Gameplay, as always is the main focus for any game. Gamers are now only too happy with powerful and innovative games that can be produced with Macromedia technologies such as Flash (especially MX) and Shockwave. This presents a tremendous opportunity to blend the addictiveness of excellent gameplay with fast online playability and fast downloads.

Icreon is ideally positioned to accomplish the above. By combining our native Macromedia Game Development skills with our gamer’s perspective and experience, delivering world-class bespoke solutions is just the beginning of the tasks that we can do.

Macromedia’s Flash MX brings to the world, the various tools needed to cater to games for internet audiences. And Icreon here is to utilize the same. Using Macromedia based technologies such as Flash and Shockwave, we can:

• Create rich, engaging graphics in our games and merge it in a fluid manner with absorbing gameplay.
• Create environments online to play and/or download these games by optimizing file sizes.

A playback device that can interpret the download movies

Harnessing Vector Graphics
Arguably, the most important aspect of any game (besides gameplay of course), is excellent and compelling graphics. Gamers want to be transported to worlds such the ones that can be seen in Halo, EverQuest and Myst. These worlds are, gorgeous,to say the least.

Albeit the restrictions posed by games developed in Flash may not exactly match up to Mainstream game development, our designers working in Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, or Fireworks keep working with the tools they are comfortable with, knowing that our work will be usable in Flash and it’ll still possible to create engaging gameplay.

Flash truly delivers broadcast-quality images over the Internet.

Small File Size
Inherently, bandwidth is a consideration and an important one at that. Flash MX addresses this with compressed movies that can be easily downloaded even with dial-up connections.

Game Components
A game consists of a number of components: the core Flash movie, sound clips, video clips, code, additional Flash movies, and graphics. Packaging all of these components into a single file makes for a large movie or a large game. We utilize Flash MX to chunk out not only the main movie, but also the different media types for your game. This means that each file can be downloaded on demand. The end result is a more efficient game designed for an online community.

Small Plug-In
Much of the Flash Player’s success depends on the gamer’s small file size. It takes less than a minute, even over a dial-up connection to download Flash Player, the plug-in required to play Flash Games online and is almost instantaneous for broadband connections. The incredible speed at which the Flash 5 Player has infiltrated internet users is an apt case in point for how easy it is to download and install. Even PDAs these days support the Macromedia Flash Player. Also many versions of Windows PocketPC have Flash Player in-built, as a regular feature.

Game Criteria
To churn out games, we divide the entire process into three parts:

Game design

Graphics have to be created for the game. This is the first step. We use tools such as Fireworks and Freehand for the same as the UI between various Macromedia products is largely consistent.

Game Development

This is done with Flash because it has the features that enables us to import graphics created with Fireworks and Freehand, and then put these into a movie.

Game Hosting

This is the final stage. Just as a PC game runs from a PC, a flash enabled online game would need to run from a website. We use Dreamweaver MX as the definitive tool for this purpose, again because the interface is largely similar.