yeah it was fine to play games on or see neat websites but it was absolute garbage to build and maintain with.
fresh out of college one of my first jobs was a web master for an ad agency whose site was purely built in flash/actionscript. It was the absolute worst to update. I hated it. I was one of those that celebrated flash and actionscripts downfall.
I completely forgot about this trend of building actual websites in flash. Fuck disabled people right?
yeah it was “all the rage” in the early 00’s up to like the early 10’s. Pain in the ass to build, even worse to maintain and update. but EVERYONE wanted a cool interactive flash site. It’s just trends with companies. I remember after flash it was all paralax. everyone wanted paralax. thankfully that was a lot easier to build since it was just HTML5. but yeah web dev trends are annoying because you’re constantly having to learn new stacks that you know will become irrelevant in like 3 years or less once some middle manager discovers something “cool”.
I’m all about using Astro + Tailwind because it reminds me of building Geocities sites and I like that.
I heard somewhere that Flash itself is garbage (not the games in it)
It had massive security holes, but its vector handling is sublime
yeah i agree.
TAKE ME BACK 😭
I tried to become a flash developer back then 😞
I honestly miss those flash games. Like I’d spend hours upon hours scrolling through websites like bored.com playing all kinds of games. I could play any game in any genre and have a great time.
I miss those times. Maybe I miss them because they remind me of my youth but they were amazing either way.
Newgrounds still works. They’ve adapted
Along with Homestar Runner. I think Newgrounds and H*R were the two big flash sites to pivot to using Ruffle.
Who? Who celebrated?
Who celebrated? Everyone at the time who wasn’t trying to write flash exploits did
People who have no clue what they’re talking about be like:
I mean, seriously… Celebrating FLASH of all things? And complaining that there are no more free amateur games? MF, never heard of Unity? Godot? O3DE? Defold? GDevelop? OGRE? renpy? pygame? stride?
The worst of these still being infinitely better than Flash. And then you can publish your work at Itch.io.
I think they are just celebrating the era. The Internet was completely different then. A lot of those flash games later turned into microtransation shit as well on new engines.
Yeah, it’s just unsubstantiated “looking back through rose tinted glasses” kind of thing.
Only the ones that had enough staying power to be turned into microtransaction shit on new engines. Remember how many horrendously grotesque and edgy games there were for no point other than to be horrendously grotesque and edgy? Sure we have some of those now but scrolling Steam or Itch it isn’t a constant stream of edgelord suicide simulators or whatnot
Web Assembly will always be better then Flash(the Engines you mentioned turns the code into Web Assembly)
itch is full of low quality generic slop made by restrictive game engines. A few good games. A few.
So exactly the same as flash games?
I hear you, but not quite - Flash games had more of a blank canvas and there was no obvious way how you would build your game, leading much greater and richer variety.
Itch stuff is far more formulaic
Nonsense.
You have RPG games, rogue-likes, VNs, puzzles - literally all the kinds of games in existence are right there on Itch. It’s exactly like back when Flash was popular, only this time it’s more secure and less resource hungry (most of the time).
Hmm on second glance you might be right. Still, I find it hard to find any good web games, there doesn’t seem to be a rating system (perhaps for good?)
Any standout games you can recommend?
My general approach is to find any gamejam (if you just browse the free games lists many will happen to be from gamejams and link to whatever gamejam they’re from) and look through the games that resulted from it. Gamejam games tend to be high quality short experiences
A couple that I’ve enjoyed recently:
- Dragon Tax Return Simulator 2015
- Peggys Post
- My Dystopian Robot Girlfriend (optionally NSFW)
Top rated free games: https://itch.io/games/top-rated/free.
I personally don’t play on Itch that much, but I just had a looksie today and found something that seems to be the spiritual child of Trackmania: https://kodub.itch.io/polytrack.
This is also brilliant: https://edgarmendoza.itch.io/help-no-brake
so like Gamemaker and Unity??
i also seen alot of Godot which is not restrictive.
There are plenty of other places to play games online still, Like Pico-8
Donko Donko Literate Club
Flash was so good, I’m sad it’s gone. The HTML5 era has been a massive let down.
“Hey guys, hear me out… what if we take all these great tools and replace them with… nothing?”
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I was working as a flash developer when they killed it. I was definitely not on board haha. I had to pivot my whole career but I learned such a valuable lesson.
Flash was the tool that really made programming click for me. It was easy to pick up but hard to master and I spent so much time learning how to write all kinds of code patterns
Still peak humor
You can still do this. There’re loads of free and basic (i.e. easy-to-learn) game engines and you can make games of much better quality with the same effort. itch.io is full of free games made by amateurs.
When people celebrate the downfall of Flash, it’s not because of the games. It’s because the entire internet was replete with unnecessary Flash-heavy bullshit that required constantly updating your browser’s Flash plugins (and all browsers had their own version you had to install and update), and how it was completely unsuited to any sort of UI/UX (e.g. you couldn’t even copy and paste text in Flash pages most of the time). And all that is to say nothing of the gaping goatse of a security hole that it was.
It was cancer. Just because the cancer got you down to your goal weight, it doesn’t mean you should lament the success of your chemotherapy.
Metaphor game on point.
I don’t know if people working at Artix are passionate, but I definitely wouldn’t call their games ‘free with no microtransactions’.
