Update : SwiffOut the extension for playing flash games full screen is now available at swiffout.com
Games are about immersion. Yes flash games too !
Some days ago, I was listening at the Channel 9 Corrinne Yu interview. She’s Halo technical director, has incredible insights on the game industry in general. Have a look at the video if you haven’t, you’ll see what passionate means. One of the question she answered during the interview was : does the focus on graphism in current games has a negative impact on gameplay in video games ?
While I was internally agreeing with the implicit opinion within the question, she turned me back. I can’t remember the exact wording, but in essence it was : Great graphisms enable greater immersion, avoid breaking the illusion of the game and as such increase the fun.
Here is what flash games look like right now :
Kongregate it a great website. I could have choosen way worse.
But, immersive ? Hu ? There is way too much glitches: taskbar, tabs, bookmarks, ads, chat…
Imagine watching a movie with the light on, the fridge buzzing in the background, and your girlfriend doing the dishes (hum, hum ). Nice… but not immersive. This is the current online gaming experience.
We have grown so accustumed that this is what flash games look like that we can’t even believe that flash games can be good. Are we too hard on flash games ? We love to hate flash, we even have dreams about replacing it with HTML5. It is an incredible gaming platform though, with many libraries, nice tools, and a very large number of players. We should love that.
Let’s remove the clutter :
This is what flash games should look like, their true face. And actually, this is real. I build it.
This is and will be SwiffoutGames – HD Online Games.
This screenshot is your whole screen, not a captured window. To get this, the issue is not flash. The issue is the browser. The browser is simply not suitable for playing games. It is aimed at browsing – we can’t blame it, that’s it’s purpose after all. There is no way to fix flash games that much in the browser.
SwiffoutGames introduces a new thick client that interacts with our website to enable an immersive full screen mode for flash games. Press a button and we make flash games feel and look like desktop games. It’s not a flash game maximizer, it goes beyond that. The thick client switch the screen resolution to preserve speed and game quality and run the game in its own process. You can even save a shortcut to a game and put it on your desktop. But we do this while retaining all the distribution capability of the web and integration with the arcade ecosystem. We get the best of both world.
If you don’t know anything about flash games, or generally think they are crap, here is a selection of flash games that I really like. Flash games are often focused around one gaming mechanic idea. These one are a little more advanced. Here are my recent favorites : Final Ninja, Trap Master, Cursed Treasure, Inferno
If you want to play flash games in full screen, you could check out FlashPlus at http://axemclion.github.com/#projects/flashresizer.html . It is available as an extension for Google CHrome and as bookmarklet for other browsers. It resizes the game to fit the screen.
What I want to do with SwiffOutGames is to give a real native fullscreen mode for flash games. It’s possible to resize flash games, but it doesn’t work with many games. Final ninja doesn’t work as an example.
Furthermore, flash is too slow on large resolutions, especially on highly graphical games.
SwiffoutGames switch the resolution to the closest of the native resolution of the game. This give you an efficient fullscreen mode too and works with many more games.
May be I love way too perfect things. Did you try it ?
Whenever I play flash games, I already ctrl+u, search for .swf, and open that URL up and play it full screen. And usually hit F11 from there. No fun to do it any other way.
Or you can use your desktop zoom features: http://viennot.biz/full_screen.mp4
man that cursed treasure is addictive
Very nice post, and thanks for linking to my article. That full screen feature sounds pretty neat, seems to me like you’ve got it all figured out and running how you want it. I do like the idea of just playing a game and not seeing a whole browser and web page; that’s definitely how it should be.
Problem with full screen on really big screens are with performance. On 24″ LCD in larger games in full quality and full screen is not problem to get you CPU and GPU to almost 100 percent. This is crazy.
I think flash games are meant not to be full-screen for a simple reason and that reason is ads. As you know flash games are most of the time free, and If you’re going to let people play full-screen and put shortcuts on their desktops, you’re going to need to find an other way to show them ads. Also most of the time when I’m playing a flash game, I’m browsing at the same time, so flash games need to be light and easy to switch from.