In a time where the CEO of Electronic Arts describes collapsing revenues as a brightside opportunity to cut the fat, farmers can't get enough GMO seeds and petro-fertilizer for lack of credit, and the whole show looks like it's going to come down, we need to ask ourselves what kind of a high we want to develop, what kind of an industry we want to create. It's clear to me that there could be a very bright future in web-based games, either as stand-alone experiences or windows into a wider world, such as a MySQL database of profiles, a leaderboard, a rich MMO, or what the hell - Storytron. That's assuming that the internet doesn't crash under a lack of infrastructure or get knocked out by a solar radiation storm in 2012. Either way, Flashbang has been putting out fresh, distinct games using Unity for a while, and they're really starting to broaden out. In their latest, they show that you can have your casual cake and eat it too, suggesting that the future of profitable gameplay may well take majority out there in the wilds of the net.
No longer content to stick with a theme-gimmick lifted from Family Guy or Calvin and Hobbes, they decided to get off the crazy train and do something a bigger studio would do, but with rapid prototypting finesse. Basically, the plan was to rip off flOw and turn it into a game. It works. The visual effects but more importantly the smooth and off-the-shelf physics show how Unity brings a more interesting game to the browser. I'd say they give the PS3 download a run for its money. Instead of the linear dimension of flow, where the enemy circling would counter your straight moves, this game makes circling a requisite to both attack and consumption, with navigation another dimension of control altogether. Yet they maintain the zen-button control that flOw employed. It's like the circular dynamic is a free dimension gifted down by Santa Physics. There's nothing phantasmic here, just rich flow, crafted and balanced and delivered in two months. Ain't nothing wrong with that. This game is more significant as a demonstration of what web-gaming can become than as a specific design. It's also a great example of getting a good feel, from the mechanics of input to the dynamics of the physics to the aesthetics of a psylocybin jellyfish.
Speaking of jellyfish, let's talk about money. Last time I checked Flashbang was merc'ing out their talents for cash, and making games this good and this fast because they both can and because they must if they are to make anything good at all. I am awed at their energy, I merc myself out all day and I feel like shit when I get home. I've been working on a wrestling game, I had a dream that the owner of the league confessed his evil plan to tap into human hate and make money, and that I'm his pawn. This is not the kind of context that leaves one free and clear to pursue independent projects. On the other hand, flOw made a really good % ROI, some of which trickled down into the student loan payments of the talent behind the game. Daniel James's company does good stuff that is designed for a business model (Whirled excepted) which put them in a quite fine position. These are the two paths to profitability I see in the future, pearl-like console downloads on one hand, and web-based free-to-play on the other.
Blurst is already one of the better free game sites out there, there's huge potential for a portal based around cohesive portfolios of unique games, instead of a hat collecting meta-game. They could sell people credit for making the games possible, I mean it's only like 10-20k to get a game done in these time frames, they could make a meta-game of donations!
The third, hidden path, and I think this has the most potential, involves slashing your cost of living and growing most of your own food part-time on roughly 1.5 acres per person, then developing freeware. This is known as the Jason Rohrer method. I think that's where these guys need to end up, so go play their well crafted harbinger of future web glory for free and donate some money on the condition that they all move to a satellite internet connected farm in Panama.
I think it's pretty clear
I think it's pretty clear that there's no bright future in Storytron. :)
Regarding the flOw connection, I don't think it's a rip-off. FlOw was probably an inspiration. Certainly, there are very similar game elements, but Blush is about as close to flOw as flOw is to Evo for the SNES. Yes, you're swimming around killing things to make your body longer, but there are lots of differences: the more complex battle/collection method, the requirement to ferry eggs back to a collection point, the (short!) time limit, and the lack of level progression, to name the biggies. You might as well say flOw was a ripoff of the old game Snake. Eating apples made you longer!
(an aside: needing to register to comment is annoying and so Web 1.0)
Web 1.0
Needing to register to comment at least deters some comment spam, which is ever-increasing in volume.
Funny, I Was Just About To Review Exploit
Yeah I wasn´t really accusing them off ripping it off. I was just making a playful jab. Flashbang guys read that and they think, "we didn´t rip them off," That Game Company guys and gals read that and thing "hey! flOw was a game" then we all have a moment of reflection and a good laugh. Or I offend both of them at once.
The Future of Browser Games?
First I want to commend you, Patrick, and everyone else at Play This Thing! for bringing so many unique and innovative games into the public eye. It is refreshing and rare to see a site focus on the obscure rather than the mainstream, and every day I look forward to your uninhibited perspective about an unknown indie title. In this particular article, your comparison of Blush to flOw is well stated, and I tend to agree that the former borrows from, yet changes the latter, creating something entirely different. However, you also touch upon an issue that I think extends beyond the almost niche (yet extremely compelling) focus of this site, and applies more directly to the broader community when you say: “the game is more significant as a demonstration of what web-gaming can become than as a specific design.” Moreover, I would suggest that games such as Blush will push the browser as a platform in a more mainstream direction.
I suppose browser gaming is already mainstream, as everybody and (actually more often) their mother plays Bejeweled or Bingo Luau to pass the time. What I am wondering is, do you think games using technology like the Unity engine will turn the browser into a more hardcore-friendly environment? The games displayed on Blurst, like Blush and Offroad Velociraptor Safari are looking like pretty sophisticated 3D games compared to the run-of-the-mill flash game; Jetpack Brontosaurus plays almost like Spyro the Dragon for the original Playstation, and probably looks a little better, albeit at about fifteen frames per second. These Flashbang titles, while immersive (thanks to their beautiful visuals and clean design), certainly were produced with the casual player in mind, employing simple control schemes and enforcing (often a little clumsily) a less than five-minute play session. What happens, though, when someone decides to make a more complete experience using Unity or a similar engine? As this generation of hardware seems to be nearly maxed out in terms of graphics capabilities, and with the next generation nowhere near on the horizon, do you think that browser games will start to close the technological gap? And if so, will the easy accessibility of these more extensive experiences captivate casual players, or will it simply attract more hardcore gamers to the platform? With consoles becoming increasingly expensive to develop for, I think developers will turn more of their focus towards cheaper mediums, as long as they can figure out a way to monetize their efforts.
http://jeffmagers.blogspot.com/
Web Games: Threat or Menace?
Well, I'm not at all sure that "browser games" have ever been "non-hardcore." I just looked at Miniclips -- okay, Club Penguin is #1 there, that's certainly casual, but #1 is Commandos 2, a 2D sidescrolling combat game. On Kongregate, #1 is currently Sonny, a game that's basically a streetfighter using Final Fantasy-style turn-based combat. I call that hardcore. And, you know, Defend the Castle, often pointed to as one of the first really popular web games? Casual? I think not.
Early web games were largely imitative of the arcade, because that was pretty early to do in Flash; the arcade is where the hardcore was formed (unless you want to reach back to board wargaming and D&D, which in fact I do). They were attempting to appeal to self-identified gamers, not to the mythical "rest of us."
But never mind.
Sure, Unity (and, to give it its due, InstantAction, which is based on the Torque engine) provide the ability to create considerably richer game experiences than Flash (though Flash has improved, and continues to improve). And sure, as Moore's Law does its work, doing a game in the browser, even with the processing overhead that entails, means browser-based games can become better, in some sense. But this is a double-edged sword; "richer" and "deeper" and "3D" all translate into "more expensive to create," and given the extraordinarily small per-user revenues that browser-based games generate, there's a real limit to how far you can press that trend. Advertising sucks, you know. It really does. It's nice that a handful of Flash game developers can actually make a living doing Flash games now, and that is indeed a hopeful sign for the future -- but the only real way to support a studio doing web games at the moment is by doing work for corporate clients, ala This Is Pop. I can't see that changing, not without access to some revenue stream beyond advertising alone -- perhaps micropayment upsell (first 12 levels for free, next 12 for $3, kind of thing).
Of course, from my perspective, web games -- along with social network games, smartphone games, and console downloadables -- is exactly the sort of fringe, from both a business and a creative standpoint, where the sort of interesting and innovative work that the mainstream industry lacks, and that the medium desperately needs for self-renewal, is likeliest to appear.