The developer I'm most embarrassed to have left out of my previous post is my friend Nick "PestoForce" Pasto who I had the pleasure of meeting at a Flash Gaming Summit. His game Chibi Knight features the voice of his daughter (who I guess was 3 at the time) and I must say she did an excellent job. While Nick has made many great games, I want to point out Nephi's Adventure because it pertains to his faith. While I may not share his beliefs, I admire him for making games about things that are important to him. I want to point out his work on the absolute masterpiece of an NES tribute Abobo's Big Adventure.
Another prolific developer is Patrick "Godlimations" Majewski. He has made fighting games and action platformers, but he's perhaps best known for point-and-click adventures like Monster Basement. Despite the name Godlimations, he rarely put religious themes in his games. Instead, he would create imaginative fantasy stories and I was always excited to see him make something new.
The Perfect Balance series could be described as the quintessential physics puzzle games. The games involve accounting for the weight of geometric shapes, and they are both very polished and very difficult. As a response to players having such a hard time with the games, the developer made Perfect Balance Playground as a sort of joke.
When talking about legendary Flash games, it's hard to leave out The Fancy Pants Adventures. While most platformers stick to the comfort of flat surfaces, Fancy Pants manages to bring a world to life that's as curvy as a scribble. And more than just being able to walk along uneven ground, you can slip and slide and do parkour across it like you're surfing on a wave. It seems this series will fortunately survive the death of Flash because new games have been coming out for mobile.
Josiah "Jazza" Brooks is more of an animator than a game developer, but I want to mention him here because he's contributed some great art to some great games. Also, the world of Flash animations is almost as important to me as the world of Flash games but it just happens to be outside the scope of this post. Jazza is a man of many talents, and he made Battle for Wayland Keep as a precursor to a game called Ortus that I helped crowdfund 9 years ago but was never completed. I kind of know what it's like to be in "development hell" and I don't wish that on anyone so I hope the whole team can move on with their lives and not worry about their backers too much.
Jay "Zeebarf" Ziebarth is a very creative developer who has dreamed up some incredible (and often gross) fantasy worlds. The Several Journeys of Reemus is his biggest game series and it follows an exterminator (like DROD) and his tiny bear friend in a whole bunch of awesome point-and-click adventures.
I had the pleasure of working with Chris "Lil' G" Gianelloni on a game project that unfortunately had to be scrapped, but he did send me a couple of talking demon dolls that he made based on his Reincaration series. His game CellCraft was apparently made in collaboration with real biologists to teach real science.
Daniel Sun has both Arab and East Asian heritage and I've always admired him for fusing the mythology of those two worlds together when creating games like the Armed with Wings series. He lent me his fantastic skills by creating the character animations for my game Ame Fury. (I'm not proud of my own work on that game but I'm in awe of the two artists and the voice actress!)
I really love the StormWinds series by Hero Interactive and I consider it to be a pioneer of the steampunk genre. But it's so difficult to make money in an industry like video games, especially when you're a real artist (and your product is free), so unfortunately Hero Interactive had to go out of business long before Flash died. It's always sad when a game studio goes out of business, especially one I adore. The first time I went to the Flash Gaming Summit, I got to hang out with five members of Hero Interactive at the party in the Kongregate office. It's rare to find women who animate for Flash games, and it's certainly more rare to find women who write code for Flash games, and I got to meet a woman who wrote code for Hero Interactive (and I may have flirted with her a bit). But then the next year there were only two members of Hero Interactive remaining, and the struggles of Hero Interactive seemed to symbolize the struggles of the Flash game industry as a whole. Apparently Hero Interactive's employees were begging their boss to keep the studio going and they loved it so much that they were willing to work for free but he couldn't let that happen in good conscience. And then years later Flash enthusiasts everywhere were begging Adobe to keep Flash alive by letting someone else fix the product for them, but I guess Adobe still had to shut Flash down. May we carry this love we had for Flash as we all move forward in our lives, and may we bring that love into everything we do.
