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I remember creating a simple "catch the falling X" game in Flash 20 years ago. It was basic, but had everything you'd expect in a beginner project: points, mult

I remember creating a simple "catch the falling X" game in Flash 20 years ago. It was basic, but had everything you'd expect in a beginner project: points, multiple game states/screens, a victory condition, basic story (which was just a screen at the beginning, like NES). The thing is, I was a literal child and I also had no clue how to code -- I did everything by following tutorials and gluing together code I copy&pasted&modified. And it worked! And people played it! They all thought it was pretty shit, but to me it was more important that some random person across the globe genuinely picked up something I wrote, played it, and then wrote up a review of it. I showed it to my parents and they immediately started pushing me to learn programming.. and well here I am now. Thanks Flash. It blows my mind that no one has made a tool like that in so long. It had the same quality as Excel, where any non-technical person could just look up a tutorial, right click a bit, and make something usable. Why has the pinnacle of ease of use in game creation been achieved and never replicated since?

iKlsR 4y ago
Some of the better years of my life a little over a decade ago were spent on mofunzone playing the stick figure fights with friends. I remember bullet time fighting (matrix clone with swords, guns, slow motion) and there was also an amazing action narrative series called Ray with Southpark themed characters and one of the craziest platformers I ever played called N. I managed to snag some of these a while back and preserve them offline and can still enjoy them using https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/. We lost so many good things from the flash era.
- ddulaney 4y ago
  N is one of my favorite platformers of all time. Happily, it's still around and doesn't require any Flash hacks! https://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html https://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html Do you know if there's been any progress on preserving the older Macromedia games? I remember those starting to get flaky even in the Flash heyday.
  - iKlsR 4y ago
    Not to my knowledge, I only got introduced to flash ~2007, I've mostly been going by stuff I can recall and hunting for them on wayback machine.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  I really hope all these games a preserved somewhere. There are big movements to preserve old console and PC games, but flash, and possibly to a bigger extent, mobile games seem more overlooked. I think there's a tendency to look back at these games as trash, but it was a pretty wildly experimental time. Indie games as we know them now weren't really a thing yet.
  - segh 4y ago
    Flashpoint has a nice UI and I managed to find many old favorites. https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
- Cpoll 4y ago
  FYI N has some console and PC updated versions. One being N++ https://store.steampowered.com/app/230270/N_NPLUSPLUS/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/230270/N_NPLUSPLUS/
- Vinnl 4y ago
  Wow, hitting a bunch of memories there. Bullet time fighting was amazing, and I had a bunch of friends who were way into N ("way of the ninja") - built a couple of the most popular levels for it. Which also was pretty cool that they were able to do that, come to think of it. I remember one of them dabbling into creating games with Flash as well, and when he got stuck, I encouraged him to reach out to the creator of N to ask how he had solved that. (I think it was collisions with curved floors.) Got a nice message back that explained to him how to do it. Good times.
- kokanee 4y ago
  My time spent creating "stick death" videos in Flash as a kid is probably one of the main reasons I'm a software engineer today.
dandigangi 4y ago
Had an awesome experience learning programming on AS also! Simple projects/games but great language to learn. Can involve so many key concepts.
- thedragonline 4y ago
  I miss AS. I used it to build a gis engine that packed 5D into what superficially looked like 2D - item renderers helped make that happen. It is aggravating to no end to watch people pile on Flash for its faults - they either don't understand what was lost or just don't want to understand the loss. Steve Jobs is in this group.
  - dandigangi 4y ago
    Flash really was great. Its unfortunate that they killed it. The Mini Clip and animated shorts days were awesome. Used to love finding cool animations in Deviant Art.
- yawnxyz 4y ago
  I made a game / synthesizer combo in AS3 for college. Good times. I wouldn’t even know where or how to begin doing that today in JS
mejutoco 4y ago
This brings so many memories. One could use decompilers to see how other games were made. It was fantastic for learning. I am surprised Adobe did not manage to get Flash / Adobe Animate adapted to html5/js without people jumping ship.
junkieradio 4y ago
Wick editor is the closest modern thing to traditional flash ie. Flash 8. I've made a fully animated pixel platformer tech demo type thing in it, it's somewhat capable.
CharlesW 4y ago
> It blows my mind that no one has made a tool like that in so long. […] Why has the pinnacle of ease of use in game creation been achieved and never replicated since? FWIW it never went away¹ and targets standards-based runtimes these days. I'm sure there are many kids every month having the same kind of epiphanies with it! That being said, because Adobe Animate is marketed as a tool for professionals rather than kids/enthusiasts, orders of magnitude more kids are having the kind of experience you had with Minecraft and Roblox instead. ¹ https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
- dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
  I remember when Minecraft was released a bunch of kids had their first Java experience due to the modding scene. Funnily enough I didn't do that since by then I was a C enthusiast and had an irrational hatred towards Java (oh how the turntables..). I wonder if that's still possible now that Microsoft has changed the codebase IIRC?
  - thayne 4y ago
    It's still possible for the java edition.
  - robotnikman 4y ago
    Definitely still possible, various modding frameworks like Forge or Spigot for Java Minecraft still thrive.
  - bionade24 4y ago
    There are 2 editions of Minecraft. One, is the original one, now called Java edition. They definately still work on it, because despite not running well on Java > 8 for a long time, it now does. But afaik, they're still stuck on LWJGL 2. The newer one written in C++ was first called "pocket edition" and targeted mobile. It's now called "Bedrock edition" and is also the version that has RTX support. It'll be hard to move the modding community over to the Bedrock edition. I personally don't have any knowledge how limited modding is in the latter one.
- 4y ago
kitd 4y ago
I'd add Visual Basic to your "glue bits together" list. After working on C++ & FORTRAN professionally, Visual Basic was like a breath of fresh air. I remember thinking "how could programming be this simple". It felt like cheating. Ofc, there's an evil undercurrent to the "any non-technical person can use it". We ended up having to support a tool that some "business analyst" had written. My eyes bled.
- clarge1120 4y ago
  The redpill in me says MSFT created dotnet to kill VB6. That tool made it too easy (and cheap) to create value through automation.
  - numair 4y ago
    A lot of large companies did a tremendous amount of back office using VB6 applications. I remember visiting Disney and seeing it all over the place in the late 90s.
  - kome 4y ago
    it's a generalized trend. Python is the new BASIC, but Python is SO much more complicated than BASIC. Web development was easy, now it's impossibly complicated, etc etc... Rebol, Red, tcl/tk are good and easy programming languages, but kinda niche and obscure. I have no idea why computing is getting more complicated instead of easier.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      I only disagree on web development. It was never easy. The web always always a mess, and nothing really worked. Today it's a mess, but you can make it work if you know what you are doing. But yes, looks like the web was a trendsetter that pushed things into becoming harder without any good reason. Or maybe the web was just following the trend of the toolmakers all going out business at the early 00's (thanks a lot to Microsoft).
      - 4y ago
thatguy0900 4y ago
You should look into roblox. I think a lot of the kids who want to create are doing it there or in minecraft. There are really some pretty expansive games created there.
RandomWorker 4y ago
Have you tried processing it gets close to action script and canvas. We just need to put processing on a time framed canvas. With a Figma like editing experience. https://processing.org/tutorials/gettingstarted https://processing.org/tutorials/gettingstarted
axus 4y ago
https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ seems like a social network for kids making basic games and learning to code. They seem to encourage forking and learning from existing projects.
zackmorris 4y ago
That's how I feel about HyperCard. Some apps were so ahead of their time that when they were axed, nothing comparable replaced them. I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to their ego and do a bunch of stuff in business to hoard even more wealth, rather than working to reform the system which keeps so many others down. I would very much like to write a programming language, a blogging tool, a web framework, a game, a game development tool, etc etc etc. But I never will. Most of the people reading this never will either. So I endure. I meditate, I practice stoicism, I go to the gym. But I had to let my dreams die for my own self-preservation because opportunity cost grew to consume my entire psyche. I simply can't think about all of the other things I could be doing while I have to work. And all I do is work. There doesn't seem to be much help coming in terms of UBI or having N people split a 40 hour workweek or forming artist communes for makers. Sure, we hear the occasional stories. But it's like we're all waiting around for a billionaire to liberate us, rather than creating a scalable cooperative system to sustain all of us right now today. What I'm saying is that until we look beyond the technical challenges and see that the problem is subjugation, we'll never get free of the lackluster tools, because we'll never have time to make better ones.
- quijoteuniv 4y ago
  “ Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to their ego and do a bunch of stuff in business to hoard even more wealth, rather than working to reform the system which keeps so many others down.” Well said
- leetrout 4y ago
  "but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent" THIS. I am so sick of the competition in most tech jobs / companies to climb the stupid ladder. Everyone just wants more more more and our society reinforces that. I _REALLY_ miss working on teams that didn't have that amount of competition causing mild dysfunction.
rogual 4y ago
I took a similar path to you. Sometimes I feel the best thing my high school did for me was having Flash, VB6 and HyperStudio installed on the school computers.
taeric 4y ago
The scratch set of tools still enables kids do a lot of this stuff.
jayd16 4y ago
Try Roblox, I guess. And to be honest Unity is really easy at the tutorial level. Shipping a real game is the hard part.

iKlsR 4y ago

Some of the better years of my life a little over a decade ago were spent on mofunzone playing the stick figure fights with friends. I remember bullet time fighting (matrix clone with swords, guns, slow motion) and there was also an amazing action narrative series called Ray with Southpark themed characters and one of the craziest platformers I ever played called N. I managed to snag some of these a while back and preserve them offline and can still enjoy them using https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/. We lost so many good things from the flash era.

ddulaney 4y ago
N is one of my favorite platformers of all time. Happily, it's still around and doesn't require any Flash hacks! https://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html https://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html Do you know if there's been any progress on preserving the older Macromedia games? I remember those starting to get flaky even in the Flash heyday.
- iKlsR 4y ago
  Not to my knowledge, I only got introduced to flash ~2007, I've mostly been going by stuff I can recall and hunting for them on wayback machine.
vlunkr 4y ago
I really hope all these games a preserved somewhere. There are big movements to preserve old console and PC games, but flash, and possibly to a bigger extent, mobile games seem more overlooked. I think there's a tendency to look back at these games as trash, but it was a pretty wildly experimental time. Indie games as we know them now weren't really a thing yet.
- segh 4y ago
  Flashpoint has a nice UI and I managed to find many old favorites. https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
Cpoll 4y ago
FYI N has some console and PC updated versions. One being N++ https://store.steampowered.com/app/230270/N_NPLUSPLUS/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/230270/N_NPLUSPLUS/
Vinnl 4y ago
Wow, hitting a bunch of memories there. Bullet time fighting was amazing, and I had a bunch of friends who were way into N ("way of the ninja") - built a couple of the most popular levels for it. Which also was pretty cool that they were able to do that, come to think of it. I remember one of them dabbling into creating games with Flash as well, and when he got stuck, I encouraged him to reach out to the creator of N to ask how he had solved that. (I think it was collisions with curved floors.) Got a nice message back that explained to him how to do it. Good times.
kokanee 4y ago
My time spent creating "stick death" videos in Flash as a kid is probably one of the main reasons I'm a software engineer today.

dandigangi 4y ago

Had an awesome experience learning programming on AS also! Simple projects/games but great language to learn. Can involve so many key concepts.

thedragonline 4y ago
I miss AS. I used it to build a gis engine that packed 5D into what superficially looked like 2D - item renderers helped make that happen. It is aggravating to no end to watch people pile on Flash for its faults - they either don't understand what was lost or just don't want to understand the loss. Steve Jobs is in this group.
- dandigangi 4y ago
  Flash really was great. Its unfortunate that they killed it. The Mini Clip and animated shorts days were awesome. Used to love finding cool animations in Deviant Art.
yawnxyz 4y ago
I made a game / synthesizer combo in AS3 for college. Good times. I wouldn’t even know where or how to begin doing that today in JS

mejutoco 4y ago

This brings so many memories. One could use decompilers to see how other games were made. It was fantastic for learning. I am surprised Adobe did not manage to get Flash / Adobe Animate adapted to html5/js without people jumping ship.

junkieradio 4y ago

Wick editor is the closest modern thing to traditional flash ie. Flash 8. I've made a fully animated pixel platformer tech demo type thing in it, it's somewhat capable.

CharlesW 4y ago

> It blows my mind that no one has made a tool like that in so long. […] Why has the pinnacle of ease of use in game creation been achieved and never replicated since? FWIW it never went away¹ and targets standards-based runtimes these days. I'm sure there are many kids every month having the same kind of epiphanies with it! That being said, because Adobe Animate is marketed as a tool for professionals rather than kids/enthusiasts, orders of magnitude more kids are having the kind of experience you had with Minecraft and Roblox instead. ¹ https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
I remember when Minecraft was released a bunch of kids had their first Java experience due to the modding scene. Funnily enough I didn't do that since by then I was a C enthusiast and had an irrational hatred towards Java (oh how the turntables..). I wonder if that's still possible now that Microsoft has changed the codebase IIRC?
- thayne 4y ago
  It's still possible for the java edition.
- robotnikman 4y ago
  Definitely still possible, various modding frameworks like Forge or Spigot for Java Minecraft still thrive.
- bionade24 4y ago
  There are 2 editions of Minecraft. One, is the original one, now called Java edition. They definately still work on it, because despite not running well on Java > 8 for a long time, it now does. But afaik, they're still stuck on LWJGL 2. The newer one written in C++ was first called "pocket edition" and targeted mobile. It's now called "Bedrock edition" and is also the version that has RTX support. It'll be hard to move the modding community over to the Bedrock edition. I personally don't have any knowledge how limited modding is in the latter one.
4y ago

kitd 4y ago

I'd add Visual Basic to your "glue bits together" list. After working on C++ & FORTRAN professionally, Visual Basic was like a breath of fresh air. I remember thinking "how could programming be this simple". It felt like cheating. Ofc, there's an evil undercurrent to the "any non-technical person can use it". We ended up having to support a tool that some "business analyst" had written. My eyes bled.

clarge1120 4y ago
The redpill in me says MSFT created dotnet to kill VB6. That tool made it too easy (and cheap) to create value through automation.
- numair 4y ago
  A lot of large companies did a tremendous amount of back office using VB6 applications. I remember visiting Disney and seeing it all over the place in the late 90s.
- kome 4y ago
  it's a generalized trend. Python is the new BASIC, but Python is SO much more complicated than BASIC. Web development was easy, now it's impossibly complicated, etc etc... Rebol, Red, tcl/tk are good and easy programming languages, but kinda niche and obscure. I have no idea why computing is getting more complicated instead of easier.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    I only disagree on web development. It was never easy. The web always always a mess, and nothing really worked. Today it's a mess, but you can make it work if you know what you are doing. But yes, looks like the web was a trendsetter that pushed things into becoming harder without any good reason. Or maybe the web was just following the trend of the toolmakers all going out business at the early 00's (thanks a lot to Microsoft).
    - 4y ago

thatguy0900 4y ago

You should look into roblox. I think a lot of the kids who want to create are doing it there or in minecraft. There are really some pretty expansive games created there.

RandomWorker 4y ago

Have you tried processing it gets close to action script and canvas. We just need to put processing on a time framed canvas. With a Figma like editing experience. https://processing.org/tutorials/gettingstarted https://processing.org/tutorials/gettingstarted

axus 4y ago

https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ seems like a social network for kids making basic games and learning to code. They seem to encourage forking and learning from existing projects.

zackmorris 4y ago

That's how I feel about HyperCard. Some apps were so ahead of their time that when they were axed, nothing comparable replaced them. I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to their ego and do a bunch of stuff in business to hoard even more wealth, rather than working to reform the system which keeps so many others down. I would very much like to write a programming language, a blogging tool, a web framework, a game, a game development tool, etc etc etc. But I never will. Most of the people reading this never will either. So I endure. I meditate, I practice stoicism, I go to the gym. But I had to let my dreams die for my own self-preservation because opportunity cost grew to consume my entire psyche. I simply can't think about all of the other things I could be doing while I have to work. And all I do is work. There doesn't seem to be much help coming in terms of UBI or having N people split a 40 hour workweek or forming artist communes for makers. Sure, we hear the occasional stories. But it's like we're all waiting around for a billionaire to liberate us, rather than creating a scalable cooperative system to sustain all of us right now today. What I'm saying is that until we look beyond the technical challenges and see that the problem is subjugation, we'll never get free of the lackluster tools, because we'll never have time to make better ones.

quijoteuniv 4y ago
“ Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to their ego and do a bunch of stuff in business to hoard even more wealth, rather than working to reform the system which keeps so many others down.” Well said
leetrout 4y ago
"but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent" THIS. I am so sick of the competition in most tech jobs / companies to climb the stupid ladder. Everyone just wants more more more and our society reinforces that. I _REALLY_ miss working on teams that didn't have that amount of competition causing mild dysfunction.

rogual 4y ago

I took a similar path to you. Sometimes I feel the best thing my high school did for me was having Flash, VB6 and HyperStudio installed on the school computers.

taeric 4y ago

The scratch set of tools still enables kids do a lot of this stuff.

jayd16 4y ago

Try Roblox, I guess. And to be honest Unity is really easy at the tutorial level. Shipping a real game is the hard part.