I just got back from Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco, CA.  Overall I felt like it was a great conference, lots of interesting little tidbits coming from interesting places.

There are a few things that I really took away from the conference:

+  There are a lot of social network games based in Flash.  Usually this is a no-brainer but this year it was really obvious, tonnes of people from Facebook-integrated companies.  Crazy.

+  Developers are still way awesome.  I met a lot of developers at the conference and they are great people.  Flash developers are really special.  And it’s interesting finally meeting someone you’ve been interacting with for years but never had a chance to speak to in-person.  They make great games but they are even greater people, so thumbs up.

+  Regardless of the incredible volume of Flash Games being produced, people are still innovating and doing amazing things in Flash.  Watching Sean Cooper’s Boxhead demo with 500 zombies and full framerate on screen was something special.

+  I find it refreshing to hear stories of developers pushing themselves through failure and persisting to get an amazing game out that does successfully for them.  We all have failures in game design and production, but people openly discussing how they approached their problems is really enlightening.  Tim Fowers, author of Now Boarding, created an amazing distribution model by offering a free copy of the game to anyone who could get a friend to buy a copy.  Obviously, friends would tell all their friends and suddenly hundreds of eyes had access to the game… simple things like that are crazy smart.

+  FGS had great talks from game developers, but there was still a lot of talk about money.  This year was definitely better given the talks from several developers and new panelists, and I applaud Mochi for the improvement over last year.  That said, we still have a few remaining holes in the art, sound, and game design panels.  Some of these topics were covered briefly in single-developer presentations (which were really neat) but I would love there to be more multi-dev panels on approaches to game development and what developers do during the game development process.  The two track (development/distribution and financials) conference model really helped this year though, I’m glad that happened.

Overall, fun 24 hours.  Also, pictures soon to follow.  Thanks to Tass, Dan, Joey, Greg, Alison, Con, Jared and HI, Mike, Emily, Nick, Tyler and all the other awesome cool people I had time to talk to, you guys are neat.

Hi everyone!

Been busy this week wrapping up a game, but finally had a night to dump some photos from FGS.

Last Saturday I flew in with Joey from Armor Games into San Francisco.  We took the BART subway from SFO into Downtown San Francisco and met up with Dan (CEO of Armor).  We then took our poker chips and played in the first ever Armor Games Poker Tournament!  I ended up getting thumped out of the game pretty early but it was fun playing with the likes of Hero Interactive, Jay from Jay Is Games, and a few other family favourites.

After poker we headed to bed, but the next day was Flash Gaming Summit!

The venue was larger than I expected, and there were a ton of people.  While there was only one conference hall there was plenty of audience to fill the hall.

I talked after a few other people, and boy was I nervous.  After a few questions on stage though I was fairly comfortable.  Apparently I don’t show nervousness on stage either, so I’m glad I can sell it.  I answered a few questions from the audience and after that it was smooth sailing through the rest of the conference.

After the conference we head over the the FGS after party, complete with Guinness on-tap!  I got to hang out with some friends from Kongregate and meet up with a ton of people I haven’t had the pleasure of talking to outside of the internet.

It was a fun little trip.  Totally tired afterwards (we left the following morning), and hoping that it isn’t a weekend venture next year.  Looking forward to future years of Flash Gaming Summits!

Check out the album on my Pictures page.

This weekend I had a chance to talk on a panel with a few other people about Flash Game distribution. Flash Game distribution is about getting your game out to the public.  It’s about deciding whether you should put your content on other sites, implement API’s (code that can hook your game up to high score and badge systems), and get licensing for your games!  It was a rather interesting talk, with most of the panel having interesting perspectives on Flash game distribution in-general.

On the panel with me was Richard Fields of Mindjolt, Matt Spall of Gimme5games, and Chris Hughes of Flash Game License.  It was moderated by Jeremy Liew.

Some of my major points about Flash game distribution were viral content and API implementation.  The first point I wanted to make was that it never hurts to get your content to as many eyes as possible.  The more you get your game around, the more can enjoy and come back to your site.  Another important point was API implementation, which I think is important for every developer to do but I had to stress that API’s needed to be made easy to the developer.  We get a lot of API’s which are poorly written and require us to do a lot of work just to report information for badges.

The good news was that if you were not there you can watch the recorded live feed here!  I decided not to embed directly in case it was ever taken down and to save bandwidth for you and me.  Feel free to watch me say a really bad haiku and then talk about my experience in game development.

More to follow on my experience at Flash Game Summit!  There’s so much to write about, I can’t just dump it into one post .

Hi everyone!

I had a marvelous weekend in San Francisco at Flash Gaming Summit.  I met a lot of developers I’ve never had that opportunity to meet in person and had a chance to speak on a panel about Flash distribution and getting your work out there.  It was a rare opportunity and I was very thankful I had that chance to talk.

I talked mostly about how Armor Games does their distribution.  I was really nervous about being up there in front of everyone but I got comfortable after a few short minutes.

Anyway, I’m super tired so I won’t post much tonight.  But in the coming days I’ll post numerous photos and videos from the conference.  It was a lot of fun, I can’t wait to share the details.

That’s right, there’s now officially a conference for Flash Gaming, and it looks like I’m going to be talking!

Flash Game Summit is a lot of things but for the most part it’s a one-day meeting of Flash websites and developers in the industry (man, I can’t believe it’s an INDUSTRY now) and chat it up about important topics in Flash.  There is also a Flash games award show and I’m *hoping* I am nominated for something.

I’ve got an interesting position since I’ll be talking from both a developer and website administrator’s standpoint.  I’ve been both now since working at Armor Games so it’s interesting to be on both the sending and receiving ends of the spectrum.

Hope to see you there, it’s around GDC so you MUST be around for a reason right?  Right?

And if you picked option A from the list of “Things John Might Do This Weekend” game you have won two points.  Congratulations.

Have a great weekend!