
Flashpoint: a webgame preservation project - aresant
https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
======
stared
I saw somewhere "As a frontend developer, I cannot be happier that the Flash
is going to die. As a person raised on Newgrounds, there are tears of
nostalgia."

Speaking of Flash, I miss the most this game... or rather, meme-focused
experience (IMHO it is a true masterpiece): "Reimagine :The Game:" by Nicky
Case:
([https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/569281](https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/569281),
video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG1gh5l1YLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG1gh5l1YLM)).

Two other things I really liked were ported by their developer: GemCraft
(turret defense) and Velocity Raptor (a special relativity game,
[https://testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html](https://testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html)).

And you, what do like the most to see back?

~~~
mr-ron
Well I never played these games before, what I miss the most is exactly that.
A plethora of games that had no monetary reason to make them. Simply because
it was possible for a solo non-skilled person to put a inspired idea in Flash
in a relatively quick amount of time. I don't think we have any equivalent in
the web today

~~~
dwild
> A plethora of games that had no monetary reason to make them.

I don't know for Newgrounds but actually many website paid quite a bit of
money to sponsor games. Gemcraft for example was sponsored by Armor Games and
I believe they were in the 10k ranges. The ECPM was also not bad, I believe
some were able to reach 10$ because of video ads.

MochiAds, which was one of the most used ads provider also had a distribution
platform which was quite useful.

Once I made a game during a boring math class, I was able to get 500k views
out of it (sadly mostly from China which had an ecpm of like 0.01$, it wasn't
a market that MochiMedia was developing much for ads, they tried later on but
Flash killed them before they were able to increase it enough). I made a bit
over 100$ over that game made in an few hours. I was able to reproduce the
experiment a second time, with similar result, less views, 300k I think, but
much more in the US, a bit under 100$ that time.

I was hoping that Unity would bring that back, because they came during the
crash of Flash, but while they still push toward faster development, they were
going toward a different market.

~~~
zyx321
IIRC, Tom Fulp paid hosting out of his own pocket for a long time, but
eventually he started turning a profit and paying out cash prizes for well-
received flashes. Also, including your own monetization was always allowed.
Ads on the loading screen were the most popular, but some later games even
included micro transactions.

------
dpfu
For Linux and Mac, there some experimental builds available as well [0, 1].
And they are looking for Mac and Linux testers (and developers).

[0]
[https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Mac_Support](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Mac_Support)

[1]
[https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Linux_Support](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Linux_Support)

------
sagark1992
I downloaded it last month. There are a lot of addictive puzzle games that
have the potential of being huge on mobile if someone remakes it for
android/ios.

~~~
dizzy3gg
I'm keen to learn game development. I have experience with web & react native
but would be willing to go canvas/unity if required. Any ones that stand out
that you think would be a good starter game project?

~~~
StavrosK
The replies talk about engines, but you asked about which Flash game would be
good to convert, right? Or did I misunderstand?

~~~
dizzy3gg
Yup, I was hoping for some game titles that would be easy to introduce. I’d
pick the stack/engine based on the game. Grateful for the other advice still.

------
Animats
Next, Flash emulation running under WebAsm?

~~~
the_duke
I don't think Adobe ever open-sourced the Flash codebase, right?

The attempts at building something compatible like shumway have all been
rather unsuccessful.

Even if the code was available, porting it to WASM would probably be a pretty
big task.

It would be great to retain access to the huge amount of flash content out
there though.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I wish Adobe would start making publications though, they know Flash has been
end-of-life for ages yet there's a lot of earlier internet media still in that
format.

~~~
pjmlp
Flash is now Animate.

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azhenley
I made 8 flash games back around 2009 that were profitable. Sadly, they’re
completely broken now because all of the web services they depend on are gone.
Although the main game play is uneffected, it still attempts to load
leaderboards and ads, which make them look horrible.

:(

~~~
jermaustin1
What is considered profitable? How long did the games take to make, how much
did they cost to make, how much did they make?

Are free-to-play browser games still possible in this day and age? Or has it
all moved to mobile?

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Pxtl
The trajectory of Flash has been one of the great disappointments of the 21st
century. Initially it democratized animation and gaming for a whole
generation... Then Adobe bought it and moved it higher and higher up the shelf
out of reach of young artists through cost and anti-piracy measures. At the
same time, its nimble little plug-in became worse and worse, becoming
synonymous with security problems and endless patching... And ultimately they
failed to port it to mobile and that was its dead end.

For indie game development, unity is a worthy successor Flash... But we never
really saw anything win out for animation.

Who is the new Homestar Runner?

~~~
chrisseaton
> And ultimately they failed to port it to mobile and that was its dead end.

I don't think they _failed_ to port it - I think they were not invited to do
so by the people building the mobile platforms.

~~~
janci
> I don't think they failed to port it - I think they were not invited to do
> so by the people building the mobile platforms.

I don't think they were not invited to do so - I think they were not paid for
the work or licenses

~~~
chrisseaton
I'm not really sure what difference you're trying to highlight there.

The point is that the people building the platforms didn't want Flash, so they
didn't invite Adobe/Macromedia or whoever it was at the time to port them
across, and yes since they didn't invite them to do the work they obviously
also weren't going to to pay for it.

Saying they weren't paid for it makes it sound like they were asked to do it
but not paid or something like that. I think the reality is it was never
wanted.

~~~
benologist
Didn't invite is a silly way of putting it. Jobs went to war with Flash, and
at the time Adobe was making progress integrating iOS as publishing targets,
and today it would have been a moot point as iOS hardware is surely powerful
enough. Creative Cloud is heading to the iPad Pro and it is a real shame that
Flash isn't part of that.

~~~
chrisseaton
> Jobs went to war with Flash

He just ignored it. It was redundant on the iPhone, with native apps and the
rise of web applications.

Completely ignoring something seems like the opposite of 'going to war' with
it.

~~~
smacktoward
He took the unusual step of publishing a letter, “Thoughts On Flash”
([https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-
flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)), published under
his own name, which said that “Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or
consume any kind of web content.”

That’s going to war.

~~~
chrisseaton
These seem like dispassionate technical observations to me? His argument is
that it’s obsolete.

It’s ‘we’re ok without that thanks’ not ‘war’.

~~~
benologist
It wasn't obsolete in the slightest when Jobs published that letter. It was a
piece of software worth billions, powering games like Farmville worth
billions, powering video like YouTube, advertising, and it had remained a
popular creative platform for two decades.

There is more information about it here - in addition to Jobs going after
Flash so publicly they added an app store rule specifying which languages
developers could use to publish apps, and excluded Flash, after Adobe had made
substantial progress publishing native iOS apps from Flash.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_and_Adobe_Flash_controve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_and_Adobe_Flash_controversy)

------
codeulike
I wonder about iOS game preservation, I guess thats going to be a lot harder
than old 8-bit games or PC games etc.

~~~
egypturnash
It’s already happening, there’s a ton of games that aren’t on the App Store
any more because their creators stopped paying a hundred bucks a year. A lot
of them won’t work on newer versions of iOS even if you still have a copy.

~~~
smacktoward
Or they were written as 32-bit apps, which became _verboten_ on iOS not long
ago. I had a bunch of games I had paid for and enjoyed for a long time vanish
suddenly because their creators didn't deem it worthwhile to go back and
recompile them as 64-bit.

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skuthus
Dagobah.biz was an amazing collection of flash based games, videos, and tools.
Highly recommend archiving from there

------
ogre_codes
I don't care about flash games, but I really hope the "Badgers Badgers
Badgers" and the "I'm a Cow" animations are preserved for posterity. (I'm sure
they are on YouTube but it's just not the same)

~~~
klondike_klive
I got my start in animation releasing stuff at the same time as Mr Weebl, Joel
Veitch and others. In fact my first ever animation was in a Joel Veitch
cartoon on his website. I remember releasing stuff onto Newgrounds and seeing
the view counter tick up. It was super exciting.

------
andrepd
Ah, Backlot. Many hours spend faffing around in it.

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samstave
So they ONLY provide a ~275GB torrent zip file???

Lame.

Why not allow the DL of only certain games?

I don't need 38,000 flash games... nor does my laptop have 500++ GB free to
fiddle with this.

Poor delivery decision IMO.

~~~
miedpo
Check the Downloads Page and download the Infinity version, which allows you
to download games as you play them rather than the whole lot at once.

~~~
samstave
Thanks - regardless though - really really poor explanation on whats going on
here, on their part.

Of course I know how torrents work, but to have a single zip is just stupid
practice.

~~~
miedpo
No worries. Yeah that was the first thing I looked for when I first looked at
too.

In any case... if you did download it... I'll recommend two of my favorites.
If you like tower defense style games, try out Ghost Hacker. If you like
strategy a bit better, try out Pixel Legions. Both are really fun.

~~~
samstave
hehe tower defense was the reason i wanted this!

Can you dropbox just those recommendations to me?

~~~
miedpo
I can't unfortunately because of sitelocks... part of what Flashpoint does is
in Man In The Middles the Flash Player so it thinks it's on a certain website,
which allows the games to be played offline. You can play these games on
Kongregate and Newgrounds if you have a flash enabled browser though. Sorry
about that :/

In terms of tower defense, here's some recommendations:

Ghost Hacker (the original one, which is better than the 2nd one)

Defender's Quest (trial version, complete game on steam)

Kingdom Rush (also available on your phone)

Cursed Treasure

Demons v Fairyland (feels very much like Kimgdom Rush)

Onslaught2

Dungeon Defender

