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Macromedia announced a shiny new version of its Flash software this week, one that the company says will make it easier for designers to create "rich" content for PCs, PDAs, Internet appliances, and whatever other electronic devices are soon to come along.
This new Flash, called MX, is sure to enchant Web designers who are looking for ever more wondrous ways to make their sites stand out.
But Ferry Halim -- a 28-year-old accountant from Fresno, a central California city that's pretty much in the middle of nowhere -- doesn't need the latest version of Flash for his website to stand out. He doesn't even need the current version, Flash 5.
Instead, Halim has created dozens of what may be the world's most addictive video games using Flash 4. They also may be the world's simplest.
A sophisticated youngster who's been raised on the million-polygon graphics and cinema-like sound of PC and console video games undoubtedly will look at one of Halim's tiny creations with some derision.
But load up one of his games and you'll find yourself bewitched by its simplicity -- the modest concept, the ease with which you get the hang of it, the pastel graphics and three-note music that sounds like an ice-cream truck passing by. And perhaps that intoxication explains why Halim gets about 30,000 visitors a day to his site (about a million a month), some of whom spend seemingly all their time trying to get the high scores.
"People e-mail me with angry letters, saying, 'I've been playing for three hours and the Web connection died,'" Halim said. "I tell them, oh my goodness, please take it easy, these are supposed to be fun."
The first game he created, called Milk the Cow, has this premise: A herd of Holstein cows comes flying at you, and your job is to click on each one as fast as possible, trying to fill up a pail of milk. It's a brain-dead game to play, and because of that, perhaps, it seems nearly impossible to play it just once.
Judging by the high score list, there are people out there who have become expert at the game. An average player will take about 10 seconds to fill the milk pail, but a player named Kan has managed to do it in a superhuman three seconds.
"Oh my goodness," Halim said, "I cannot imagine how they got such crazy good scores. It's easy for an experienced Web designer to hack into it maybe and set the scores. Each week I reset the scores, but in another three hours there's another person with crazy scores."
Halim has been an artist since he was a kid, but he studied accounting, and when he got out of school he took a job as an accountant at a graphics company.
"And for the last six months I worked there, I did a lot of graphics stuff instead of accounting stuff," he said, "because the art director there liked my work. He said I should do that instead of me doing my accounting stuff."
He had no computer training, but Halim picked up Flash by reading about it. When he saw that people liked his cow game, he set about creating other ones, with each one taking him a couple weeks to design.
"The ideas themselves, that's the hard part, they don't come every day," he said. "Like now I don't have any good ideas."
Many of Halim's games are variations on the cow game, requiring the player to be a really good mouse-clicker. You click to catch eggs or apples, click to bean kids with snowballs and penguins with ice blocks, and, of course, you click to fire cannons.
For their small size -- each game is around 100 KB or less -- Halim's creations don't look amateurish, a fact that he attributes to the "Japanese look": round faces, straight lines.
"I found that it's the most efficient style to use," he said. "Creating complex pictures, like a real person, you'll have some trouble animating it because of the CPU power it requires. The less there is, the faster it is to run."
The one problem that Halim has is finding a hosting service that won't charge him a lot to serve up his games, which are free to play. He's had some problems in the past with hosts balking at the traffic his site gets, and he doesn't know how long his current host will keep him.
Paying for their creations is a problem many Flash creators face, according to Jarvis Mak, an analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings.
Sites like Lifesavers' Candystand, which offers Shockwave and Flash games, might be a good branding opportunity, he said, but many online games are a labor of love.
That's certainly the case for Halim. He likes that people like his games, and it especially tickles him, he says, when very young kids get hooked. And to appeal to kids, he keeps his games nonviolent.
"I try to make things interesting in a clean way," he said. "You can always make a Tetris game, because you've seen that and you know how it looks and how it plays. The hardest part is seeing if you can make something new and making sure there is no violence.
"That's my main intention. You won't find any blood or any decapitated heads on the site. I tend to think, 'Why don't you create something that is less violent that will appeal to kids and adults?' That's a hit."
