Creating games is a business, there is no doubt, but it is a business that many people feel passionately about. For every large team in the industry slaving away with massive resources on big-budget games, there are dozens of enthusiasts out there creating games with limited resources—or even experience—but loads of passion. In fact, this is a great time to be a young game developer, as there are more ways than ever to learn to create your own games and sell them yourself. One site is taking a new approach to making sure it has plenty of content: they will train gamers to create Flash games themselves.

Kongregate, a web site with an addictive variety of Flash games, has launched Kongregate Labs, a series of tutorials that, in essence, teach you how to use Flash to create your own games. Jim Greer, the CEO of Kongregate, thinks the tutorials will give budding developers a good start. After completing the tutorials, gamers "will know all the basic skill needed to create 2D flash games—animation, event handling, simple AI, collision detection, sound, even things like statistics and achievements. They should be able to create a pretty wide variety of games," he told Ars.

The forums at Kongregate have also become a place to learn, as users are sharing game creation tips with one another. "In general the community in the forums and chat is quite supportive—people answering questions, helping out people who have problems. This morning, one of our users posted very detailed instructions on how to complete the tutorials without the commercial Flash product using free open-source tools," Greer said. "That makes me happy."

This may seem like an initiative that's looking to the future, but these sorts of tools and user-driven communities actually hearken back to the early days of game development. Greer explained why the company decided to begin this program. "First off, we've had a lot of demand for this—we have a programming forum on our site, and we were thinking it would be mostly experienced programmers exchanging tips. As it turns out it's a lot more beginning programmers asking for help."

The second reason will be familiar to our older readers. "Secondly, I learned to program by making games—this was like 25 years ago, on an Apple ][+. Back then it was pretty common for books and magazines to print the source code for games, and you had to type it in if you wanted to play it. That was a great way to learn that obviously doesn't happen any more, so creating a step-by-step tutorial seemed like a good alternative."

While it's true that level editors and SDKs for modern gaming may give experienced gamers more control over mods and new content than they even have, that doesn't help inexperienced coders. Kongregate Labs wants to lower the bar of entry, and the tutorials are their way of getting people excited about the possibility of creating their own content.

Of course Kongregate is also hoping that, in the end, the site will benefit from a user base that now knows how to create its own games; the easiest way to make sure you find an Einstein is start teaching as many children as you can. Greer sees a future where giving as many gamers as possible these tools will lead to what's most important: great games. "In the short term, I think we'll see a lot of experimentation, pretty simple games, slight alterations of what you build in the tutorials. Over the next 6 to 12 months, I bet we'll see that some of those people turn into serious developers who create great games," he explained. "Obviously we're betting that Kongregate will continue to benefit from that."