13 ms·

Nitrome to convert its Flash game library to HTML5

167 points by danso 6y ago

jjice 6y ago
I'd be interested to see the metrics for a browser game site. When I was a kid, Flash games were our go to when we had time in class, or even at home. I can remember my sister and I crowded around the family computer playing countless Flash games. But what about now? Now that phones are so common among children, and they offer such a large library of free games (granted, many are packed with ads and micro-transactions), is there still a large market? I don't have a modern perspective since I don't really play mobile or web games anymore, but I'd be interested to see how websites like this are doing in terms of traffic.
- dangerboysteve 6y ago
  Google got into HTML 5 games a little while ago with Game Snacks. Here is a blog post with about it. https://www.blog.google/technology/area-120/gamesnacks-brings-quick-casual-games-any-device/ https://www.blog.google/technology/area-120/gamesnacks-bring...
- heeton 6y ago
  Anecdotally: flash games got a LOT of plays because of that play style. I was a kid at the time, and released a few crappy flash games (“Tilt” where you literally just had to balance a plate on your cursor). Over 5 years it go something like 100million plays... I never quite believed it.
- robotbikes 6y ago
  My daughter was super excited to find a game website that had just cloned a lot of games from the play store because it worked in the browser and I had adblock on so it was like magic to her, not having to watch an ad every 30 seconds. Like when I was a kid video games were ad-free and TV was the source of ads but its the opposite for a lot of kids growing up these days.
  - darepublic 6y ago
    You also had to buy those games.. the shareware titles were five bucks. I never asked my mom or dad to fork up for the additional episodes either
- frenchie14 6y ago
  This past weekend I uploaded a small game to Kongregate. It's been played 1000 times in the last 24 hours. I'd say the community is still surprisingly alive! Also, if I had uploaded the same game with zero marketing to mobile, I'd have expected zero downloads. https://www.kongregate.com/games/Frenchie14/factions https://www.kongregate.com/games/Frenchie14/factions
  - aabeshou 6y ago
    thats awesome! what technology are people using these days to make "flash" games?
    - frenchie14 6y ago
      There's a lot of options! I use Unity3D. For 2D games, I'd recommend something with a more native web build.
- avolcano 6y ago
  I built a tiny, kinda crappy multiplayer web game a few years ago (https://manygolf.club/ https://manygolf.club/), and while it's mostly dead now, it was relatively popular with 5-15 active players at any time for a few months (I know, small potatoes, but as someone who had never made a game played by _anyone_ outside of friends and family before, it was cool to see). I noticed one of my biggest traffic referrers appeared to be from some kind of school proxy, and the most common Google suggestion for "manygolf" was "manygolf unblocked", so I imagine it is a lot of bored kids with locked-down devices. I also still get an occasional email every now and then from a "game portal" site that wants to license my game in some way, so I guess that stuff is still a market unto itself.
KingOfCoders 6y ago
Astonished to see this in 2020.
dijit 6y ago
I grew up with nitrome as a staple of the internet, so I’m happy they’re doing this, even for nostalgic reasons- their games really shaped my youth and we definitely lost a wealth of content when flash died. I feel like in general the “spirit” of the old flash games has died, I’m not sure why but there was an incredible amount of low grade content around during the flash days, and thus we had breakout successes like “the stick guy vs the web designer“ and line rider. Maybe it’s because I’m old, but I don’t see those kinds of incredibly Indy things anymore. I don’t miss flash as a web technology though.
- lilgreenland 6y ago
  I've been working on a html5 game. I'd like to think it captures some of the old school flash feel. https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/index.html https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/index.html
  - episode0x01 6y ago
    This is really great!
  - the_af 6y ago
    Very cool. Your game definitely captures the Flash era (Kongregate!) for me. Thanks for sharing.
  - MH15 6y ago
    Woah! I've been working on a multiplayer game and I stumbled upon an iteration of your source code for this sidescroller a few months back. I was looking to solve some problems in my Matter.js collision code, and found a solution from your repo. Thanks!
    - lilgreenland 6y ago
      How is matter.js in multiplayer? I can imagine how local would multiplayer would work, but server-based seems like it might be hard to keep the physics the some for the clients.
Causality1 6y ago
Is this approach different from what sites like Newgrounds did for their Flash libraries?
- jimbob45 6y ago
  Didn't Newgrounds force new games onto HTML5 and build a player to play old flash games?
- Tajnymag 6y ago
  It is. Newgrounds rendered old flash animations to a video container. To NG flash games, you are directed to their pre-set offline flash player.
  - Causality1 6y ago
    Ah. I can see disadvantages with that approach. Bandwidth usage for a given video would be increased as well as losing the vectorized nature of Flash video that allows them to be losslessly upscaled.
    - tomc1985 6y ago
      Plus interactive elements are suddenly unavailable or, depending on how the original video was rendered, smashed together at the end or beginning or wherever the developer put them in the timeline. Strongbad Emails are an example... the SWFs frequently had secret links and hotspots that would take you to Family Guy-style cutaways. In sbemail's latter years some of them were quite involved. You could even hit tab repeatedly and flash player would highlight them for you. I don't think any of this appears in the DVD release, or on rendered versions on Youtube.
vijaybritto 6y ago
The text is so hard to read! Even after zooming in. I think I am used to modern sites so much that I completely forgot how it used to be before 10 years
- asiachick 6y ago
  Your screen was probably 800 pixels wide or something less than it is today so the characters were bigger. HN is not so great in this area either
bdcravens 6y ago
While it wasn't a game, so the bar was pretty low, a fun project (it was a sporting goods company I think) I did was converting a ton of Flash widgets into the HTML5 equivalent - this was probably 8 years ago, when the options were pretty much limited to jQuery plugins. (short of rewriting in vanilla JS, which was tougher then than now, given that older version of IE were still somewhat in use)
jpeter 6y ago
https://htwins.net/scale2/ https://htwins.net/scale2/ this needs a html5 version
Aardwolf 6y ago
I wish Newgrounds would also find a better solution than its current Windows-based Flash player to play its enormous Flash games collection (which currently still works in browser, of course)
- jonkoops 6y ago
  It should be possible to make a Flash player that works for the most part using web technologies (e.g. WebAssembly). I remember Mozilla created Shumway (https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway) but it looks like they have given up on it.
  - LEARAX 6y ago
    I believe that's exactly what Newgrounds is doing. See https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
gramakri 6y ago
I want the same for http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/
- cmehdy 6y ago
  The music in "rainmaker" is one of the most soothing loops I can think of.
apignotti 6y ago
We are working on fixing this problem "the right way" by virtualizing the x86 Flash plugin in WebAssembly. For more info see here: https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with... https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...
- cupofjoakim 6y ago
  First time I hear about this and it brought a smile to my face. I'm one of those "web assembly sounds great, but when am I actually supposed to use it"-guys, but this use case is so perfect and makes me really happy. We forget that flash games wasn't just a way to pass time, it's now also a part of internet culture that, without people like you, will go lost forever. HUGE props if you pull this off.
- mcphage 6y ago
  > Redistributing the Flash binary is not normally allowed, so we are going to directly download it over HTTP the first time our system is started. How will this work when Adobe stops distributing the Flash installer?
  - traverseda 6y ago
    Maybe get archive.org to handle it? My understanding is that they have some pretty good legal counsel, so that's something they might be cool with?
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      Security is another concern. Unless WebAssembly itself is immune
  - apignotti 6y ago
    Since we wrote the post we started discussing with the appropriate parties to solve the licensing issues.
aclelland 6y ago
I've been looking into how to best make a large collection of flash games available after flash is removed from browsers. An electron app was looking promising but that plan has been scuppered by licensing issues with the Flash runtime. Adobe have told us they'll be removing flash installers from their site and the cost to embed Flash into the app itself makes it a no go. Maybe before December there will be a good HTML5 converter but I'm not holding out much hope. Shame to see so much content disappear. Glad to see that Nitrome have had the resources to port their games over and some content is being saved!
gibspaulding 6y ago
For anyone interested in playing/archiving old flash games, BlueMaxima's Flashpoint has some 49,000 games packaged up to be played offline. I haven't messed with it yet, but it seems like a really neat project. https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
bubbab 6y ago
I did not know about Nitrome, but wow I love the site design! On a related note, Neopets has also been migrating their huge catalog of Flash games to HTML5 over the years. I have no idea how that's going though.
azhenley 6y ago
Flash was an amazing, low barrier way to make games that could be distributed with almost no effort. In a single weekend I was able to make a game, do all the art, integrate a video advertisement API into it, and release it to hundreds of websites. I made tens of thousands of dollars doing this from my dorm while going to school and working two jobs. I have yet to find an alternative that can come anywhere close to this. I wrote a bit about this on my blog, if you'd like to know more: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/8lessons8games.html http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/8lessons8games.html
- richardlblair 6y ago
  I have a good friend who's passion projects were flash games. He went to conferences, would send over samples, and honestly they were good. I think it made him a better programmer than me too. The hate against flash is warranted in the contexts the hate originates, but there is a niche where it belongs.
- babaganoosh89 6y ago
  Same with me, Flash games were an amazing side business for a college kid. I made over a dozen games and paid for college completely :)
  - zerr 6y ago
    How were you monetizing it?
    - gregsadetsky 6y ago
      Not GP, but there was a huge economy around banner / ads being embedded in Flash games, and those games being shared widely / distributed on many different sites. There were many "portal" sites that showed (hosted) many games and showed ads alongside or before the games started, and then a second sub-ecosystem of ads embedded in the games themselves by the game developers. Instead of feeling like their games were "pirated" when somebody copied the game's .swf file, developers had this (viral) mechanism which made those games lucrative wherever they'd appear on the web! Source: know someone who ran one of those "portal" sites and made an absolute killing.
Lorin 6y ago
I hope 'Flight' from Armor Games where you fly/upgrade a paper airplane gets an HTML5 treatment.
ladberg 6y ago
I loved Nitrome when I was younger and I am super excited for this! I haven't visited in years mainly because I don't have Flash.
berbec 6y ago
Someone script convert homestarrunner.com quick
antigirl 6y ago
Flash was a lot of fun to use. The possibilities were endless. Especially because web isn’t what it is today. I used to do a lot of flash banners for Vodafone. It was a lot of fun and made good money whilst I was doing my MSc too. I eventually picked up Flex because flash was all the rage and did a really nice UI for an exhibition that was in the museum for a year. I think you’d still need to use something like imagemaps now for what I achieved with flex and flash together

167 points by danso 6y ago

I'd be interested to see the metrics for a browser game site. When I was a kid, Flash games were our go to when we had time in class, or even at home. I can remember my sister and I crowded around the family computer playing countless Flash games. But what about now? Now that phones are so common among children, and they offer such a large library of free games (granted, many are packed with ads and micro-transactions), is there still a large market? I don't have a modern perspective since I don't really play mobile or web games anymore, but I'd be interested to see how websites like this are doing in terms of traffic.

dangerboysteve 6y ago
Google got into HTML 5 games a little while ago with Game Snacks. Here is a blog post with about it. https://www.blog.google/technology/area-120/gamesnacks-brings-quick-casual-games-any-device/ https://www.blog.google/technology/area-120/gamesnacks-bring...
heeton 6y ago
Anecdotally: flash games got a LOT of plays because of that play style. I was a kid at the time, and released a few crappy flash games (“Tilt” where you literally just had to balance a plate on your cursor). Over 5 years it go something like 100million plays... I never quite believed it.
robotbikes 6y ago
My daughter was super excited to find a game website that had just cloned a lot of games from the play store because it worked in the browser and I had adblock on so it was like magic to her, not having to watch an ad every 30 seconds. Like when I was a kid video games were ad-free and TV was the source of ads but its the opposite for a lot of kids growing up these days.
- darepublic 6y ago
  You also had to buy those games.. the shareware titles were five bucks. I never asked my mom or dad to fork up for the additional episodes either
frenchie14 6y ago
This past weekend I uploaded a small game to Kongregate. It's been played 1000 times in the last 24 hours. I'd say the community is still surprisingly alive! Also, if I had uploaded the same game with zero marketing to mobile, I'd have expected zero downloads. https://www.kongregate.com/games/Frenchie14/factions https://www.kongregate.com/games/Frenchie14/factions
- aabeshou 6y ago
  thats awesome! what technology are people using these days to make "flash" games?
  - frenchie14 6y ago
    There's a lot of options! I use Unity3D. For 2D games, I'd recommend something with a more native web build.
avolcano 6y ago
I built a tiny, kinda crappy multiplayer web game a few years ago (https://manygolf.club/ https://manygolf.club/), and while it's mostly dead now, it was relatively popular with 5-15 active players at any time for a few months (I know, small potatoes, but as someone who had never made a game played by _anyone_ outside of friends and family before, it was cool to see). I noticed one of my biggest traffic referrers appeared to be from some kind of school proxy, and the most common Google suggestion for "manygolf" was "manygolf unblocked", so I imagine it is a lot of bored kids with locked-down devices. I also still get an occasional email every now and then from a "game portal" site that wants to license my game in some way, so I guess that stuff is still a market unto itself.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

Astonished to see this in 2020.

dijit 6y ago

I grew up with nitrome as a staple of the internet, so I’m happy they’re doing this, even for nostalgic reasons- their games really shaped my youth and we definitely lost a wealth of content when flash died. I feel like in general the “spirit” of the old flash games has died, I’m not sure why but there was an incredible amount of low grade content around during the flash days, and thus we had breakout successes like “the stick guy vs the web designer“ and line rider. Maybe it’s because I’m old, but I don’t see those kinds of incredibly Indy things anymore. I don’t miss flash as a web technology though.

lilgreenland 6y ago
I've been working on a html5 game. I'd like to think it captures some of the old school flash feel. https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/index.html https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/index.html
- episode0x01 6y ago
  This is really great!
- the_af 6y ago
  Very cool. Your game definitely captures the Flash era (Kongregate!) for me. Thanks for sharing.
- MH15 6y ago
  Woah! I've been working on a multiplayer game and I stumbled upon an iteration of your source code for this sidescroller a few months back. I was looking to solve some problems in my Matter.js collision code, and found a solution from your repo. Thanks!
  - lilgreenland 6y ago
    How is matter.js in multiplayer? I can imagine how local would multiplayer would work, but server-based seems like it might be hard to keep the physics the some for the clients.

Causality1 6y ago

Is this approach different from what sites like Newgrounds did for their Flash libraries?

jimbob45 6y ago
Didn't Newgrounds force new games onto HTML5 and build a player to play old flash games?
Tajnymag 6y ago
It is. Newgrounds rendered old flash animations to a video container. To NG flash games, you are directed to their pre-set offline flash player.
- Causality1 6y ago
  Ah. I can see disadvantages with that approach. Bandwidth usage for a given video would be increased as well as losing the vectorized nature of Flash video that allows them to be losslessly upscaled.
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    Plus interactive elements are suddenly unavailable or, depending on how the original video was rendered, smashed together at the end or beginning or wherever the developer put them in the timeline. Strongbad Emails are an example... the SWFs frequently had secret links and hotspots that would take you to Family Guy-style cutaways. In sbemail's latter years some of them were quite involved. You could even hit tab repeatedly and flash player would highlight them for you. I don't think any of this appears in the DVD release, or on rendered versions on Youtube.

vijaybritto 6y ago

The text is so hard to read! Even after zooming in. I think I am used to modern sites so much that I completely forgot how it used to be before 10 years

asiachick 6y ago
Your screen was probably 800 pixels wide or something less than it is today so the characters were bigger. HN is not so great in this area either

bdcravens 6y ago

While it wasn't a game, so the bar was pretty low, a fun project (it was a sporting goods company I think) I did was converting a ton of Flash widgets into the HTML5 equivalent - this was probably 8 years ago, when the options were pretty much limited to jQuery plugins. (short of rewriting in vanilla JS, which was tougher then than now, given that older version of IE were still somewhat in use)

jpeter 6y ago

https://htwins.net/scale2/ https://htwins.net/scale2/ this needs a html5 version

Aardwolf 6y ago

I wish Newgrounds would also find a better solution than its current Windows-based Flash player to play its enormous Flash games collection (which currently still works in browser, of course)

jonkoops 6y ago
It should be possible to make a Flash player that works for the most part using web technologies (e.g. WebAssembly). I remember Mozilla created Shumway (https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway) but it looks like they have given up on it.
- LEARAX 6y ago
  I believe that's exactly what Newgrounds is doing. See https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

gramakri 6y ago

I want the same for http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

cmehdy 6y ago
The music in "rainmaker" is one of the most soothing loops I can think of.

apignotti 6y ago

We are working on fixing this problem "the right way" by virtualizing the x86 Flash plugin in WebAssembly. For more info see here: https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with... https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...

cupofjoakim 6y ago
First time I hear about this and it brought a smile to my face. I'm one of those "web assembly sounds great, but when am I actually supposed to use it"-guys, but this use case is so perfect and makes me really happy. We forget that flash games wasn't just a way to pass time, it's now also a part of internet culture that, without people like you, will go lost forever. HUGE props if you pull this off.
mcphage 6y ago
> Redistributing the Flash binary is not normally allowed, so we are going to directly download it over HTTP the first time our system is started. How will this work when Adobe stops distributing the Flash installer?
- traverseda 6y ago
  Maybe get archive.org to handle it? My understanding is that they have some pretty good legal counsel, so that's something they might be cool with?
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Security is another concern. Unless WebAssembly itself is immune
- apignotti 6y ago
  Since we wrote the post we started discussing with the appropriate parties to solve the licensing issues.

aclelland 6y ago

I've been looking into how to best make a large collection of flash games available after flash is removed from browsers. An electron app was looking promising but that plan has been scuppered by licensing issues with the Flash runtime. Adobe have told us they'll be removing flash installers from their site and the cost to embed Flash into the app itself makes it a no go. Maybe before December there will be a good HTML5 converter but I'm not holding out much hope. Shame to see so much content disappear. Glad to see that Nitrome have had the resources to port their games over and some content is being saved!

gibspaulding 6y ago

For anyone interested in playing/archiving old flash games, BlueMaxima's Flashpoint has some 49,000 games packaged up to be played offline. I haven't messed with it yet, but it seems like a really neat project. https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

bubbab 6y ago

I did not know about Nitrome, but wow I love the site design! On a related note, Neopets has also been migrating their huge catalog of Flash games to HTML5 over the years. I have no idea how that's going though.

azhenley 6y ago

Flash was an amazing, low barrier way to make games that could be distributed with almost no effort. In a single weekend I was able to make a game, do all the art, integrate a video advertisement API into it, and release it to hundreds of websites. I made tens of thousands of dollars doing this from my dorm while going to school and working two jobs. I have yet to find an alternative that can come anywhere close to this. I wrote a bit about this on my blog, if you'd like to know more: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/8lessons8games.html http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/8lessons8games.html

richardlblair 6y ago
I have a good friend who's passion projects were flash games. He went to conferences, would send over samples, and honestly they were good. I think it made him a better programmer than me too. The hate against flash is warranted in the contexts the hate originates, but there is a niche where it belongs.
babaganoosh89 6y ago
Same with me, Flash games were an amazing side business for a college kid. I made over a dozen games and paid for college completely :)
- zerr 6y ago
  How were you monetizing it?
  - gregsadetsky 6y ago
    Not GP, but there was a huge economy around banner / ads being embedded in Flash games, and those games being shared widely / distributed on many different sites. There were many "portal" sites that showed (hosted) many games and showed ads alongside or before the games started, and then a second sub-ecosystem of ads embedded in the games themselves by the game developers. Instead of feeling like their games were "pirated" when somebody copied the game's .swf file, developers had this (viral) mechanism which made those games lucrative wherever they'd appear on the web! Source: know someone who ran one of those "portal" sites and made an absolute killing.

Lorin 6y ago

I hope 'Flight' from Armor Games where you fly/upgrade a paper airplane gets an HTML5 treatment.

ladberg 6y ago

I loved Nitrome when I was younger and I am super excited for this! I haven't visited in years mainly because I don't have Flash.

berbec 6y ago

Someone script convert homestarrunner.com quick

antigirl 6y ago

Flash was a lot of fun to use. The possibilities were endless. Especially because web isn’t what it is today. I used to do a lot of flash banners for Vodafone. It was a lot of fun and made good money whilst I was doing my MSc too. I eventually picked up Flex because flash was all the rage and did a really nice UI for an exhibition that was in the museum for a year. I think you’d still need to use something like imagemaps now for what I achieved with flex and flash together