You know, people like to crap on Flash (and there are valid reasons to do so), but I really miss how quick you could get a game built with it, while it still felt like "real" programming.
With Flash, I felt like a nice "one-stop-shop" in a lot of ways; you could draw your graphics, animate them, and code them, and you could get a simple game made in an hour or two.
I haven't tried Unity or really any other dedicated game engine, so maybe you get that feeling with those, but I will always be nostalgic for Flash; it really helped make programming "fun" for me.
Flash was great and I haven't found a direct replacement yet (GameMaker Studio 2 is the closest I have found). I pumped out 8 Flash games about a decade ago that generated enough ad revenue to cover all my bills for a few years! I miss how easy it was. Another huge win is how effortless it was to distribute Flash games (they spread like wildfire after I uploaded it to one or two sites).
It's not the loss of Flash per se (as there are plenty of rapid game making tools targetting HTML5 about) it's the complete collapse of the supporting infrastructure.
Mochi Media closing was huge. I went from getting a steady trickle of money for games I wrote to nothing.
As far as I can see there is no Mochi for HTML5 games. Every portal is its own closed environment.
A friend just messaged me telling me that i need to check out Scirra Construct; apparently that gives a very Flash-style interface to build games. I'll have to play with that.
Unfortunately most of Roblox games are just attempts to siphon your money by buying Robux. Their target market, kids around 8, beg their parents for Robux so they can buy some stuff in one person's game.
It's incredible how much money they make through tactics that make many of their games not really enjoyable unless you spend a lot of money in them.
Haxe is just a language. However, there are several graphical frameworks that allow for that. Dicey Dungeons (his newest game) is specifically built off the OpenFL framework which tries to replicate the Flash API.
You can actually create graphics in the Flash WYSIWYG editor and import them into OpenFL. You won't get the exact same workflow, but it's not completely lacking the visual tooling either.
You can have an engine like Love or pygame where the engine is literally just a shared object or dll and you need to basically supply your own tools for level design, programming, etc.
Engine-IDEs are one-stop-shops with nearly everything you could need built in (level editor, code editor, particle effect sandbox, etc.).
Flash was awesome and it's can't be overstated how much it empowered the indie game community in the aughts.
Seems like people crap on it not because of the tool itself but because Adobe dropped the ball and let it become a crashy, resource-hogging mess, aligning powerful people (like Steve Jobs) against it.
I feel like Google simply didn't like users having such control over extending their browsers' functionality in ways that are harder to track, so they started the anti-flash bandwagon by abusing their browser's market share to kill it along with all other add-ons (a continuation of their death grip on what extensions are allowed and making unapproved extensions not available to the average user either), leaving a vast graveyard of significant, great content unavailable to the average web user. The golden age of web functionality was the period of HTML5 and Flash both being supported at the same time and Firefox having full support for NPAPI and the old extension system including allowing unsigned extensions. Now we're stuck suffocating in sterilized walled gardens almost everywhere we go. Android still lets you install third party apps for now at least but I bet the days of that are numbered too. Sad state of affairs for users all around.
I think Steve Jobs was more responsible for Flash's death than Google. YouTube only stopped serving Flash as the default less than 5 years ago while hubs like Newgrounds were seeing significant declines well before then.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but the golden age of Flash content was certainly over before HTML5 hit in a big way.
People crap on Flash because of the sites made on it. It wasn't for games nor videos.
Adobe had a site building tool that was more productive than ASP, but only barely so, and created sites that would break on about every computer. The few times they were working, they would have completely non-standard UI elements, including buttons and links, and break nearly all interaction modes.
Would it be ridiculous to write a Flash game then package it with Electron bundled with a Flash Player?
I feel like the issues most people have with Flash are one of two things. It isn't a great choice for rich interfaces (especially things that aren't games) when considering accessibility and different screen sizes. It also presents security vulnerabilities when it was intended to be sandboxed.
By moving it from web browsers to standalone applications, you lose any expectation of sandboxing. When only using it for games, it ceases to have the same accessibility constraints.
Unless I'm missing something that Electron adds to the equation, that's already possible (and common!) via standalone Flash player packages or Adobe AIR. There's a fair number of smaller indie games on Steam distributed that way, for example.
There are many interesting potential outcomes that could emerge from such an idea.
Here is one that would be a tad awkward:
- The concept goes appreciably (if not crazily) viral, people start distributing "SWF-lectron" containers, and much fun is had by all.
- Flash is officially deprecated (incidentally 20 days from now, the 11th of January 2020). It dies; the bitrot process is exponentially accelerated because of the huge installed base yet abrupt and utter lack of updates. Many, many, MANY vulnerabilities are found in the platform. How much impact do they have? Theoretically little to none. But you never know.
- The Electron containers used in this idea probably never get updated. It proves surprisingly easy to just wait for Chrome 0days to float to the top of the pond, scoop them up, and rework them.
Practically speaking I know the above will never really eventuate. But it's what I envisage; more generally, that anything that leverages Flash will fall victim to a very mature ecosystem of hackers (the cracker kind) who've been studying the platform for years, and have a once-in-a-lifetime moment to attack while the platform remains installed.
Flash will have a half-life of years, but it's going to become a VERY big target, I think.
I think.
Maybe I'm wrong/being overdramatic/freaking out/am wearing too many security hats at once/none of the above?
I am not really seeing how any of the hacking discussion relates to a self distributed game, using a packaged version of Flash.
It’s not the browser, so it’d be easier for hacker to just distribute their malware directly than go to the trouble of making malware that hacks an unrelated game, then does something else.
I absolutely love Pico-8, and actually teach that to teenagers at the library on Saturday, and I will agree that it does somewhat satisfy some similar niche as Flash.
That said, Pico-8 is (purposefully) very limited, and if you want to do something a bit more advanced than C64-era gaming, the limitations show. Flash is limited too, but not as much.
It's obscenely fun to play with, definitely agree with you there.
Newgrounds is still around, and there are probably some great HTML5 games out there; I don't really play games anymore so I don't go on there much now.
A friend of mine recommended just Scirra Construct if I want something similar to Flash that exports to HTML5.
Flash was my first programming language from way back when I Was 12-13 in a game programming club when I got to high school. It was a fun, creative way to get introduced to programming. Which I have done non-stop ever since, and now do professionally.
There are also great Javascript platforms for all kinds of purposes these days. As a former flash developer (hobbyist level) I do not miss Flash at all.
> There are also great Javascript platforms for all kinds of purposes these days.
Except nothing replace it in a one-stop do it all like Flash was able to do. You open it, you had a timeline that could contains both graphics and code, you could easily reference them on the IDE directly, and then when exported, it was a single binary file that could be shared everywhere and could easily be made quite secure. That meant that there was platforms like Mochimedia that allowed you to import a SWF, that added the ads and it was shared on multiple thousands website for people to play on.
Nowadays you have to use a bunch of different tools, which sure is more flexible in a way but it's a barrier big enough to remove any desire to do a quick prototype for fun. There's software like Unity which is amazing (and a proof that a one-stop software is highly preferred by people), but it's made for bitmap or 3D graphics, which both are made over an other platform and are more complex to handle than vectors that just works great in any context.
That's while considering that everything can be done, which isn't really true because even in term of performance, it took a decade for JS to reach a performance similar to what Flash was able to do at the time. The vector editor was so good that I knew many people that preferred it over Illustrator. I was able to do some nice graphics easily on it, I tried to do the same with Illustrator nowadays and I just can't.
> As a former flash developer (hobbyist level) I do not miss Flash at all.
I don't really have anything to add... But as a former professional Flash developed, and now nearly 10 years doing game dev (with Unity), I agree 100% with what you said.
It's not really about the language or about the Flash player itself. There was something special about the direct integration of the code and the visual design/animation tool with Flash. Nothing else really comes close these days. Nothing else allows such rapid development.
That's probably fair; I think part of my rose-colored viewing of this is in no small part because I largely don't do any kind of games programming anymore, and as a result am largely ignorant to the newer alternatives to Flash.
I was under the impression that Adobe Animate was a direct successor to Flash the authoring software (but with output options including HTML5 instead of SWF).
This is the saddest part. Even with the Flash Player being killed Adobe could have done so much more with the authoring tool. Instead they did little incremental updated and basically let it (and the vibrant community around it) die off.
With Flash, I felt like a nice "one-stop-shop" in a lot of ways; you could draw your graphics, animate them, and code them, and you could get a simple game made in an hour or two.
I haven't tried Unity or really any other dedicated game engine, so maybe you get that feeling with those, but I will always be nostalgic for Flash; it really helped make programming "fun" for me.