Classic Flash games have made a mild resurgence in the last few years now that high quality emulation is available. Kongregate, a stalwart of online games portals is one example where they’ve done a great job of making all their classic games playable. With this year being a new games year for us, I wanted to look through our catalogue of previously created and sponsored games to gain ideas for conversions, new products and find any lessons from the past.

Looking at these ancient games makes sense for us as a small company because they were created quickly, usually cheaply and with an emphasis on immediate gameplay. As a small company we always must be efficient and scale our ambitions correctly. In all we had at least 52 games that we created or sponsored for our online games’ portals. First, I checked which games we’ d already converted to mobile. We’ve converted thirteen of them, with eight remaining on at least one app store. I’d forgotten how many of them we’d converted, it’s a very high proportion if you only include the games we made, rather than the ones we bought in.

So out of the remaining games are there any that are worth converting or adapting to mobile? The collection of our tri peaks styles games like Tower Solitaire and Tripeaks Reserve won’t add much to our catalogue as standalone games. However, Tower Solitaire (https://www.solitaireparadise.com/games_list/tower_solitaire.html) might well make a nice additional level in one our games and the artwork is in a vector format that should work well in modern resolutions. It looks so cute and I’m enjoying linking to our old games’ portal Solitaire Paradise (owned by someone else these days, but under obviously good stewardship).

One of our other interesting solitaire games is Chief Eagle Solitaire – https://www.solitaireparadise.com/games_list/chief_eagle_solitaire.html. It’s a variation of our popular Pyramid Solitaire games with no deck cards to deal and three different level layouts. It offers us a few lessons in making future variants or improvements to our Pyramid Solitaires https://www.glowingeyegames.com/game/pyramid-solitaire-ancient-egypt/

The first important lesson is that card clarity is paramount! The imagery is stylised and looks good, but when playing it feels busy and the text is fairly small. This means it loses some of the intuitive understanding that we see all users rely on while playing.

Next, each level has no cards that can be dealt out. Although the levels are well balanced, the game feels less fun because the player’s attention has more elements to focus on at the start, and the player has no tools to improve their chances. The Pyramid Solitaire style of game feels better if the player has cards to deal. However overall Chief Eagle is still quite enjoyable and if online games were still a thing, I would happily consider an update to enhance it.

The action games we created weren’t financially successful. However, our simple shooting game Rebel Fortress and the quick sequel Rebel Fortress survival (https://www.kongregate.com/games/accoladegames/rebel-fortress-survival), show a nice development trick that can be a benefit! You can make a sequel quickly, if you iterate on the previous game with a small set of gameplay changes. It’s a cheap example of a principle we’ve used several times. This option has changed with modern games, because updates are so engrained into development, if the improvements aren’t big enough players might feel shortchanged having to obtain another game.

Our puzzle game collection has previously been converted to mobile. Sadly, despite success online when it came to mobile market, they just didn’t find traction. It’s a shame really, as Brilliant Blocks (https://www.kongregate.com/games/glowingeyegames/brilliant-blocks) is still an enjoyable game, albeit one needing some honing, in the modern age. I’d love to revisit it again, but it would need a strong prototyping phase.

We also extensively sponsored puzzle games; my favourite is GemClix Blitz (https://www.kongregate.com/games/glowingeyegames/gemclix-blitz). Sadly, I can’t find a link to developer anymore, but in its day the particle effects were quite impressive for a flash game! The emulation suffers quite a bit of slow down, so it doesn’t feel as good as the original. However, I’ve often thought this puzzle experience could do with a mobile variant.

We went through a phase of sponsoring physics-based games, mostly puzzle game variants. They work best on larger screens, and although enjoyable aren’t really right for small screens without a lot of work. I forgot how interesting physics-based games feel. Doodle Roll is our best one (https://www.kongregate.com/games/accoladegames/doodle-roll)

We experimented with other genres (e.g. visual novels, spot the difference, sports and tower defense) but where Glowing Eye Games seems to have done best over the years, is board games, card games and solitaire games. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should only make these kinds of games, but adding variety to our range should be done gradually.