HTML5 Game Markets

Rich over at PhotonStorm posted this the other day:

Insert Coin to Continue: The HTML5 Game Sponsorship Market

It’s a very good rundown of the HTML5 game market.  Most important to me was I finally understand a bit of the distinctions and pros and cons between “app” games versus mobile HTML5 games like he’s talking about.  It seems like for the former you’re either selling the app outright, and competing against some heavy hitters, or going for micro-transactions, which can also be pretty hard and unpredictable.  The latter is in some ways much more like the Flash market, where portals want to host your game so they can get eyeballs on their ads.  I’ll have to think a bit about what this means for the Haxe app based approach we’ve been focusing on here.

Flashplayer Standalone Debug on Arch

Re-installing from the latest Arch distribution, I had some minor issues using the standard AUR package to install the standalone Flashplayer. Most notably, it seems like the tarball from Adobe has been updated since the package last was, so the MD5 sums are off. To fix this, manually download and md5sum /tmp/packerbuild-0/flashplayer-standalone-debug/flashplayer-standalone-debug/flashplayer_11_sa_debug.i386.tar.gz and replace that with the first value of md5sums in the PKGBUILD.

If you have VLC installed, that will for some reason take precedence as the default app for running SWF files.  To fix that, add the following to ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list:

[Default Applications]
application/x-shockwave-flash=flashplayer.desktop

Flash Plugin Trusted Locations

This catches me for a moment every time I start working from a new location on my disk: If a local SWF plays in the standalone Flash player, but does not run in Web browsers, it may be a security issue. The Flash browser plugin by default does not trust local SWF files and won’t execute them. Unfortunately, somewhat ridiculously, it does not issue any sort of alert or indication that it is blocking the file for this reason, so you may find yourself just sitting there wondering what’s going on.

Right click on the Flash stage in the browser. In Global Settings -> Advanced -> (Developer Tools) Trusted Location Settings add either your specific SWF file or a parent directory. I usually add an umbrella project directory, e.g., /home/joe/rocketshipgames/haxe/. The SWF should now play when you reload the page.

Alternatively, you could set up a local webserver and access the SWF through that rather than a file URL; Flash by default trusts localhost.