Archive for the ‘game development’ Category

One of the more common questions in flash game development is where to get free sounds or music.

Probably the best free sound archive I know of is Soundsnap. They have tons of sounds effects, sound loops, and music samples. And they’re all free to use in your games!

You can find almost any sound there, and if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, you can use Audacity to the modify the sounds until you get what you want. The program is open source and ultra easy to use. I get particularly good results from mixing together a couple of similar sounds to get a richer sound effect. But be careful not to mix too many or else it’ll sound disorganized.

As for a free music site, I don’t know of an all-encompassing site like Soundsnap but I do like opsound. They have a good selection of nice music there. The songs are covered under the Creative Commons License so it’s best to to ask for permission before using it in a commercial game. Most artists will be happy to be featured in a wide release game so it shouldn’t be a problem to ask.

Aside from submitting the game link to blog sites, I’ve also been submitting the SWF itself to flash game sites, such as Newgrounds and Kongregate. Actually, the sponsor submitted it to Newgrounds. I think they’re also going to submit it to other sites, so I don’t have to do a lot of the SWF propagation work.

So far, OrbBlaster’s garnered pretty positive reviews, managing to make front page on Newgrounds. It’s doing okay on Kongregate, which I think is because it doesn’t have any badges or achievements tie-ins for the site. Kongregate players love the achievements so I might have to implement some sort of it.

Spreading the SWF is a great way to reach other players, but I probably should have put a more visible link to doogog.com. Currently, it’s inside of the Credits button, which seems like not many people check out.

I also submitted my site to the Yahoo and Google directories, and am going to try linkdumps, too.

In this post, I’m going to talk about my experience in promoting OrbBlaster through flash blog sites. Hopefully, it’ll be helpful for developers who are looking for ways to promote their flash games on their own sites.

Before I completed OrbBlaster, I figured I needed a good looking site to present it. So my brother over at phuson.com designed and set up the site for me. Then how would people know to visit my site? Well, I’ve been submitting the link to flash/web gaming blog sites such as jayisgames and thegameslist.

The best case scenario is that those blog sites enjoy the game, and make a post about it like Mark Hurst over at goodexperience. OrbBlaster was also featured over at Jonas’ blog at wearegame. So far, the link made its way to European sites somehow, and I’ve been getting a lot of hits from ollo. Awesomes!

I realized I didn’t know that many other flash gaming blog sites, but I’ll probably find more as I dig around. If you have tips or other gaming blog sites I could submit to, please leave a comment about it or contact me!