E4.com Grand Master Flash competition:
Play and vote for your favourite finalist
Good game, good game
What makes a good game? Why do people like playing ‘em? What are they for?
Frankly, we don’t have a clue – is there a mathematical formula? We asked one of our top business analysts to whip up a spreadsheet for us and here’s the result.
Useless.
What we realised is this: you can’t define fun. And we ought to employ some better business analysts. Good games are like good jokes, try to dissect them and they fall apart.
But, we thought, if we’re asking you lot to go off and make us a first rate Flash funbundle, we should put our money where our mouth is and try knocking one up ourselves. So that’s what we decided to do. Well, not “us” exactly…
We challenged E4.com Grand Master Flash judge Rob Manuel to construct us a game from scratch. He had exactly six weeks to complete the project, and each week he had to update us with his progress and tell us what he learned. It all went so well for a while...
Week one: The Magic Rules
Week two: Brainstorm A Brilliant Idea
Week three: Marrying Music To A Great Title
Week four: How To Cheat At Graphics
Week five: Adding A Wiki And User Generated Content
Week six: When Everything Went Wrong
And if you would like to find out what we at E4.com are into game-wise, check out these lickle babies.