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My own version of famous Monopoly board game

How did this project was born?

(You can play final monopoly version here)

It all started 12+ years ago. Back then, I was studying Macromedia Flash ActionScript (it was held by Macromedia long time ago, now Adobe controls it). The first version of ActionScript was 1.0; later it improved to 2.0, and now it is 3.0. My game was done in AS 2.0.

I was young and eager to learn, had a lot of time and would spend countless hours on the subjects I liked. Creating something from nothing, especially creating games was one of the things I really liked, so I started designing my version of board game Monopoly.

The first variant looked like this:

Old-Monopoly-Version-1

Not much of a game if you ask me. Soon I understood, nobody will play such a dull game. I could abandon the project right there.

But I didn’t. I already spent time doing it; I was determined to finish it.

What did I do next? I added superior graphics (it looked “beautiful” to me, but compared to nowadays games, they still looked pretty monotonous). I created separate animations for each event: buying a square, ending up in police, etc. You can see some examples below, just press play.

Here is a screenshot of how did my improved Monopoly game looked like.

Old-Monopoly-Version-2

In fact, in first finished version, you were not just buying different companies inside the game-board; you were also destroying your rivals with unique weapon cards. I called it “Anti-monopoly.

After a while, I got an idea that you can just put copyrighted names in your game, so I removed all the companies and gave them random names. I made it less colorful, just to keep the same color scheme.

Here is a full version (may be buggy though) if you want to try.

You can use guns after your “roll the dice”. Mind that most guns need to be used strategically, some can build a wall behind you, some can fire 1 square in front, and so on.

And then my enthusiasm dropped. The game was 99% finished. It even had his own intro!

Old-Intro(Click on the image to see the intro – it contains sound)

It still required some finishing touches, but I did not know how exactly I should proceed with the game. I just put it aside assuming I will make something out of it in the future.

Was my assumption correct? Hell, no. 9 years passed, and nothing happened. Zero. Big nothing.

Finally, I looked back at it and decided to complete “unfinished projects”. I invested so much time after all, and the only way to make that time count was to finish the game.

I had a new idea to redesign the game, so it looks great in buyer’s viewpoint. And just sell it. It was 2012 year when the game came back to light again. I skipped some parts of “anti-monopoly” and made the game simpler – no banks, no special weapon guns.

Old-Monopoly-Version-3

Again, the game was 99% finished. The only worry that I had, it included only a few sound effects. I thought I would hire someone to make the sounds, and then sell the game, but it never happened. Maybe the reason behind that is that I didn’t have an exact plan what to do, how to find a sound specialist, how to sell it (I was thinking about FGL.com).

I just pushed the game aside, and waited for the right moment, which, you can guess it by now, never came. Actually, darkest scenario happened: Flash technology and its fame started to fade away when Apple decided that Flash will NOT be supported on Apple devices.

So here I was, stuck and attached to the game. I couldn’t sell it anymore (or maybe I didn’t want to sell it), but I still wanted to act, still wanted to do something with it, after spending so many hours creating it.

And finally, in 2016 year, I decided, AGAIN, to complete it finally. I added sound fx, character and voiceover (hired on Fiverr everything) and FINISHED it this time.

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