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Launchball – an awesome Flash game

Posted by James - 16/06/08 at 10:06:43 pm

I’m very impressed with Launchball, a Flash game from the Science Museum.

I love the design, I love the interface – its unique, simple and very swish. Once I started playing the game I was staggered by how fully realised it is – no skimping on the programming here, we’re talking realistic physics and complete freedom, thanks to the Flade Actionscript dynamics / physics engine. (Launchball is AS2 – but incidently Flade is now called the APE and is available in AS3 format).

And when everything just works, you start to get far more creative. Most Flash games are tasks, challenges, but Launchball seems so much more like an environment (with a goal, of course). It’s beyond your average Flash game and into the realms of something I’d expect from a proper games console.  No wonder it picked up a few awards!

There’s an awful lot of fun to be had with Launchball, and if you’ve got friends, there’s also more to the game than the standard few levels – there’s a whole host of features for creating and sharing your own levels. I was also interested to see that, although the game doesn’t have any real integration with sites like Facebook (all the game sharing is done via the good old e-mail & account method) there is a group devoted to the game. (Become a fan of Launchball on Facebook)

Read more;

Mike ellis of electronic museum was involved in the creation of Launchball. See what he had to say about it on his blog. [link]

Henry of prehensile.co.uk gives an interesting overview of many of the elements that went into the development Launchball.  A long read, but interesting… [link]

Preloaded is the agency that brought Launchball to life. [link]

10 Comments »

1. 

   Simple but brilliant, good game.

   Comment by T-Enterprise — 17 June 2008 #

2. 

   The types of Flash games that are now beginning to hit the Internet, closely emulate the old Console games of the ‘80’s. There are a lot of Tetris clones and PacMan rip-offs. But, these are just the experiments that need to be done to test out a new technology. The same thing happened with the PC: the first PC games were classics such as Solitaire (take a few minutes at lunch to walk round the office and count the number of people playing solitaire on their computers).

   Where Flash will take game developers is now beginning to materialize. Strangely, the first place we’ve seen Flash games developed is in the advertising arena. The new medium of online commercials is Flash. You can see it on sites such as Weather.com, CNN.com and C|NET.com. All of these sites leverage rich media advertising (a.k.a. Flash). Companies that have been very successful with interactive Flash advertising include VW, with their VW Beatles’ Flash Ads.

   You can also check out Websites such as Shockwave.com. Shockwave.com was once the last stand for Director developed games. Now you’ll find that many of the new games are developed with Flash.

   The next step developers can take with Flash today is to make Flash games interactive. This can be done with current Flash Player -– you can use with Flash Remoting, Flash Communication Server or XML:Sockets to do this.

   thank!

   http://www.br3games.com

   Comment by john — 15 July 2008 #

3. 

   Tiago,

   Great find! I agree, this game is terrific. The whole presentation is understated, which makes it stand out from the crowd, and the graphics are classy. Most importantly, it’s fun!

   Comment by David Stiller — 16 December 2008 #

4. 

   Yeah, it is a great game. It was designed and built by Preloaded.

   http://www.preloaded.com

   Comment by Adrian Parr — 15 January 2009 #

5. 

   It looks good, but I can’t for the love of me figure out the controls.

   I find I can mouse over an object and a short description of it will be revealed in the frame but clicking on achieves nothing.

   I’ve given the entire keyboard a handjob trying to figure this out.

   Nowhere in the game are controls explained which makes it that much more irritating.

   I’ve tried playing it in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but not yet in Internet Explorer.

   Comment by Mikhail — 15 February 2009 #

6. 

   NevermindI’manidiot.

   Comment by Mikhail — 15 February 2009 #

7. 

   I really like this simple games.Great work.

   Comment by NY Web Design developer — 1 June 2009 #

8. 

   Cool game … a little old

   You can try this also, only new games, very good ones:

   Free 2010 Games – New Games 2010

   Comment by Christian Pop — 24 February 2010 #

9. 

   How awesome is this game?!!!

   I solved about 10 levels, and have been doing nothing but building my own ever since! For me,

   Comment by John Heavern — 26 February 2010 #

10. 

    How awesome is this game?!!!
    I solved about 10 of the pre-loaded puzzles, and then discovered C

    Comment by John Heavern — 26 February 2010 #

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