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Did you ever dabble with Flash? I did, and it's frankly amazing how easy it was to make games with it, especially since it gave you tools to draw right there in

Did you ever dabble with Flash? I did, and it's frankly amazing how easy it was to make games with it, especially since it gave you tools to draw right there in the app. It had a low barrier to entry and a high skill ceiling, which is why we saw such a massive amount of content those days from high school and college students. I don't know of an equivalent program to help build HTML5 games. It's basically on you to pick the engine, choose the drawing program, and cobble the entire thing together with only code. The barrier to entry is way over kids' heads.

AshleysBrain 6y ago
> I don't know of an equivalent program to help build HTML5 games. We make Construct 3, a web app aimed at exactly this: https://www.construct.net https://www.construct.net
- phailhaus 6y ago
  Wow, impressive! You're helping make the web a more fun place, thank you.
cableshaft 6y ago
This. I made Flash games back in the day, some of which were fairly popular. My most played game, Proximity, I came up with the idea at the beginning of the week and had it released on Newgrounds by the end of the week. It was just so easy to make games on that platform, and to collaborate effectively with artists, who could create the art directly in the software and you could incorporate it into the game easily. I haven't found any platform that's been as easy or quick or easy to collaborate with artists, while at the same time not having too many restrictions in what type of game you want to make, since, and I've floated around from platform to platform since then. I'm still making games, but I'm doing more analog game design now (board games), which is giving me a little bit of that easy to make (at least the prototypes) and collaborate vibe that I haven't gotten from video games. Currently using MonoGame for video game development at the moment. I've used Unity professionally before, but it's too cumbersome for 2D hobby game development. I'm actually a little surprised that lightning in a bottle hasn't been able to be replicated properly since then.
- samch 6y ago
  Thank you for making Proximity! I spent many hours playing it and enjoyed immensely.
  - cableshaft 6y ago
    You're welcome :) Glad you had so much fun with it. Currently trying to bring it back, actually. I released a sequel on Xbox 360 a while back, and I'm trying to clean it up, add some things, then release it on desktop, then mobile, then hopefully more modern consoles. Now that Flash is basically completely dead from modern browsers, I'm trying to figure out what I should do about the original. I might eventually make an HTML 5 version, but in the meantime I'm considering making downloadable executables of the Flash game and releasing it on itch.io or something. I also finally prototyped a board game version, and at some point I'm hoping to find a publisher for it. Figured I need to bring the video game back so it can be played again before publishers will give it a shot, though. Speaking as a fan, do you have any opinions on what I should be doing with the game?
city41 6y ago
I've only lightly played with this so far, but it feels about what you're after: https://phasereditor2d.com/ https://phasereditor2d.com/
- miohtama 6y ago
  AFAIK all of these editors lack art and graphics tools that were the original Flash authoring tool selling point. So you would need to combine the scripting engine plus online animation editor plus vector drawing program to offer the aamel value.
robotnikman 6y ago
This so much. I've been messing around with the Phaser framework for fun to try and create an HTML5 game, but its nowhere the same as the days of making games and animations in Flash, especially in terms of simplicity and user friendliness. I hope something similar comes along at some point.
- freehunter 6y ago
  I honestly believe that the mid 2000s were a golden age of easy to use programming tools. Wanted to make a professional looking website with little code? Dreamweaver. Wanted to write a desktop application with little code? Visual Basic. Wanted to make a game or animation? Flash. Want to write a web application? PHP, just drop it on a server. Even as you started to get more complex into the late 2000s, Ruby on Rails on Heroku is still worlds easier than pretty much anything that's come after it. Today you have buildpacks and webpack and deployment pipelines and confusingly named cloud services and yet another Javascript framework. Maybe it's rose tinted glasses but everything seemed easier back then. And I'm not sure what we've gotten in return for the complexity.
AgentME 6y ago
Doesn't Flash-the-creation-tool live on as Adobe Animate? It supports HTML5 export now, so the death of Flash-the-browser-plugin shouldn't be an issue.
- dashlite 6y ago
  The HTML5 backends are garbage. The workflow isn't streamlined like SWF and none of the Actionscript ecosystem carries over. Adobe just doesn't care about the product anymore. You're better off using any of the game frameworks with HTML5 export, but from an accessibility standpoint, those are still a notch above Flash.

AshleysBrain 6y ago

> I don't know of an equivalent program to help build HTML5 games. We make Construct 3, a web app aimed at exactly this: https://www.construct.net https://www.construct.net

phailhaus 6y ago
Wow, impressive! You're helping make the web a more fun place, thank you.

cableshaft 6y ago

This. I made Flash games back in the day, some of which were fairly popular. My most played game, Proximity, I came up with the idea at the beginning of the week and had it released on Newgrounds by the end of the week. It was just so easy to make games on that platform, and to collaborate effectively with artists, who could create the art directly in the software and you could incorporate it into the game easily. I haven't found any platform that's been as easy or quick or easy to collaborate with artists, while at the same time not having too many restrictions in what type of game you want to make, since, and I've floated around from platform to platform since then. I'm still making games, but I'm doing more analog game design now (board games), which is giving me a little bit of that easy to make (at least the prototypes) and collaborate vibe that I haven't gotten from video games. Currently using MonoGame for video game development at the moment. I've used Unity professionally before, but it's too cumbersome for 2D hobby game development. I'm actually a little surprised that lightning in a bottle hasn't been able to be replicated properly since then.

samch 6y ago
Thank you for making Proximity! I spent many hours playing it and enjoyed immensely.
- cableshaft 6y ago
  You're welcome :) Glad you had so much fun with it. Currently trying to bring it back, actually. I released a sequel on Xbox 360 a while back, and I'm trying to clean it up, add some things, then release it on desktop, then mobile, then hopefully more modern consoles. Now that Flash is basically completely dead from modern browsers, I'm trying to figure out what I should do about the original. I might eventually make an HTML 5 version, but in the meantime I'm considering making downloadable executables of the Flash game and releasing it on itch.io or something. I also finally prototyped a board game version, and at some point I'm hoping to find a publisher for it. Figured I need to bring the video game back so it can be played again before publishers will give it a shot, though. Speaking as a fan, do you have any opinions on what I should be doing with the game?

city41 6y ago

I've only lightly played with this so far, but it feels about what you're after: https://phasereditor2d.com/ https://phasereditor2d.com/

miohtama 6y ago
AFAIK all of these editors lack art and graphics tools that were the original Flash authoring tool selling point. So you would need to combine the scripting engine plus online animation editor plus vector drawing program to offer the aamel value.

robotnikman 6y ago

This so much. I've been messing around with the Phaser framework for fun to try and create an HTML5 game, but its nowhere the same as the days of making games and animations in Flash, especially in terms of simplicity and user friendliness. I hope something similar comes along at some point.

freehunter 6y ago
I honestly believe that the mid 2000s were a golden age of easy to use programming tools. Wanted to make a professional looking website with little code? Dreamweaver. Wanted to write a desktop application with little code? Visual Basic. Wanted to make a game or animation? Flash. Want to write a web application? PHP, just drop it on a server. Even as you started to get more complex into the late 2000s, Ruby on Rails on Heroku is still worlds easier than pretty much anything that's come after it. Today you have buildpacks and webpack and deployment pipelines and confusingly named cloud services and yet another Javascript framework. Maybe it's rose tinted glasses but everything seemed easier back then. And I'm not sure what we've gotten in return for the complexity.

AgentME 6y ago

Doesn't Flash-the-creation-tool live on as Adobe Animate? It supports HTML5 export now, so the death of Flash-the-browser-plugin shouldn't be an issue.

dashlite 6y ago
The HTML5 backends are garbage. The workflow isn't streamlined like SWF and none of the Actionscript ecosystem carries over. Adobe just doesn't care about the product anymore. You're better off using any of the game frameworks with HTML5 export, but from an accessibility standpoint, those are still a notch above Flash.