5 ms·

I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ One thing Flash

I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc. That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file. But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game. Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.

nosrepa 7mo ago
Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used to be fun.
- fuzzy_biscuit 7mo ago
  Strawberry Clock is our king!
  - barbs 7mo ago
    B
  - Dwedit 7mo ago
    I was in some instant-message conversations (Romhacking related I think) with CoolBoyMan before he told me that he was Strawberry Clock.
shminge 7mo ago
I've tried Love2D and enjoyed it but just found the lack of support for Lua was tough - how do you handle debugging and things?
- a1o 7mo ago
  I remember I could connect love2d to the IDE I used and debug lua just fine with it. Which IDE you were using?
notpushkin 7mo ago
I feel we need a modular verdion of Flash: standalone editor that produces just the animations with Flash-like mechanics, SDKs for major OSS game frameworks, and possibly an editor component you can use in IDEs. You then drop in animation file(s) and track them in VCS like any other asset. Edit: but of course, the standalone variant should work for non-game animations as well!
wesammikhail 7mo ago
God I love the look of those old school sites. Takes me back to a happier time. Whatever happened? :(
- throawayonthe 7mo ago
  newgrounds is still around though
- andai 7mo ago
  Remember how mobile sites were the same thing except with less personality? And then they figured out they could remove what little personality remained and call it progress? And then they realized they could do that on desktop too?
qingcharles 7mo ago
Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS? I remember trying to produce a Flash renderer in C# when we wrote DudeFactory to render out the characters after you used the Flash app to put all their clothes and accessories on. I think we cheated in the end and pre-rendered large PNGs of them all and used .NET to just layer them all with instructions sent from Flash. https://dudefactory.com/ https://dudefactory.com/
- troupo 7mo ago
  > Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS? This sounds like a "is there anything you can do in C++ or Javascript that you couldn't do in Brainfuck?". Flash was a complete authoring environment. Yes, you can replicste the output in JS+CSS (or more likely JS+Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU), but at what cost and with how much effort?
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  2D and 3D games, with good developer and debugging tools.
- RobotToaster 7mo ago
  Technically you may not even need js, since SVG has integral support for SMIL.
  - lukan 7mo ago
    Have you ever tried that out? Last time I checked (some yeqrs ago) wide support (and performance) was not great but more importantly handling I found not great. Support and performance might have improved, but I think the style is still ugly and good authoring tools non existent.
- wongarsu 7mo ago
  SVG + CSS + JS was hailed as the Flash-killer. But authoring tools never materialized. The tech stack can render the same things, but the process of creating anything beyond a static image in SVG is night and day compared to making the same thing in Flash
rtpg 7mo ago
It feels like we're fairly close yet so far. Lots of newer tools do have animation and tweening of arbitrary properties but then will just have bitmap image editors instead of a built-in vector editor for example. Or just make it really hard to tie all the stuff together. The ease at which Flash CSx would just let you draw a circle in a spot, then click on it to get its script file and immediately add a little bit of behavior is magic for prototyping
gf000 7mo ago
> is an environment that both coders and artists could use. Maybe Rive fits this well enough? (Not affiliated, just looked into it at a time from a render engine perspective)
- dnpls 7mo ago
  I came here thinking the same. To me, it looks like Rive is the closest tool with the highest potential to be a Flash replacement.
dizhn 7mo ago
Before opening the comments I made a bet with myself that the top comment would be about how someone made flash games in the 2000s and nothing really replaced it in the coming years. :)
0x1ceb00da 7mo ago
Original adobe tools for flash should still work on windiws/wine. Why don't people use them to make things?
- amenghra 7mo ago
  Flash died once people no longer had a flash player. The tooling might also need updating if the apps being built are targeting today’s touch devices.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- andai 7mo ago
  Indeed they do, at least once a year :) https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1554561/1 https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1554561/1
hrmtst93837 7mo ago
[flagged]
wink 7mo ago
The versioning was indeed a bit of a pain, also anything with dynamic input. I was pretty proud of a solution where we could feed a web CMS that had a flash and a html version with the same editable text fields. IIRC you could grab the input of some fields from a text file and Flash didn't care where these came from, so on save the CMS just spit out a bunch of text files in a folder. That must have been around 2001.
dnpls 7mo ago
Have you tried Rive? It seems to have a lot of potential for game development.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  It's a UI authoring toolkit, you could do entire games in it I suppose, but you'd be fighting against it, rather than being helped by it. Better to go the route of doing Spine2D animations then leverage a real game engine like Godot or Unity and load the animations there. But then you're essentially back to "traditional game development" which is very different from what you could do with Macromedia's Flash back in the day.
  - hobofan 7mo ago
    > but you'd be fighting against it, rather than being helped by it I think this was also true of doing game development in Flash. Some people here might be looking back at Flash with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.

nosrepa 7mo ago

Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used to be fun.

fuzzy_biscuit 7mo ago
Strawberry Clock is our king!
- barbs 7mo ago
  B
- Dwedit 7mo ago
  I was in some instant-message conversations (Romhacking related I think) with CoolBoyMan before he told me that he was Strawberry Clock.

shminge 7mo ago

I've tried Love2D and enjoyed it but just found the lack of support for Lua was tough - how do you handle debugging and things?

a1o 7mo ago
I remember I could connect love2d to the IDE I used and debug lua just fine with it. Which IDE you were using?

notpushkin 7mo ago

I feel we need a modular verdion of Flash: standalone editor that produces just the animations with Flash-like mechanics, SDKs for major OSS game frameworks, and possibly an editor component you can use in IDEs. You then drop in animation file(s) and track them in VCS like any other asset. Edit: but of course, the standalone variant should work for non-game animations as well!

wesammikhail 7mo ago

God I love the look of those old school sites. Takes me back to a happier time. Whatever happened? :(

throawayonthe 7mo ago
newgrounds is still around though
andai 7mo ago
Remember how mobile sites were the same thing except with less personality? And then they figured out they could remove what little personality remained and call it progress? And then they realized they could do that on desktop too?

qingcharles 7mo ago

Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS? I remember trying to produce a Flash renderer in C# when we wrote DudeFactory to render out the characters after you used the Flash app to put all their clothes and accessories on. I think we cheated in the end and pre-rendered large PNGs of them all and used .NET to just layer them all with instructions sent from Flash. https://dudefactory.com/ https://dudefactory.com/

troupo 7mo ago
> Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS? This sounds like a "is there anything you can do in C++ or Javascript that you couldn't do in Brainfuck?". Flash was a complete authoring environment. Yes, you can replicste the output in JS+CSS (or more likely JS+Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU), but at what cost and with how much effort?
pjmlp 7mo ago
2D and 3D games, with good developer and debugging tools.
RobotToaster 7mo ago
Technically you may not even need js, since SVG has integral support for SMIL.
- lukan 7mo ago
  Have you ever tried that out? Last time I checked (some yeqrs ago) wide support (and performance) was not great but more importantly handling I found not great. Support and performance might have improved, but I think the style is still ugly and good authoring tools non existent.
wongarsu 7mo ago
SVG + CSS + JS was hailed as the Flash-killer. But authoring tools never materialized. The tech stack can render the same things, but the process of creating anything beyond a static image in SVG is night and day compared to making the same thing in Flash

rtpg 7mo ago

It feels like we're fairly close yet so far. Lots of newer tools do have animation and tweening of arbitrary properties but then will just have bitmap image editors instead of a built-in vector editor for example. Or just make it really hard to tie all the stuff together. The ease at which Flash CSx would just let you draw a circle in a spot, then click on it to get its script file and immediately add a little bit of behavior is magic for prototyping

gf000 7mo ago

> is an environment that both coders and artists could use. Maybe Rive fits this well enough? (Not affiliated, just looked into it at a time from a render engine perspective)

dnpls 7mo ago
I came here thinking the same. To me, it looks like Rive is the closest tool with the highest potential to be a Flash replacement.

dizhn 7mo ago

Before opening the comments I made a bet with myself that the top comment would be about how someone made flash games in the 2000s and nothing really replaced it in the coming years. :)

0x1ceb00da 7mo ago

Original adobe tools for flash should still work on windiws/wine. Why don't people use them to make things?

amenghra 7mo ago
Flash died once people no longer had a flash player. The tooling might also need updating if the apps being built are targeting today’s touch devices.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
andai 7mo ago
Indeed they do, at least once a year :) https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1554561/1 https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1554561/1

hrmtst93837 7mo ago

[flagged]

wink 7mo ago

The versioning was indeed a bit of a pain, also anything with dynamic input. I was pretty proud of a solution where we could feed a web CMS that had a flash and a html version with the same editable text fields. IIRC you could grab the input of some fields from a text file and Flash didn't care where these came from, so on save the CMS just spit out a bunch of text files in a folder. That must have been around 2001.

dnpls 7mo ago

Have you tried Rive? It seems to have a lot of potential for game development.

embedding-shape 7mo ago
It's a UI authoring toolkit, you could do entire games in it I suppose, but you'd be fighting against it, rather than being helped by it. Better to go the route of doing Spine2D animations then leverage a real game engine like Godot or Unity and load the animations there. But then you're essentially back to "traditional game development" which is very different from what you could do with Macromedia's Flash back in the day.
- hobofan 7mo ago
  > but you'd be fighting against it, rather than being helped by it I think this was also true of doing game development in Flash. Some people here might be looking back at Flash with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.