except the fans of 8-bit art, old school and vintage junkies, and the ex-children of Soviet Union?

To get it, look at the “Tanks“, the first game made on the Alternativa3D platform.

Fig. 1 (clickable to play). Tanks Battle. Anton Volkov of Altrernativa said “it’s just a prototype”

Also, Alternativa3D posted their detailed report about their trip to the Adobe MAX 2008 in Milano, including the second and third parts.

Ted Patrick just shared some info on his new “Hyperdrive” project which is a hosted video service for AdobeTV and Adobe Media Player, or just AMP.

This video project is for contain app demos, tutorials and conference sessions created by community. Anyone can upload his stuff and share with others.

To start with Hyperdrive, Ted uploaded the complete set of full San Jose 360|Flex Sessions recordings, so anyone can see them through the AMP now. All videos are High Definition 1024×768 ones. At the moment, 5 sessions are available:

1. TicketMaster Kiosk by Kevin Fauth
2. Flex Accessibility by Giorgio Natili
3. Reading the Flex source code by Jonathan Branam
4. Project Workflow by Axel Jensen
5. Creating Reusable Components by Ben Clinkbeard

If you are a Game Maker, and still not completely sure about how to sell your game(s), then following short article from Lorenz Games is for you: How to Get a Sponsorship with a Flash Game.

It is about how to make your offer to the game portals aside from the slow Flash Game License Bids, including a list of available resources with direct email links for faster communication (recommended by Lorenz), tips on composing email with the offer and important step of choosing the right game license (exclusive or non-exclusive).

Overall, this post may be useful even if you are not making flash games right now. Maybe you will decide to try out this way of monetizing your work after figuring out that Huge Flash Games Industry

I guess you played a lot of games, sophisticated too. But you probably never played this one. Literally speaking, “Polcarstva.net” is a simple quest game. There’s no 3D, no social features, no user registration or something web20 either. But it seems there’s a heart in the game. And there’s… there’s the flash in this piece of art, created by Denis Stepkin. Click to play:

…and also, there’s Sigur Ros soundtrack.