Kongregate Labs Offers Free Browser Game Tutorials

[BlinkOk]

Browser game portal Kongregate has launched Kongregate Labs, a community site designed to teach visitors how to create their very own Flash games. Dubbed "shootorials," the first round of free tutorials teaches users how to create a simple side scrolling shooter, using a free trial of Adobe's Flash CS3.

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i can see the giant wave of #%$^@ forming on the horizon

[ImprisonedPride]

i can see the giant wave of #%$^@ forming on the horizon

Or a wave of "Help with Kongregate tutorial" bull**** threads filling up the games forum.

[.hooligan]

yeah saw that this morning. Very interesting. Wonder what effect this will have.

[BlinkOk]

it's interesting that whenever you see kongregate talk about developers it's "developers need to be valued more" and yet here you can only read this action as nurturing immature blandware.
their retail model is the long tail so blandware would really suite them. it is very frustrating.

[Viza]

Man, reading the comments left in some of the tutorials really made my jaw drop. I seriously slapped my self on the forehead.. How can they be so freakin immature and stupid by leaving comments like:
"This is stupid, can't someone give me the code?"
"Gay"
"1/5, too hard"
.. and my personal favourite: "This game sucks"

I actually like the crowd at Kongregate; yeah they're insanely immature most of the time, but atleast they give you feedback and they are what they are - players.

Perhaps trying to turn some Kong players into developers will fail miserably, but I think Kongregate has got off to a great start with its tutorials and associated competition so it'll be interesting to have more noobs like me to help out, lol.

Viza.

[tomsamson]

The whole thing might have been made with good intentions, but yeah, it sounds a bit "weird" in a way if its done by a portal which directly earns money off of newbies with such a move.

to Viza, regarding this you said:
"
I actually like the crowd at Kongregate; yeah they're insanely immature most of the time, but atleast they give you feedback and they are what they are - players.
"

Hm, on one side: sure, on another: how a site is set up and how it is moderated does have a lot of effect on who visits it and how the people behave. Not to talk one of em down but just compare the average commenter on jayisgames with ones on newgrounds.

[Viza]

@TomSamsom: Yep, I completely agree with you.

Hm, on one side: sure, on another: how a site is set up and how it is moderated does have a lot of effect on who visits it and how the people behave. Not to talk one of em down but just compare the average commenter on jayisgames with ones on newgrounds.

Yeah, I understand your opinion. I agree with you in regards to the obviously much more civilised and mature behaviour of the crowd at jayisgames.com. You simply cannot compare the two different crowds, because Kongregate is filled with mindless twats.

BUT, the reason why I said "I liked" the players found at Kongregate is because they play my game and therefore they are another audience I should try to appeal to (obviously not to the point where I design games with mindless explosions and "ZOMG Zombies FTW!!?!", but you have to consider the opinions of all feedback). Despite heaps of dev's hangin s*** on Kong, I'd like to think that their opinions (as long as it's not just "gay", "no badges, thus 1/5" or pointless crap like that) are sometimes just as valid as any other person playing my game. I don't necessarily have to listen or take on board any advice, but if someone takes the time to write me a comment I'll atleast spare a few seconds to read it.

...Or maybe I'm just talking out of my a$$. I've never had a game 'properly' featured on Kong's frontpage, so I guess I haven't been exposed to the complete tards yet.

Viza.

[tomsamson]

no need to talk down your own opinion, its a valuable one and yeah,i agree.

[renderhjs]

yay more flash crap content- way to go.

as for retarded kids:
Disrespectfull, imature and often dumb kids/ teenagers are the biggest turn off in the game industry in my oppinion and I know that I am harsh on this one - but it bugs me often.
Instead of reaching more intelligent and mature audience like many game developers tried in the past (see the ego-shooters, story driven adventures, more mature graphics/ tones/ themes/ story/ content,...) it reached often alot younger audiences who had not been the main target or the target audience at all.

[Squize]

Being totally cynical, this is an even easier way for the "youTube of games" to get more content.
I'm sure they couldn't give a toss if they get 50 copies of the tut. game skinned in different ways.

It's also a very clever move, in that they're pushing to be a one stop shop for Flash game dev.
You can almost picture it being pimped as "Not only do we give developers a revenue share and the chance to win a weekly / monthly bonus, we're even teaching non-coders how to write games so they can have a slice of the pie too".

Money makes the world go round and all that.

As to the members at Kong, imho they're the worst of any community, to the point where I won't post any of our games there any more. Newgrounds by comparison is a lot more mature, even if they do treat games as if they've had to pay for them when it comes to the reviews ( Which isn't always a bad thing ).

Squize.

[Sietjp]

Same opinion here, I still submit to kongregate when I have time but I don't look at the commetns and ratings there.
I prefer Newgrounds and Nonoba to get some interesting feedback.

[tonypa]

I would not be so negative about the tutorials as most replies have been so far. Most people here probably dont remember how it was to write first game, its not always about getting rich fast, it could be also doing something for your own fun or understanding how to write a games.

Old guys probably remember similar shooter game tutorial by David Doull:
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Ga...-598/index.php
Yes, I have seen countless games over the years that basically just changed the graphics in there but I am also sure there are a lot of people who learned from it, changed things, added new features, played with code, rewrote it and eventually created something new or used the knowledge to write their own game.

Its easy to forget that leap from "I dont know anything about making games" into "something" is huge and for many people the option of "spend 5 years to understand basics of programming language" is not enough. They may be struggling with creating movie clip, or how to make scrolling background and once they see how it can be done they can learn another bit. You know, number of people who dont know anything about Flash or game programming is always larger then people who are pretty good at it, so basic tutorial about explaining things to the absolute beginner will have much more thankful readers then tutorial discussing advanced techniques of specific game genre.

[ChaseNYC]

I have to agree with tonypa on this one... The first thing I thought of when I read the thread is that I looked at the same tutorials tonypa linked to when I was first interested in designing a game. I can't get the tutorials to play in firefox, but I'm very surprised no one has mentioned the quality of the tutorials...

Anyways just had to get my devil/satan post count out of the way...

[Ray Beez]

I agree with you Tonypa, with one exception... Depends on the motivation. If a newbie is motivated by wanting to make games, great. But what if they are motivated by wanting to make money [from Kong revenue sharing]?

One type of newbie will want to learn to make their vision come to life. The other will just want to get things working ("gimme codez!!") so he can make a buck ASAP.

[tomsamson]

I had similar thoughts as tonypa, chase and ray thinking about how yes, for newbies it could be a helpful thing. But the reality is that things have changed a lot since most of the "oldies" here started out. Meanwhie one can do so much more in flash and there are so many more ressources around to learn and experiment with stuff, its not really comparable. While one could say no matter how much learning material is available, more is always good, yeah, there´s the point that of course the ambition is at least to some degree to make money off of beginners and ideally get lots of content for even more dumped prices.
I remember i was actually quite happy to get my first few games onto portals, but then felt a bit cheated when i learned how much some sites made with the stuff i made for them in comparison to what i earned.
As long as there´s a fair balance all can learn,create and also earn in a fair share if money is made with the stuff in some way, then i wouldn´t argue against it, well,let´s see how this evolves.

[EvilKris]

Been away from the Flash scene for a year now and they're still only making AS2.0 tutorials. Unbelievable. Thought the internet would be flooded with OO style AS3 tutorials by now.

[tonypa]

Emanuele Feronato runs good site for beginner tutorials:
http://www.emanueleferonato.com/
Its interesting to read the user comments there, obviously some people are only after getting their hands on full code and are not able to change even one line. But, and I find it more comforting, there are also many people willing to bugtest, modify, rewrite the code and share it back to everyone.

Also, there are both AS2 and AS3 tutorials and I would say, its about half and half share on both versions, I mean the visitors reading them and asking for other version. Personally, I think writing good beginner tutorial in AS3 is more difficult because you would need to explain basics of OOP too and thats not what the game tutorial is about.

[.hooligan]

yay more flash crap content- way to go.

Exactly what I was thinking.

[TOdorus]

So what's the big deal? Either you get more n00bs that will either quit pretty quick or go on to become somewhat of a developer. As I can make out nobody here really cares for the low quality games, so you can keep ignoring those.

On another note: concluding that the kong crowd is immature as a gratification for you bashing it is in my opinion... quite immature.

[tomsamson]

its an interesting topic with obviously very different opinions on it, personally i think that it does make quite a difference how many games get released on a portal per day, the more there are the more difficult it is for one particular title to stick out or stay sticky. In my eyes a portal can either go for higher quality games and then needs less of em per month or they can go for just lots of new content every day, i like the first way more obviously.