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That's a shame. Ever since the removal of Flash from Chrome I think it's been a downhill ride for web-based games. I used to love going through the catalog of q

That's a shame. Ever since the removal of Flash from Chrome I think it's been a downhill ride for web-based games. I used to love going through the catalog of quirky "minigames" if you will every now and then to pass time. On top of the decline of Flash Player, I think mobile games definitely hit the nail in the coffin for them.

notRobot 4y ago
Yeah :( It's hard to find fun games that can be played in the browser nowadays. They definitely do exist, but there's no where near the variety that we used to have when Flash was still a thing.
- defenestration 4y ago
  I loved the days that Kongregate.com was thriving. Today, Armor Games is still up and running. It has quite some gems worth exploring: https://armorgames.com/games/rating#games https://armorgames.com/games/rating#games
  - Riverheart 4y ago
    Armor Games has been porting classics to Steam. We've got Scriptwelder games and Crush the Castle.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  My go-to for these types of games is itch.io. https://itch.io/games/html5 https://itch.io/games/html5
  - smaudet 4y ago
    My experience with that is it usually never works, and for whatever reason the games never seem compelling. Not sure why, flash games never had that problem. They were always full games with rich graphics and often a story. I literally tried to pull up itch while tablet shopping yesterday - the site never rendered on the tablets and the one game I tried about crashed the whole tablet. Audio/video worked fine. I'm sure if I sat down at a high powered beefy windows desktop maybe they'd work - I remember flash working great on 1GHz celeron processors with maybe 1 or 2 GB of memory and windows 95. Html games are still a bunch of nonsense, on average.
    - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
      Some games can be iffy, but I haven't really had any major problems with the site. My computer is from 2015, so not exactly high-end. You could also install the desktop client, then you can play all the games easily (including the non-web-based ones). I'm partial to this one: https://leef6010.itch.io/projectkat https://leef6010.itch.io/projectkat
    - 29083011397778 4y ago
      I just pulled up "Farmers Stealing Tanks" on my BlackBerry KeyOne and played for a minute. It was playable (though not perfect), and that's on a 5 year old phone with a chipset that emphasized battery life over performance.
  - dleslie 4y ago
    Interestingly, it appears a great many of those are unity games and won't run on phones.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  Newgrounds is still alive and kicking. They’ve even ported all their Flash games to be playable on modern devices to boot! That said, I’m not going to pretend like I go there frequently either. I just don’t have time to blow on popcorn experiences anymore.
- unwind 4y ago
  I'm certainly not an expert but I think you're comparing apples and oranges a little. Js and canvas is a code execution environment, but Flash had a polished authoring environment which I believe made it easier for less-technical people to get stuff happening.
- andrepd 4y ago
  Unfortunately, it's hard to find fun games on mobile as well. Mobiles games are an utter disgrace nowadays. Can you even call them games? They're an optimised engagement loop with some gameplay in between the "buy platinum coins" and "spin to win" popups.
hackernewds 4y ago
Google decided to, and successfully, killed a whole software system. In hindsight, what was the reason, and was it justified?
- duskwuff 4y ago
  Let's be honest here: what killed Flash was years of neglect by Adobe. Google removing it from Chrome was a downstream effect, not a cause.
  - jterrys 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm old enough to remember how absolutely fucking garbage Flash was, and the source of many a web-based malware that haunted many a Windows user. I don't really blame Apple's decision not to support it. There's no way Jobs would've allowed such a disease prone plugin infesting his new platform.
    - smaudet 4y ago
      Are you sure it's any better? Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful. Flash had bad bits to be sure but it could be snappy. I had hope we could do better but a lot of sites seem as bad or worse on arguably better hardware. I'm not sure the tech stack was ever to blame...people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash.
      - duskwuff 4y ago
        > Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful. That's an issue with the web site, not the underlying technology. > […] people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash. The Flash plugin was a closed-source component. (Various attempts were made at open-source substitutes, but none ever reached a fully usable state.) The only people who could have "fixed the bad parts of Flash" were Adobe employees, and they didn't.
    - satellite2 4y ago
john567 4y ago
At this point in time. In what way was Flash superior to JavaScript and canvas? There was even SWF player implementations in JavaScript at this point in time. Somehow, I don't think the death of Flash had much to do with it. Rather, the app ecosystem replaced a space that, that for a limited time, was occupied by Flash based web stuff.
- naoqj 4y ago
  There's nothing as good and as easy as Flash was to create 2D games. It was wysiwyg. Even kids could do it.
- someotherperson 4y ago
  Is there authoring/creation tooling anywhere near what Flash had? I made Flash stuff when I was a lot younger and it was insanely straight forward thanks to the tooling. I haven’t tried to animate anything since… 2007 perhaps? Does JS or canvas have a similar experience to author content?
  - shoozza 4y ago
    Depends on what you need. For simple stuff Wrick Editor[0] might be good enough. [0] https://www.wickeditor.com/ https://www.wickeditor.com/
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Tumult Hype: a Mac application that uses a graphical timeline UI to manipulate CSS and JSS for animation, and includes a physics engine to simulate collisions, bounces and things needed for game design. Exports to HTML, GIF and MP4. https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/
- andybak 4y ago
  Authoring tools.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  Former Flash game developer here. A big part of it was artists and coders could use the same tool. An artist could create some flash animations and then I as a coder would go in and hook up all the code to make it functional without having to spend any extra effort to make the graphics or animation work (in other platforms you'd have to pack sprite sheets, color encoding, sometimes fight memory (at least I did on iPhone 4 back in the day), and then you'd have to set up all the animations manually and get each one working. With Flash I was just sent an FLA, browsed through all the animations, went "awesome", and started setting up hitboxes and dropping them into the game. Like I've wanted to port some of my Flash games to HTML5, but the intense frame by frame animation would be a bear to export and hook up in other formats. And non-frame-by-frame animation was easy enough that I could help fill in the gaps when needed, no big deal. I even made a few simple animations just for the hell of it back then since it was so easy to work with. I eventually migrated to console dev with XNA, then mobile dev with iOS, then some 3D development with Unity, and I've dabbled with Monogame, Phaser, Java, Pico-8, PlayDate, Unreal Engine, and currently working on a game in Unity again, since it's pretty much your only choice right now besides Unreal if you want good VR support. But yeah, nothing I've worked with has felt quite as nice as Flash as far as synergy between art and code, especially 2D art. Examples: I teamed up with an artist to make a 7 character head to head fighting game: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 I teamed up with another artist to make a richly animated (espcially the boss) short platformer.: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/116067 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/116067
giffarage 4y ago
If there was a demand, game developers would find a way. It’s just that kids are playing games on phones these days.
MivLives 4y ago
I think it was mostly mobile games. Why make games for small amounts of money when you can make actual money on the app store. The decline was happening even before Flash was removed from chrome.

notRobot 4y ago

Yeah :( It's hard to find fun games that can be played in the browser nowadays. They definitely do exist, but there's no where near the variety that we used to have when Flash was still a thing.

defenestration 4y ago
I loved the days that Kongregate.com was thriving. Today, Armor Games is still up and running. It has quite some gems worth exploring: https://armorgames.com/games/rating#games https://armorgames.com/games/rating#games
- Riverheart 4y ago
  Armor Games has been porting classics to Steam. We've got Scriptwelder games and Crush the Castle.
Tijdreiziger 4y ago
My go-to for these types of games is itch.io. https://itch.io/games/html5 https://itch.io/games/html5
- smaudet 4y ago
  My experience with that is it usually never works, and for whatever reason the games never seem compelling. Not sure why, flash games never had that problem. They were always full games with rich graphics and often a story. I literally tried to pull up itch while tablet shopping yesterday - the site never rendered on the tablets and the one game I tried about crashed the whole tablet. Audio/video worked fine. I'm sure if I sat down at a high powered beefy windows desktop maybe they'd work - I remember flash working great on 1GHz celeron processors with maybe 1 or 2 GB of memory and windows 95. Html games are still a bunch of nonsense, on average.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    Some games can be iffy, but I haven't really had any major problems with the site. My computer is from 2015, so not exactly high-end. You could also install the desktop client, then you can play all the games easily (including the non-web-based ones). I'm partial to this one: https://leef6010.itch.io/projectkat https://leef6010.itch.io/projectkat
  - 29083011397778 4y ago
    I just pulled up "Farmers Stealing Tanks" on my BlackBerry KeyOne and played for a minute. It was playable (though not perfect), and that's on a 5 year old phone with a chipset that emphasized battery life over performance.
- dleslie 4y ago
  Interestingly, it appears a great many of those are unity games and won't run on phones.
jimbob45 4y ago
Newgrounds is still alive and kicking. They’ve even ported all their Flash games to be playable on modern devices to boot! That said, I’m not going to pretend like I go there frequently either. I just don’t have time to blow on popcorn experiences anymore.
unwind 4y ago
I'm certainly not an expert but I think you're comparing apples and oranges a little. Js and canvas is a code execution environment, but Flash had a polished authoring environment which I believe made it easier for less-technical people to get stuff happening.
andrepd 4y ago
Unfortunately, it's hard to find fun games on mobile as well. Mobiles games are an utter disgrace nowadays. Can you even call them games? They're an optimised engagement loop with some gameplay in between the "buy platinum coins" and "spin to win" popups.

hackernewds 4y ago

Google decided to, and successfully, killed a whole software system. In hindsight, what was the reason, and was it justified?

duskwuff 4y ago
Let's be honest here: what killed Flash was years of neglect by Adobe. Google removing it from Chrome was a downstream effect, not a cause.
- jterrys 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm old enough to remember how absolutely fucking garbage Flash was, and the source of many a web-based malware that haunted many a Windows user. I don't really blame Apple's decision not to support it. There's no way Jobs would've allowed such a disease prone plugin infesting his new platform.
  - smaudet 4y ago
    Are you sure it's any better? Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful. Flash had bad bits to be sure but it could be snappy. I had hope we could do better but a lot of sites seem as bad or worse on arguably better hardware. I'm not sure the tech stack was ever to blame...people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash.
    - duskwuff 4y ago
      > Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful. That's an issue with the web site, not the underlying technology. > […] people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash. The Flash plugin was a closed-source component. (Various attempts were made at open-source substitutes, but none ever reached a fully usable state.) The only people who could have "fixed the bad parts of Flash" were Adobe employees, and they didn't.
  - satellite2 4y ago

john567 4y ago

At this point in time. In what way was Flash superior to JavaScript and canvas? There was even SWF player implementations in JavaScript at this point in time. Somehow, I don't think the death of Flash had much to do with it. Rather, the app ecosystem replaced a space that, that for a limited time, was occupied by Flash based web stuff.

naoqj 4y ago
There's nothing as good and as easy as Flash was to create 2D games. It was wysiwyg. Even kids could do it.
someotherperson 4y ago
Is there authoring/creation tooling anywhere near what Flash had? I made Flash stuff when I was a lot younger and it was insanely straight forward thanks to the tooling. I haven’t tried to animate anything since… 2007 perhaps? Does JS or canvas have a similar experience to author content?
- shoozza 4y ago
  Depends on what you need. For simple stuff Wrick Editor[0] might be good enough. [0] https://www.wickeditor.com/ https://www.wickeditor.com/
- rchaud 4y ago
  Tumult Hype: a Mac application that uses a graphical timeline UI to manipulate CSS and JSS for animation, and includes a physics engine to simulate collisions, bounces and things needed for game design. Exports to HTML, GIF and MP4. https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/
andybak 4y ago
Authoring tools.
cableshaft 4y ago
Former Flash game developer here. A big part of it was artists and coders could use the same tool. An artist could create some flash animations and then I as a coder would go in and hook up all the code to make it functional without having to spend any extra effort to make the graphics or animation work (in other platforms you'd have to pack sprite sheets, color encoding, sometimes fight memory (at least I did on iPhone 4 back in the day), and then you'd have to set up all the animations manually and get each one working. With Flash I was just sent an FLA, browsed through all the animations, went "awesome", and started setting up hitboxes and dropping them into the game. Like I've wanted to port some of my Flash games to HTML5, but the intense frame by frame animation would be a bear to export and hook up in other formats. And non-frame-by-frame animation was easy enough that I could help fill in the gaps when needed, no big deal. I even made a few simple animations just for the hell of it back then since it was so easy to work with. I eventually migrated to console dev with XNA, then mobile dev with iOS, then some 3D development with Unity, and I've dabbled with Monogame, Phaser, Java, Pico-8, PlayDate, Unreal Engine, and currently working on a game in Unity again, since it's pretty much your only choice right now besides Unreal if you want good VR support. But yeah, nothing I've worked with has felt quite as nice as Flash as far as synergy between art and code, especially 2D art. Examples: I teamed up with an artist to make a 7 character head to head fighting game: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 I teamed up with another artist to make a richly animated (espcially the boss) short platformer.: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/116067 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/116067

giffarage 4y ago

If there was a demand, game developers would find a way. It’s just that kids are playing games on phones these days.

MivLives 4y ago

I think it was mostly mobile games. Why make games for small amounts of money when you can make actual money on the app store. The decline was happening even before Flash was removed from chrome.