Here’s my list of areas that could be improved upon.

• No ability to determine where an SWF was loaded from. If someone embeds a link on their page to my SWF which is hosted on my site, why can’t the SWF determine who is loading it — as opposed to who is hosting it? Sure, I can lock down the SWF on my site, but what if I wanted to have the SWF itself decide whether it could be loaded from an arbitrary domain X, and at runtime do different things?
• No multiple inheritance. Why, Adobe, why? You can implement an interface, and extend a class, but not extend more than one class at once? This would actually be a useful concept to have, even if you can kludgily work around it via aggregation.
• The Flex profiler. Some parts of it aren’t terrible, but why can’t you start and stop sampling via the GUI? Is that not an obviously necessary feature a developer would want? It might take me 5 minutes to play the game far enough to get to a point where I want to sample, and yet it seems to always grab the entire history of the running app.
• Enums. Where the heck are the enums? There are some nifty ways to roll your own via reflection (looking at the XML of the class itself), but come on here, people — this should be a native language feature.
• Block scoping. Anyone that’s tried to write “for (var i : int = 0; i < 10; i++)” more than once in a function knows this pain. What’s the point of even allowing a var declaration inside a for (or other) statement if it’s not going to be scoped to it? You might as well make it a compiler error and force all variables to be declared at the top of the function.
• Integer serialization. You would expect an int to be a 32-bit number, just like every other language in the planet. But the AMF format evidently uses this wacky 29-bit scheme which means your biggest unsigned int is actually 2^29-1.
• Release mode is useless. What’s the point of release mode compiling, if all my variables, symbols, and data can still be inspected in plaintext by any braindead Chinese hacker using off-the-shelf tools?
• Number types.  If I write “x = 7″, what is 7? An integer? A double-precision float? Who knows! A rounding and precision nightmare.

This quote from a recent NYT article pretty much sums it up.

A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.

76% of all songs up for sale never find a buyer! And it’s not just a quality issue, there’s just too much stuff out there. Got a new band? Good luck. “Long tail”? Doesn’t exist, unless you’ve already been selling music at a decent rate. “Promotion”? If you look at pretty much any band’s MySpace page, you’ll see that online promotion is akin to 100,000 people in a room all shouting at each other.

What you have here is:

• A low barrier of entry to content (lots of crappy bands can easily make records)
• “Infinite” distribution (gatekeepers are less relevant)
• The death of mass media and terrestrial radio (will U2 be the last ever Big Stadium band?)
• A highly explored artform (when’s the last time you said to yourself, “I’ve never heard a sound like this before?”)

Could this ever happen to games? Perhaps, but there are some key differences:

• Games are considerably harder to make than records, as they involve multiple disciplines of expertise
• Games can be interactive, providing a longer lasting experience
• Games can go online, helping to circumvent the piracy problem inherent in digital goods

Maybe someone will come along and reinvent the music industry’s business model, but I doubt it. Welcome to a future where you pay your $10/month to Spotify, get all the music you want, and creators are stuck getting a tenth of a penny per play. If you’re lucky enough to be Amanda Palmer, or Trent Reznor, perhaps you can live for a while convincing your rabid Twitter fanbase to buy $300 box sets or autographed beer mugs…

So, now everyone wants to get into the microtransaction game. The obvious problem has been that Flash games by nature percolate from site to site, often making single-portal monetization solutions unattractive (sorry Whirled!). There are some exceptions, but in general the really good games are intended to get their millions of plays across a number of high-traffic sites. Thus what we need is a way for players to have some sort of shared currency, stored in some secure central location, that is available to them when playing a number of games across any portal which they happen to be hosted on.

Finally, some companies are stepping up to the plate. First is Mochi, with their predictably named MochiCoins service, still in private beta, but with at least one game floating around various portals. Not to be outdone, the Flash Game License crew has come up with their own system, GamerSafe, which combines microtransactions with server-side save games and achievements. There is also HeyZap, Andrograde, and a number of other solutions.

I think for any solution to gain traction, there needs to be a few key factors:

• First-mover advantage - The service which gets the first “hit” game, with microtransactions smartly implemented, will have a huge advantage.
• High-quality games — Users want to know that their transactions will be useful, bug-free, and for quality game content.
• The psychology of “free” — Users are used to free products. so if the games seem like “demos”, that will be a big turn-off. Instead, the transactions should feel like paying for icing on the cake, useful features that enhance their experience and are priced at a reasonable (i.e. cheap) cost.
• Stickiness/replayability — What’s the point of paying for premium features in a game that you’ll only play once for 5 minutes? Games that use this feature need to have depth and replayability. Ideally, the premium features should enhance long-term playability: fun, status among peers, UI advantages, etc.
• Variety of payment options — Paypal is great, but what if the user doesn’t have a credit card? (Other options like SMS transactions would be smart…)
• Security - At the very least, phishing of an in-game account should only let the thief access the stored credits. If there is a “gamer coins” to “real money” transaction path, there will inevitably be trouble, since Flash games can easily be decompiled/cloned/hacked to grab user login information.

It’ll only take 30-45 minutes to play through, but it’s highly recommended.

Thus, one of our upcoming titles is another “board” game (although more in the “board” vein, not the “card” vein), and the other will be a fantasy RPG of sorts. There are a lot of traditional “AAA” publishers starting to take look at the Flash space, and I think that will give it much more of an air of respectability. Will it escalate, XBLA-style, into the realm where hundreds of thousands of development dollars are required to have any success? Hard to say…

While I’ve enjoyed getting, err, “tipsy” at a number of E3 parties — do we really need to bring back the booth babes? As if we didn’t have enough problems with people thinking the game industry is obsessed with T&A? Does every publisher’s booth really need scantily clad models-for-hire, wandering around handing out schwag to bored journalists and creepily obsessed fanboys?

One of the things that immediately struck me was the time scales they kept mentioning. For example: “[…] long and boring tutorials delay the first moment of engagement, that critical moment when players realize they can indeed be immersed in this game. In some games we’ve tested, the first strongly engaging event does not occur until 20 minutes into the experience, a lifetime for a gamer who just wants to have fun.”

Twenty minutes?? In the Flash gaming world, twenty minutes is an eternity. From my decision, the average time between a user playing a new game and forming an opinion (or worse, entering a rating) is well under 5 minutes, and in many cases in the 60-second range. It can be very instructive to watch new games appear on Flash portals, especially when they only have a couple hundred plays, and how quickly they can be rated — often so quickly that the user wouldn’t have had to time complete a single mission. This creates a herd-like mentality, where users initially rate games very superficially, and ratings take 12-24 hours to converge towards a realistic representation of the game’s popularity.

Given this, successful Flash developers have to find ways to engage the user immediately, especially for games which contain non-trivial mechanics. Interestingly, on many portals, the highest-rated games are the ones with the most depth and replayability. This seems at odds with the previous statement; since to achieve that depth, most of these games have sophisticated underlying mechanics. To me, this signals that the games were able to “hook” the user with some sort of initial fun/graphics/technical interest, and then were able to smoothly transition the user along the usability curve, teaching them the gameplay mechanics along the way.

Big-name PC and console titles aren’t hit so hard by this due to a simple fact: the user has a monetary investment in the title. I have personally had the unpleasant experience of going to Gamestop, spending $50 on a terrible game, and then sitting on my couch thinking “Well, I spent 50 bucks on this, and it sucks. Maybe I should at least play it for a while, perhaps it’ll get better…”. In the web world, why waste time on a game you didn’t pay for?

Perhaps it’s just a matter of time compression — free, “bite-sized”, casual, web games operate in a very compressed timeline. They load quickly, they’re played in short bursts, and snap judgements are made about them. However, the upside of all this is a much bigger potential market.

I had all four levels solved, I had the number spot assigned rights, and the final image, and I knew that the lemurs/butterflies were some sort of numeric code. I had scanned the application files with a hex editor (I know, shame on me) and saw no text other than the level “win” screen, so I figured the solution would be some sort of numeric sequence. I was actually looking for an IP address instead of a phone number (so low-tech, I know!)

Once you see that the solution is just entering the binary sequence of numbers 1-9, things make a lot more sense. The final screen makes less sense, in that the butterflies and many of the eyes there have no actual meaning, they just exist as spacers to segreate the bits you’re trying to extract.

Guess, I will have to go back to making money the old-fashioned way!

Further thoughts: In terms of an interesting brain-teaster for the mathematically inclined, this was neat. In terms of a generally accessible puzzle that a layperson could solve, it was terrible. The “game” itself involved mostly random repetition to piece together the level solutions, and without a knowledge of numeric representation in binary it’s really not solvable. So, I’d imagine a lot of people purchased this on iTunes and were quite disappointed by the lack of an engaging puzzle experience… not sure this bodes well for their next offering, especially if their business model is based around selling large amount of these apps…

This showed up on their Twitter feed yesterday. It has bothered me that at various points during the puzzles there seem to be multiple potential paths. Usually a bad move will pop up a “Fosa” and reset the level back to the beginning, but occasionally there are multiple potentially valid moves. These always seem to involve a lemur, and often a lemur that can be “toggled”.

I had some time to kill last night, and so I revisited the first level. Lo and behold — I found another solution. It shares some intriguing similarities with the first solution I found, in that some of the moves are the same, and “chunks” of them are different (but often seem like reversed/incremented versions). The really weird thing about it is that it’s possible to end with a lemur showing and 8 captured butterflies (!) This is a bit confusing. In this case, the Lemur is placed on eye location #4. As it turns out, at that point you can tap eyes #1 to pop up the “win” dialog. *Or*, you can deactivate the Lemur by tapping it, then tap eyes #1 to pop up a Lemur in a different spot, then tap the empty #4 spot to win!

Is there a ‘best’ solution to each level? Are the butterflies more of a hindrance than a help? Maybe it involves the Lemurs? (This last solution I mentioned has three lemurs on the screen at one point…)