The true face of flash games | Hacker News Reader

The true face of flash games

grownsoftware.com

17 pointsecaradec12 comments

This all began as a project I wanted for me and my kids that kept scrolling when playing and loosing focus, etc... I couldn't have hoped better exposure, as this goes to the HN front page.

Given the feedbacks, this might be its grave as well too... may be I should have written a blog post first ;)...

I'm probably an hardcore flash gamer. As I worked on it, may be I have fallen in love with my idea, and stopped looking for it's pertinence. This might be a case where scratching your own itch does not work. I love the little fun of flash games and was hopping to give it more quality.

It's built anyway, I think that some people will like it because it's still the absolute best solution to play flash games fullscreen as it has qualities that no other solution provide : not scaling games and speed.

If you want to try it, I guaranty that it is safe anyway, I checked it against http://virustotal.com, it's clean for 41 of 42 antivirus.

The true face of flash games requires a windows-only exe to download and install first?

I think these guys might have missed the main selling point of flash, it's insane penetration which means pretty much any desktop user can play straight away. If i'm forcing my users to run some random program to play my games properly then I might as well just ship my own executable and get native performance.

Why not just build your Flash game to go full screen on a button click? If you want to see how it can be done well check out Club Penguin in full screen mode - no thick client required.

Full-screen Flash doesn't let you handle key input. From http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/full_screen... :

"# Users cannot enter text in text input fields while in full-screen mode. All keyboard input and key-related ActionScript is disabled while in full-screen mode, with the exception of the keyboard shortcuts that take the viewer out of full-screen mode."

Edit: looks like it's slightly better in Flash 10. From http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10_s... :

"Flash Player 9 does not allow keyboard input when displaying content in full-screen mode. Flash Player 10 changes this, allowing for a limited number of keys to be usable in full-screen mode. These include Tab, the Spacebar, and the (up, down, left, right) arrow keys."

Still sucks for games that need text and encourage chatting.

To design for full screen means:

- resolution independent design means interfaces become a lot more work

- vector art or high resolution raster images with significantly bigger SWF files and memory usage

- performance ... at the moment only video uses hardware acceleration, full screen means you go from a 640x480 canvas to a massively larger one that's going to hurt

- demand ... Flash has had full screen capabilities since forever, from my position of having arguably the leading analytics platform for Flash games it doesn't look like users take advantage of it.

While I think some portals (not so much Kongregate though) could tone down the clutter I don't think this is going to take off. From what I can see only about 5.8% of players go full screen.

Flash games also look crap stretched out and you can't play discretely (work/uni/school) or jump back and forth between email/browsing/im etc while you wait for that wave of creeps to finish dying.

Not to mention download random.exe to play a Flash game on a website?

You really can't compare the immersiveness of full screen titles vs. Flash games. Flash games fill a different need and they do that in spite of richer options being available. I really think you're solving a problem that doesn't exist.

Flash games also look crap stretched out

That's partly what his software apparently fixes, by switching to the screen resolution to something close to the size of the game's screen.

But I do agree, I don't see a market for this myself. It looks like something that would appeal to "hardcore flash gamers", like the author presumably is. But from my limited observations, most people playing flash games don't seem to care that much and are just looking for some quick fun.

Isn't this even worse if you use a TFT monitor?

Actually not, probably because games do not require you to read a lot and because the resolution is quite low. I don't feel that it looks bad.

Immersion is not only screen size: it's how the game reacts to your commands, how the screen shakes, what is shown and what is not. This program solves only one aspect, but the game must be built for immersion.

And... I don't play Flash games to immerse. I play to pass time.

For me Flash games are like pen-and-paper puzzles. I don't mind playing sudoku on a small piece of paper.

That being said, it would be interesting for some games, but I'm not going into the trouble of downloading (and installing?) random programs to play an occasional Flash game. Even if I did, I'd be over with the game before remembering I even had this program.

And it removes the chat and comments feature from the original website, and they are valuable.

My opinion is that Flash games fill a very specific role and you are mixing things up, but others are free to disagree.

Or you can use your desktop zoom features: http://viennot.biz/full_screen.mp4

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