How to Make a Basic Flash Game

Making a basic flash game is easy and fun. It can be small enough for even little children to play or as large as a jigsaw puzzle to challenge adults' memory skills. It can be played several ways. Below are the steps to take to make a game.

Difficulty:

Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Small pieces of card-weight stock (small index cards cut in half are a good size)
• Markers or crayons or
• a source of duplicate pictures
• Paste or glue
• Scissors

1. Make enough cards for your game: 10 will be enough to make a very simple shape-matching game for a small child. An alphabet-letter matching game takes 52 cards (26 pairs). A number-matching game could run from 1 to 20, requiring 40 cards. A picture-matching game can be as big or small as you want.

2. Mark pairs of cards, using markers or crayons. For an alphabet game, two cards need to contain the letter A, two need B, etc.For a picture game, draw the same picture on a pair of cards, then another picture on the next pair, etc. For a shape-matching game, draw a circle on two cards, a square on the next two, a triangle, rectangle, oval, star, etc., two of each.

3. Use already-printed pictures to make a big game. The easiest way to do it is to buy two copies of the same magazine. That way, you can be sure your pictures will exactly match each other. Pick out pictures you like, cut them to fit cards, and put them on with paste or glue.

4. Play the game with someone else to test the results. The simplest way to play your game is "simple match." Put all your cards on a table face-down. A player picks up two cards, looking for a match. If she finds a match, she keeps the pair. If there is no match, the player puts both cards back down, and the next player gets a turn. The player with the most pairs at the end of the game is the winner (See Tips for other ways to play).

5. Decide on whether your game is too easy, too hard or just right to have fun. Make more cards or discard some to make your game work better. If you get tired of your game, now you know how easy it is to make another.

Tips & Warnings

• If you're making a game to help someone learn things, you can make the game more educational by using the alphabet and pairing an uppercase letter to a lowercase letter or making a math game with the problem on one card with the matching card showing the answer to the problem.

• For a beginning writer, you write a letter on one card and the writer copies the letter on the other card.

• Picture cards can teach, too--put a cat on one card and a kitten on its pair, an apple on one and an apple tree on its pair.

• Put one set of cards face-down on the table, divide the other set among players. Each player must try to match the card held up by

• the player whose turn it is to be "dealer."

• Change the rules any way that makes the game more fun, so long as you match up pairs.

• Start young children or new players with small versions of the game; they can get easily discouraged if there seems to be an endless layout of cards to work through.