I saw somewhere "As a frontend developer, I cannot be happier that the Flash is going to die. As a person raised on Newgrounds, there are tears of nostalgia."
Two other things I really liked were ported by their developer: GemCraft (turret defense) and Velocity Raptor (a special relativity game, https://testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html).
Well I never played these games before, what I miss the most is exactly that. A plethora of games that had no monetary reason to make them. Simply because it was possible for a solo non-skilled person to put a inspired idea in Flash in a relatively quick amount of time. I don't think we have any equivalent in the web today
> A plethora of games that had no monetary reason to make them.
I don't know for Newgrounds but actually many website paid quite a bit of money to sponsor games. Gemcraft for example was sponsored by Armor Games and I believe they were in the 10k ranges. The ECPM was also not bad, I believe some were able to reach 10$ because of video ads.
MochiAds, which was one of the most used ads provider also had a distribution platform which was quite useful.
Once I made a game during a boring math class, I was able to get 500k views out of it (sadly mostly from China which had an ecpm of like 0.01$, it wasn't a market that MochiMedia was developing much for ads, they tried later on but Flash killed them before they were able to increase it enough). I made a bit over 100$ over that game made in an few hours. I was able to reproduce the experiment a second time, with similar result, less views, 300k I think, but much more in the US, a bit under 100$ that time.
I was hoping that Unity would bring that back, because they came during the crash of Flash, but while they still push toward faster development, they were going toward a different market.
IIRC, Tom Fulp paid hosting out of his own pocket for a long time, but eventually he started turning a profit and paying out cash prizes for well-received flashes. Also, including your own monetization was always allowed. Ads on the loading screen were the most popular, but some later games even included micro transactions.
I downloaded it last month. There are a lot of addictive puzzle games that have the potential of being huge on mobile if someone remakes it for android/ios.
I'm keen to learn game development. I have experience with web & react native but would be willing to go canvas/unity if required.
Any ones that stand out that you think would be a good starter game project?
Godot[1] is free and open source, similar to Unity, builds to mobile, desktop and web. It supports 2D and 3D, as well as VR through some addons. It has a built in python-like scripting language called GDScript that's easy to pick up and understand, and you can also use C#, C++ or many other languages through bindings (even Javascript[2]).
It's a really impressive effort for an open source project. There's a channel on YouTube called KidsCanCode[3] (not just for kids!) which has a load of project-based tutorials to build lots of types of games.
Yup, I was hoping for some game titles that would be easy to introduce. I’d pick the stack/engine based on the game.
Grateful for the other advice still.
For real-time games, Pong is a great first project and can be followed up by a top-down 2D game (probably a shooter is the most common one). For these you'll need to use Canvas.
Unless you're doing something unusual, the game mechanics are usually not the hard part. A lot more work has to go into polishing it and making a finished product.
I would suggest staying away from Unity in the beginning, it adds a lot of complexity and you'll be able to get started much faster with a bare canvas (which you can easily learn to draw on, and create a game loop with setTimeout or requestAnimationFrame) or React project.
This exists as Ruffle [1] and is coming along quite well.
The lead developer is a Newgrounds employee (Mike Welsh) and is the author of Swivel [2], a Flash to video converter already in use on Newgrounds. They're targeting both browsers and the desktop with Rust and WebAssembly, and it can already run most basic Flash animations I've tested.
I personally am very excited, having grown up in the Flash era of the Internet, where everything from online coding languages (Scratch) to authors' websites (J.K. Rowling, others) to games and webcomics (take your pick) were made in Flash. Flash was such a universal medium that there's still significant amounts of our Internet history that nobody's converted - or been able to convert - to HTML + JS. And even then, many conversions are buggy and lacking in functionality. Having something like Ruffle available as an extension or a wrapper for legacy websites would be incredible.
If anyone's interested in Ruffle's roadmap, it's available here [3].
This sounds like a fascinating approach. How old is your company? Do you already have clients who you've ported stuff to the web for this way that you can share?
The company (Leaning Technologies) exists from 2012. This specific technology is new and we have multiple commercial early adopters already signed up. We also provide porting tools from C++/Java to Javascript/WebAssembly which are mature and used by many customers.
Not having the source code sucks, but it's not a showstopper ; some videogame preservation websites have managed to workaround this issue.
It's possible to play "Prince of Persia" in the browser (through DOSBOX recompiled to Javascript).
It's even possible to play the original Windows 95 (!) Pinball in the browser. Seeing the Windows 95 cloudy boot sequence in a Javascript canvas is disturbing. The game isn't as smooth as native, but it's definitely playable.
( https://classicreload.com/win9x-3d-pinball-space-cadet.html )
The opcode’s were documented, and tools like Haxe do compile to swf. There is a lot of information available about the scripting part, but indeed it would be a great task. However I can’t wait to compile some C++ code using FlasCC [1] and run that in a wasm player.
Yeah, if I remember right they couldn't open source parts of it because some parts had other licenses in it. I'm recalling (but I could be wrong) that they wanted to in 2011 or so... but couldn't because of that. Don't remember the source though.
> The attempts at building something compatible like shumway have all been rather unsuccessful.
Alternative proprietary implementation was rather successful for game development. Sadly Scaleform GFx is now discontinued too and obviously we'll never see Autodesk publish anything under open source license.
I wish Adobe would start making publications though, they know Flash has been end-of-life for ages yet there's a lot of earlier internet media still in that format.
> I don't think Adobe ever open-sourced the Flash codebase, right?
This shows we should only allow technologies on the web if they have a clear path to preservation.
I think a similar thing should hold for DRM'ed video. Such videos may be supported on the web, but we should demand they lose their DRM when their copyright expires.
I made 8 flash games back around 2009 that were profitable. Sadly, they’re completely broken now because all of the web services they depend on are gone. Although the main game play is uneffected, it still attempts to load leaderboards and ads, which make them look horrible.
The trajectory of Flash has been one of the great disappointments of the 21st century. Initially it democratized animation and gaming for a whole generation... Then Adobe bought it and moved it higher and higher up the shelf out of reach of young artists through cost and anti-piracy measures. At the same time, its nimble little plug-in became worse and worse, becoming synonymous with security problems and endless patching... And ultimately they failed to port it to mobile and that was its dead end.
For indie game development, unity is a worthy successor Flash... But we never really saw anything win out for animation.
The demise of Flash only deserves half the blame. There are a lot of brilliant animators out there, but YouTube has become the discoverability channel of record, and it penalizes content that doesn’t release rapidly and often. Flash could have been open source this whole time, and still the next Homestar Runner never would have beaten the ease with which Pewdiepie can churn out low-effort content.
Rapid and often is a little irrelavent in my opinion. YouTube provided a degree of centralization that has allowed certain kinds of creatives to flourish but it could never recreate the old flash games and cartoons for the simple reason that centralization enables easy censorship and progressive/tolerance culture is 100% censorship culture these days. Tons of flash games were violent satire, YouTube knee jerk banned gun related content. Lots of flashes were anti-pc teen humor, YouTube is aggressively pro lgbt. The old flash sites were less practical for tolerance tyrants to take down because they were too small and quickly replaced to be worth the effort, but YouTube is now the only real game in town for content creators with ambition and Google has no interest in anything besides pandering. The modern platform environment simply doesn't facilitate the kind of free creativity that existed before.
This is correct. Adope actually developed a flash player for the iPhone but Jobs said no. A year or so later, Apple allowed the Desktop-bound version of flash on the iPhone (it's called Adobe Air)... probably because they wanted users to get their games through the App Store.
I'm not really sure what difference you're trying to highlight there.
The point is that the people building the platforms didn't want Flash, so they didn't invite Adobe/Macromedia or whoever it was at the time to port them across, and yes since they didn't invite them to do the work they obviously also weren't going to to pay for it.
Saying they weren't paid for it makes it sound like they were asked to do it but not paid or something like that. I think the reality is it was never wanted.
Didn't invite is a silly way of putting it. Jobs went to war with Flash, and at the time Adobe was making progress integrating iOS as publishing targets, and today it would have been a moot point as iOS hardware is surely powerful enough. Creative Cloud is heading to the iPad Pro and it is a real shame that Flash isn't part of that.
He took the unusual step of publishing a letter, “Thoughts On Flash” (https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/), published under his own name, which said that “Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content.”
It wasn't obsolete in the slightest when Jobs published that letter. It was a piece of software worth billions, powering games like Farmville worth billions, powering video like YouTube, advertising, and it had remained a popular creative platform for two decades.
There is more information about it here - in addition to Jobs going after Flash so publicly they added an app store rule specifying which languages developers could use to publish apps, and excluded Flash, after Adobe had made substantial progress publishing native iOS apps from Flash.
There's a few apps that I liked that were completely pulled—not just unable to be purchased, but also, you can't re-download them if you had already bought them. One got pulled because the developer was hired by Apple, and one got pulled because the developer was bought by Facebook. And certainly a whole ton more that just... don't exist anymore, so I can't see them to be reminded of them.
Another thing that happens is apps that get steadily worse over time. Bad Piggies was one of the best iOS games I've ever played, but it got stuffed with obnoxious ads, and the experience of playing it is considerably worse than it was just after release.
It’s already happening, there’s a ton of games that aren’t on the App Store any more because their creators stopped paying a hundred bucks a year. A lot of them won’t work on newer versions of iOS even if you still have a copy.
Or they were written as 32-bit apps, which became verboten on iOS not long ago. I had a bunch of games I had paid for and enjoyed for a long time vanish suddenly because their creators didn't deem it worthwhile to go back and recompile them as 64-bit.
I don't care about flash games, but I really hope the "Badgers Badgers Badgers" and the "I'm a Cow" animations are preserved for posterity. (I'm sure they are on YouTube but it's just not the same)
I got my start in animation releasing stuff at the same time as Mr Weebl, Joel Veitch and others. In fact my first ever animation was in a Joel Veitch cartoon on his website.
I remember releasing stuff onto Newgrounds and seeing the view counter tick up. It was super exciting.
No worries. Yeah that was the first thing I looked for when I first looked at too.
In any case... if you did download it... I'll recommend two of my favorites. If you like tower defense style games, try out Ghost Hacker. If you like strategy a bit better, try out Pixel Legions. Both are really fun.
I can't unfortunately because of sitelocks... part of what Flashpoint does is in Man In The Middles the Flash Player so it thinks it's on a certain website, which allows the games to be played offline. You can play these games on Kongregate and Newgrounds if you have a flash enabled browser though. Sorry about that :/
In terms of tower defense, here's some recommendations:
Ghost Hacker (the original one, which is better than the 2nd one)
Defender's Quest (trial version, complete game on steam)
Kingdom Rush (also available on your phone)
Cursed Treasure
Demons v Fairyland (feels very much like Kimgdom Rush)
Speaking of Flash, I miss the most this game... or rather, meme-focused experience (IMHO it is a true masterpiece): "Reimagine :The Game:" by Nicky Case: (https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/569281, video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG1gh5l1YLM).
Two other things I really liked were ported by their developer: GemCraft (turret defense) and Velocity Raptor (a special relativity game, https://testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html).
And you, what do like the most to see back?