The Long Ago Kongregate has been around for a relatively long time. We were around when Flash was cool, and also when it became uncool. We were also around when SSL was considered an optional luxury that added significant overhead and latency to network requests. Thus, we built our site with the assumption that HTTP was a fine protocol to use most everywhere, and SSL should just be used "as needed" -- for authentication, purchasing, and other sensitive data. That assumption held up for over a

Let me tell you a tale about an initiative to reduce Flash dependencies on what used to be a "Flash gaming" site. This is the story about a large-scale project with the best possible outcome being that users don't notice any changes, and the worst possible outcome of everything breaking horribly. This, my friends, is the story of Kongregate's Death to Flashy initiative. In the Beginning When we first started building Kongregate, we didn't have to worry much about whether or not users had Flas

Many Unity developers have taken the plunge and started exporting WebGL versions of their games. Unfortunately, many of them also run into issues that can lead to performance degradation and instability. This is a particularly tricky problem on older machines that have less resources available. This article will outline several techniques for resolving some common WebGL performance issues we’ve seen with games published on Kongregate, and hopefully get you off to a good start when it comes to d

Galvanic Games [https://www.facebook.com/galvanicgames] is a small company with few resources. As our primary programmer on the team, it’s my job to figure out how we can deliver content as quickly as possible. We had a goal to release our game, Questmore [http://www.kongregate.com/games/galvanicgames/questmore], after just a few months of development. This makes picking our tools one of the most valuable steps in the process, and Unity is a phenomenal tool for rapid development. However, it isn

Web games like Kongregate's may be one of the key ingredients for developing powerful artificial intelligence. Read on to find out why this is, where they fit in, and how you can help! Hi! I'm Jack Clark, strategy and communications director at OpenAI [https://openai.com/blog/] — a non-profit artificial intelligence research lab. I want to tell you about a new AI project from us called "Universe [http://universe.openai.com]" that relies in part on games from Kongregate. At OpenAI, we've spent

One of the biggest challenges in mobile game development is having your game run great on a low-end device without compromising the experience on a high-end one. We tend to optimize and budget the best experience for our high-end devices. There are many good reasons for this: better monetization, better engagement, etc. Low-end devices seem to run away from us in scope and get poorly prioritized because of the focus on high-end devices. But they’re still important! According to a recent Mixpanel