Creating A Web Game From Your Download

[tc_bobo]

I've actually been lurking on these forums now for well over a year. Glad to see they found a home at Indie Gamer when Steve shut them down. Took me a while to find them again.

From my point of view, the best marketing your games can have is a web game to go with it. I realize it's quite an investment in time to create a web game from your download, yet with the launch of www.Grab.com I hope some of you will consider it.

Running www.GameRival.com for the past two years and developing some of our own titles, it's been much easier to market the downloadable titles because of the web games.

Sites like AddictingGames.com, 123Spill.com and others just link to web games. And then users pass them around. We've benefited at GameRival by having about eight games that have both web and download versions.

You end up having a Kim Kommando Radio Show newsletter link to one of your web games and you can sell 350 copies of your download version in a weekend. I know.

My point is: I would encourage you guys to look at developing a web version of your games. Right now Grab is only supporting Flash, Shockwave and Java in the Indie Channel, yet down the road ActiveX is something we can hopefully do.

Thanks!

[Andy]

...get we some advance payment from somebody (don't like to point someone specifically) we'd spend a weekend to convert some of our pins into java.
http://www.wildsnake.com/file/java/pinball.html
But always nice to get an additional inspiraton.

PS Looks like one more loooooong corporate meeting ahead

[princec]

Hi tc_bobo. I noticed your Web games have a size limit of 5MB and you're not yet geared up to push Webstart as a deployment mechanism, which as you probably know is a curious halfway house between applets and downloadable software. What are your plans in this area? You could be launching Alien Flux or Super Elvis from your site if you got the Webstart thing licked.

Cas

[Chris Evans]

We'll be having a shockwave demo version available for our game, Pow Pow's Great Adventure.

The only challenge we'll have is keeping the file size down. Most Flash/Shockwave games are usually somewhat simple arcade or puzzle games, so getting them under 5MB isn't much of a problem. However, our game is a fairly expansive 3D game with a lot of textures and sound, so the file size will probably be more than most.

Though I definitely recommend doing a web version if possible. Macromedia has already approached us and wants to make our site, the "Site of the Day" when we release the shockwave demo. That alone will bring us tons of exposure.

[arcadetown]

Malcolm is making a very good point and I hope developers are listening. Comes back to what was saying in an earlier thread about online games...Web games are profitable/doable?. Gave some very good pointers about what web sites are looking for in online games. Plus with an online version it would be very smart to sell it here for you and get it out to our many partners as we've got pretty good traffic and many partners.

[arcadetown]

We'll be having a shockwave demo version available for our game, Pow Pow's Great Adventure.

That looks really cool Chris. I really think Shockwave 3D is an underutilized tool and is the future for online games. For online version you'd only need a few demo levels and maybe can tweak down quality of some textures to sqeeze it down under 5mb and hopefully even 1 - 2mb. Honestly, going much over 1mb in size and/or if it's not flash content then it's like pulling teeth to get most websites to run it. Ourselves we tend to run most anything online that's good.

[Jack Norton]

The idea sounds interesting: however, how shockwave 3d works?
I mean, I have C source code, porting it to shockwave is easy or I have to rewrite the game (even a small demo) from scratch?
In the second case surely wouldn't be good for my games, because there's so much hidden that goes on... even only starting a new season in goalkeeper game means generating 10.000 unique player based on nationality, role, skills, team, etc...
I surely could do a small version only with the arcade part of the game and it would be nice to play it in the browser... I should think about it

But back to original question, shockwave has some internal scripting language I suppose? (never tried it)

[Jim Buck]

I would think that, worst case, people who have already-written code in a language other than Shockwave's own Lingo could turn their game into an ActiveX control.. throw together an html page to instantiate an <OBJECT>.. get your control digitally signed.. and voila, you have your game running inside a webpage. Of course, the user would have a plug-in pop to click "yes" on.. but maybe you put instructions on your html page to click "yes". (Many people would have to click on such a box to update Shockwave for the 3d stuff anyway.)

[James C. Smith]

This ActiveX approach is what we used for the Ricochet Lost Worlds web game. It’s not as convenient for the user, but it was better than nothing since we did not have to time or money to invest in porting the game to something like flash. Plus, I think the end result is better (after you get over the hurdle of getting the user to allow you ActiveX control to run. )

Obviously, this doesn’t work in Netscape or on Macs. Like I said, it was easy and better than nothing. And MSN Gaming Zone sure liked it ;-)

[arcadetown]

Basically all these are good options but guess I wasn't clear. Preferably a Flash online demo is best if Flash can do the game justice. If it's 3D then Shockwave/Havoc would be a good alternative. Otherwise if those aren't options then ActiveX might be a good choice.

Here's good and bad to each... Flash content is accepted by most every online gaming site so easy to market but the games it can do justice are limited. Shockwave/Havoc gives solid 3D in the browser but it's somewhat slow, some sites only accept Flash, and it has some support problems on older graphics cards which a directx/driver update usually fixes. ActiveX gets you out the door quicker and gives all the performance (some games just no other option) but it depends on users installing it plus in many environments like corporate or school, activex is blocked. Also not sure but heard WinXP sp2 cracked down on activex.

[Jim Buck]

James, that's pretty cool you guys did that. How long did it take to create the ActiveX version from the standalone version?