At 2/23/16 04:06 PM, Bit wrote:
tl;dr: Shovelware ruins everything.
Aw no dude, thanks - but we were all pretty terrible. All the stuff we made was super shabby but everyone was really helpful and constructive and we were all really passionate about it. No one cared about the money, we cared about making stuff and having millions of people enjoy it. _That_ was the dream.
Now that I'm after an actual CS degree and about 10 more years of industry experience I can say that we were terrible professionally. I used to think I was awesome at ActionScript - lol. Now that I'm involved with several ECMAScript proposals and actually contribute to real some open source projects I'm only starting to understand what a terrible coder I was back then.
We just had a ton of passion and would hack on things tens of hours at a time - the platform was really open. There isn't anything even close in terms of how easy it is to make fun to play games.
If you look at Tom's Pico's School from 1999 as an example it was made with Flash 4, I don't know if you ever used that but it didn't have very many coding abstractions, you'd use state an GotoAndPlay (and GotoAndStop) to navigate between frames as state. You didn't have real concrete data types and such - but it's a really fun and well thought out game.
People can still enjoy it over 15 years later. The coding is something you can teach a kid in a month, the art isn't stellar but people today have to learn _so friggin much_ just to get started. Nothing even comes close to how easy and fun it was to make these games today. Things like Unity or HTML5 engines aren't even remotely close. Hopefully, HTML5 will be there at one point. Hopefully.