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PICO-8 is fantastic, but ultimately way less flexible and powerful than Flash. That's not a dig at PICO-8, it's limited on purpose. But the strength of Flash w

PICO-8 is fantastic, but ultimately way less flexible and powerful than Flash. That's not a dig at PICO-8, it's limited on purpose. But the strength of Flash was that it was extremely flexible and exposed an architectural style that lent itself very well to prototyping. PICO-8 does have all of its tools built into the same app, but it doesn't have anything at all like a movie clip system, it doesn't even have events or a timeline. I think it just has very different goals, it's a philosophy built around having a small, self-contained, understandable system -- not around having a unique workflow. The closest programming/architecture analogy I draw to PICO-8 isn't Flash, it's the TI-83 graphing calculator. That platform also had a lot of influence over how I learned to program, and it had similar strengths to PICO-8 in how limited it was and how that forced you to get creative and allowed you to really deeply understand what was going on in your program. Where I do see PICO-8 getting adjacent to Flash is in the community. I think when some people say they miss Flash, what they really miss is sites like Newgrounds and the surrounding indie scene. PICO-8 does capture some of that, it's a great environment to learn to code in, and it's a fun environment to work in. I just don't think it captures any of the tooling. When I say I miss Flash, I kind of miss the indie scene, but I miss the tooling more.

brundolf 6y ago
That makes sense I'm honestly tempted to take a swing at the "open replacement" that you described in your original post..... Though I never actually used Flash back in the day, so I'd need to do some research
- danShumway 6y ago
  It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Not necessary to try and make something myself, but just... what would a modern Flash look like if it wasn't just a clone, but it was people actually thinking about what made Flash attractive and really trying to figure out how to replicate its strengths and address its weaknesses? An interesting point here is that Adobe Animate still exists, which (in theory, I haven't used it) still has a lot of these features. But nobody uses it for game prototyping that I'm aware of -- and not just because it's expensive or (in my case) because people refuse to use subscription software. I've seen gamedevs do their animation in Animate CC, and then export it out to Unity. So there's something going on there. I wonder if I went back and reinstalled Flash 8, if there are parts of it I would notice that didn't age well, or paradigms that needed to be rethought. But I still feel like that kind of workflow is something we could have again, and with enough thought put into it, it could be even better. I would welcome more people thinking about this kind of stuff or trying their hand at prototyping game engines that were designed around novel workflows. There's fertile ground in this area if someone wanted to explore it and dig into it.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    I think you really hit on something with the integration between code and animation and vector art creation. That's not something you really see anywhere else and it instantly made me understand what was compelling about Flash. If you want to discuss this further, my email is in my bio!

brundolf 6y ago

That makes sense I'm honestly tempted to take a swing at the "open replacement" that you described in your original post..... Though I never actually used Flash back in the day, so I'd need to do some research

danShumway 6y ago
It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Not necessary to try and make something myself, but just... what would a modern Flash look like if it wasn't just a clone, but it was people actually thinking about what made Flash attractive and really trying to figure out how to replicate its strengths and address its weaknesses? An interesting point here is that Adobe Animate still exists, which (in theory, I haven't used it) still has a lot of these features. But nobody uses it for game prototyping that I'm aware of -- and not just because it's expensive or (in my case) because people refuse to use subscription software. I've seen gamedevs do their animation in Animate CC, and then export it out to Unity. So there's something going on there. I wonder if I went back and reinstalled Flash 8, if there are parts of it I would notice that didn't age well, or paradigms that needed to be rethought. But I still feel like that kind of workflow is something we could have again, and with enough thought put into it, it could be even better. I would welcome more people thinking about this kind of stuff or trying their hand at prototyping game engines that were designed around novel workflows. There's fertile ground in this area if someone wanted to explore it and dig into it.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I think you really hit on something with the integration between code and animation and vector art creation. That's not something you really see anywhere else and it instantly made me understand what was compelling about Flash. If you want to discuss this further, my email is in my bio!