
Nitrome to convert its Flash game library to HTML5 - danso
http://www.nitrome.com/blog/articles/1427/
======
azhenley
Flash was an amazing, low barrier way to make games that could be distributed
with almost no effort. In a single weekend I was able to make a game, do all
the art, integrate a video advertisement API into it, and release it to
hundreds of websites. I made tens of thousands of dollars doing this from my
dorm while going to school and working two jobs. I have yet to find an
alternative that can come anywhere close to this.

I wrote a bit about this on my blog, if you'd like to know more:
[http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/8lessons8games.html](http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/8lessons8games.html)

~~~
newacct583
> I have yet to find an alternative that can come anywhere close to this.

It wasn't the technology, it was the economy. In the late 90's consumer
internet uptake was growing literally exponentially, but the population of
hackers who could provide content was lagging terribly.

I mean, obviously Flash was probably the best option for that particular
niche, but if it didn't exist something else would have happened.

~~~
barry-cotter
And yet no one has built anything like it since. No one has even built a tool
that’s has as low a barrier to entry for either of creating animations or
making games, never mind one with both that low barrier to entry and no upper
limit to the quality of what you can make with it.

~~~
newacct583
> And yet no one has built anything like it since.

Because it's not the technology, it's the economy! You _can 't_ build another
Flash, because no such product could exist. We're awash with talented content
generation for the connected modern society. There's no niche for hacker
students to fill, with _any_ tool.

------
dijit
I grew up with nitrome as a staple of the internet, so I’m happy they’re doing
this, even for nostalgic reasons- their games really shaped my youth and we
definitely lost a wealth of content when flash died.

I feel like in general the “spirit” of the old flash games has died, I’m not
sure why but there was an incredible amount of low grade content around during
the flash days, and thus we had breakout successes like “the stick guy vs the
web designer“ and line rider. Maybe it’s because I’m old, but I don’t see
those kinds of incredibly Indy things anymore.

I don’t miss flash as a web technology though.

~~~
phailhaus
Did you ever dabble with Flash? I did, and it's frankly amazing how easy it
was to make games with it, especially since it gave you tools to draw right
there in the app. It had a low barrier to entry and a high skill ceiling,
which is why we saw such a massive amount of content those days from high
school and college students.

I don't know of an equivalent program to help build HTML5 games. It's
basically on you to pick the engine, choose the drawing program, and cobble
the entire thing together with only code. The barrier to entry is way over
kids' heads.

~~~
cableshaft
This. I made Flash games back in the day, some of which were fairly popular.
My most played game, Proximity, I came up with the idea at the beginning of
the week and had it released on Newgrounds by the end of the week. It was just
so easy to make games on that platform, and to collaborate effectively with
artists, who could create the art directly in the software and you could
incorporate it into the game easily.

I haven't found any platform that's been as easy or quick or easy to
collaborate with artists, while at the same time not having too many
restrictions in what type of game you want to make, since, and I've floated
around from platform to platform since then.

I'm still making games, but I'm doing more analog game design now (board
games), which is giving me a little bit of that easy to make (at least the
prototypes) and collaborate vibe that I haven't gotten from video games.
Currently using MonoGame for video game development at the moment. I've used
Unity professionally before, but it's too cumbersome for 2D hobby game
development.

I'm actually a little surprised that lightning in a bottle hasn't been able to
be replicated properly since then.

~~~
samch
Thank you for making Proximity! I spent many hours playing it and enjoyed
immensely.

~~~
cableshaft
You're welcome :) Glad you had so much fun with it.

Currently trying to bring it back, actually. I released a sequel on Xbox 360 a
while back, and I'm trying to clean it up, add some things, then release it on
desktop, then mobile, then hopefully more modern consoles.

Now that Flash is basically completely dead from modern browsers, I'm trying
to figure out what I should do about the original. I might eventually make an
HTML 5 version, but in the meantime I'm considering making downloadable
executables of the Flash game and releasing it on itch.io or something.

I also finally prototyped a board game version, and at some point I'm hoping
to find a publisher for it. Figured I need to bring the video game back so it
can be played again before publishers will give it a shot, though.

Speaking as a fan, do you have any opinions on what I should be doing with the
game?

------
apignotti
We are working on fixing this problem "the right way" by virtualizing the x86
Flash plugin in WebAssembly. For more info see here:

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-
with...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-
webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f)

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-
with...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-
webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f)

~~~
bogwog
Is "the right way" in quotes because it's sarcasm? This is a really cool idea,
but very impractical. I think most would agree that "the right way" would be
to port the game to HTML5, either using straight JS or a technology like Haxe
and OpenFL.

~~~
Sophistifunk
This is a pipe dream, as Flash has capabilities you just don't get in HTML+JS
without writing an entire VM, such as text metrics and weak references.

~~~
pjmlp
Hence WebAssembly + WebGL/WebGPU.

~~~
coopsmgoops
There is functionality that is just not available while in the browser
sandbox, so some flash apps will never work. But I'm happy to see this
happening.

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jjice
I'd be interested to see the metrics for a browser game site. When I was a
kid, Flash games were our go to when we had time in class, or even at home. I
can remember my sister and I crowded around the family computer playing
countless Flash games.

But what about now? Now that phones are so common among children, and they
offer such a large library of free games (granted, many are packed with ads
and micro-transactions), is there still a large market? I don't have a modern
perspective since I don't really play mobile or web games anymore, but I'd be
interested to see how websites like this are doing in terms of traffic.

~~~
frenchie14
This past weekend I uploaded a small game to Kongregate. It's been played 1000
times in the last 24 hours. I'd say the community is still surprisingly alive!
Also, if I had uploaded the same game with zero marketing to mobile, I'd have
expected zero downloads.

[https://www.kongregate.com/games/Frenchie14/factions](https://www.kongregate.com/games/Frenchie14/factions)

~~~
aabeshou
thats awesome! what technology are people using these days to make "flash"
games?

~~~
frenchie14
There's a lot of options! I use Unity3D. For 2D games, I'd recommend something
with a more native web build.

------
gramakri
I want the same for
[http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/](http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/)

~~~
cmehdy
The music in "rainmaker" is one of the most soothing loops I can think of.

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gibspaulding
For anyone interested in playing/archiving old flash games, BlueMaxima's
Flashpoint has some 49,000 games packaged up to be played offline. I haven't
messed with it yet, but it seems like a really neat project.

[https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/)

------
aclelland
I've been looking into how to best make a large collection of flash games
available after flash is removed from browsers. An electron app was looking
promising but that plan has been scuppered by licensing issues with the Flash
runtime. Adobe have told us they'll be removing flash installers from their
site and the cost to embed Flash into the app itself makes it a no go.

Maybe before December there will be a good HTML5 converter but I'm not holding
out much hope. Shame to see so much content disappear.

Glad to see that Nitrome have had the resources to port their games over and
some content is being saved!

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bubbab
I did not know about Nitrome, but wow I love the site design!

On a related note, Neopets has also been migrating their huge catalog of Flash
games to HTML5 over the years. I have no idea how that's going though.

------
Aardwolf
I wish Newgrounds would also find a better solution than its current Windows-
based Flash player to play its enormous Flash games collection (which
currently still works in browser, of course)

~~~
jonkoops
It should be possible to make a Flash player that works for the most part
using web technologies (e.g. WebAssembly). I remember Mozilla created Shumway
([https://github.com/mozilla/shumway](https://github.com/mozilla/shumway)) but
it looks like they have given up on it.

~~~
LEARAX
I believe that's exactly what Newgrounds is doing. See
[https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle](https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle)

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antigirl
Flash was a lot of fun to use. The possibilities were endless. Especially
because web isn’t what it is today. I used to do a lot of flash banners for
Vodafone. It was a lot of fun and made good money whilst I was doing my MSc
too.

I eventually picked up Flex because flash was all the rage and did a really
nice UI for an exhibition that was in the museum for a year. I think you’d
still need to use something like imagemaps now for what I achieved with flex
and flash together

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bdcravens
While it wasn't a game, so the bar was pretty low, a fun project (it was a
sporting goods company I think) I did was converting a ton of Flash widgets
into the HTML5 equivalent - this was probably 8 years ago, when the options
were pretty much limited to jQuery plugins. (short of rewriting in vanilla JS,
which was tougher then than now, given that older version of IE were still
somewhat in use)

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ladberg
I loved Nitrome when I was younger and I am super excited for this! I haven't
visited in years mainly because I don't have Flash.

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KingOfCoders
Astonished to see this in 2020.

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jpeter
[https://htwins.net/scale2/](https://htwins.net/scale2/)

this needs a html5 version

------
Lorin
I hope 'Flight' from Armor Games where you fly/upgrade a paper airplane gets
an HTML5 treatment.

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berbec
Someone script convert homestarrunner.com quick

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vijaybritto
The text is so hard to read! Even after zooming in. I think I am used to
modern sites so much that I completely forgot how it used to be before 10
years

~~~
asiachick
Your screen was probably 800 pixels wide or something less than it is today so
the characters were bigger.

HN is not so great in this area either

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Causality1
Is this approach different from what sites like Newgrounds did for their Flash
libraries?

~~~
Tajnymag
It is. Newgrounds rendered old flash animations to a video container. To NG
flash games, you are directed to their pre-set offline flash player.

~~~
Causality1
Ah. I can see disadvantages with that approach. Bandwidth usage for a given
video would be increased as well as losing the vectorized nature of Flash
video that allows them to be losslessly upscaled.

~~~
tomc1985
Plus interactive elements are suddenly unavailable or, depending on how the
original video was rendered, smashed together at the end or beginning or
wherever the developer put them in the timeline. Strongbad Emails are an
example... the SWFs frequently had secret links and hotspots that would take
you to Family Guy-style cutaways. In sbemail's latter years some of them were
quite involved. You could even hit tab repeatedly and flash player would
highlight them for you. I don't think any of this appears in the DVD release,
or on rendered versions on Youtube.

