Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Flash, Game development, Monetize and Reviews.

Today I am going to talk about a revolutionary way to make quality Flash games: PlayCrafter.

I must admit I am overhelmed by the enormous amount of options of this tool, but I’ll try to be as much clean as I can in my review.

Tired of making online games? Make a game online

First, PlayCrafter is an online tool. You don’t need to install any software in your computer. And this is the first great feature, because this means you don’t even need a computer to make a Flash game, you can just sit in an internet cafè and make your game in a matter of minutes.

The power of drag & drop

In PlayCrafter, you don’t need to write a single line of code. You just drag and drop elements to the stage, designing your level in a few clicks.

Any element has its own features, so a turret will automatically fire, a car will skid, a space trooper will jump and fire bouncing bombs, and so on.

The engine that handle physics is the famous Box2D so expect accurate physics simulation.

New elements are added frequently so you’ll never run out of ideas.

You can even edit your element or import your own graphics.

The Community

There is a quite big community behind PlayCrafter. You can play, rate and even edit games made by other players.

When you game receives a good feedback from the community, you can export your Flash game and publish it on game portals

The price

PlayCrafter is free to use, but you can pay a monthly fee ($4.95) to upgrade your account to “Premium” and unlock exclusive features such as raising the limit of levels to 100 and exporting the games to Flash portals.

Moreover, some assets in the game cost an a mount of Pips, the PlayCrafter‘s currency. You can buy Pips with real money or you can have for free if your refer users.

The limits

At the moment, the most important limits are the fixed stage size and the lack of scrolling. In my opinion, if PlayCrafter guys do not add more and more assets this will cause a large number of games with no difference among them.

Monetization

I am going to test the monetization of this tool very soon, meanwhile play Matcheroo to see a nice game made with this tool.

Final considerations

I strongly suggest to try PlayCrafter even if you are an experienced developer… you know… at school or at work you can’t install Flash… so why don’t you make a game between a task and another?

Expect a game made with this tool very soon…