You can even play it right here on Newgrounds!

Uhhhh!!! Awesome!! Thank you! I’ll check it out 🙌🙌🙌

FlashDevelop will change your life if you’ve been using Animate/Flash Pro. A bit more technical way is to use Haxe, which gives you Flash games as well as mobile, native Windows/Mac/Linux, etc.

Can confirm, FlashDevelop (and its spinoff HaxeDevelop) is the next best thing after sliced bread. It takes a bit of getting used to it, compared with Flash's integrated environment, but it really forces you to think in terms of classes, and I'd say switching to Flash/HaxeDevelop made scripting in AS3/Haxe muuuch easier, especially as it forces you to ditch the frame scripting shenanigans and think more generic in terms of development.

Can you use HaxeDevelop to program in AS3, though? As in, install the same plugins and such? I imagine so as it's 99.9% FlashDevelop based, but I'm not too keen on having multiple editors on my system.

On a semi-related side note, I was looking at @matt-likes-swords' newspost and was reminded of the other things that seemed to surround the web game ecosystem (mostly centered around Flash). Anyone remember FlashGameLicense / FGL? As far as I know, they rebranded to FGL circa 2014, but still kept going strong on the HTML5/Unity web game front instead of Flash. Now they've all but closed their doors and with little fanfare from what I know.

For what it's worth, this doesn't seem to be because of Flash's retirement, but it seems like the writing had been on the wall as early as 2012 or so, since other game sites also mentioned that interest in casual online gaming had been on the decline since then...I think a pseudo-capture of the market by Facebook would have played a role in it as well, because many things back then (and even now) live by Facebook and die by Facebook. Zynga hadn't been doing too well either, as did other online game companies.

On the whole, though, it seems like a sobering way to close the books on this story - a slow protracted death of a platform, followed by the collapse of some of its stakeholders, all during (or followed by, based on your perspective) a looming recession.

FlashDevelop is an IDE. It is mainly used for editing AS3 projects but can be used with other languages as well.

Flex SDK is used to build Flash games.

AIR SDK is used to build Flash games/applications for desktop or mobile. You can use both Flex+AIR SDK as well.

Without Flex or AIR SDK you can't compile AS3 content, because the compiler is included in the SDK.

You can't "make flash games" without using Adobe products, because Flash is itself an Adobe product.

You can, however, make HTML5 games if you want to make a web game. There's multiple ways to do this, but if you want something like Flash, then Haxe is close enough.

I remember bookmarking the site in like 2012. Not surprised I guess.

hey look it's the FLA files for most of my old flash games

https://github.com/TylerGlaiel/GlaielGamesOldFlashSources

That's rather cool. I deleted mine out of the shame of AS2 noobery.

This is really cool, I'm gonna dig through some of those.

I'd like to release the source code for my old games (and maybe even my new ones for modders to play with), but I'm really worried about the occasional sound effect or bitmap that I may not have permission to use. That and my code is embarrassingly bad, especially in the AS2 stuff.

So far I've got the entire source code for Epic Battle Fantasy 3 available for $2 on my Patreon, but no one there cares, so I may just release it to the public. And like you mentioned, it's pretty hard for people to even open old AS2 .fla files unless they already know what they're doing. I've got some fans using Flash decompilers to play around with my swfs, but none of them actually own or know how to use Flash.

this is the way

give it time, i'm sure they'll figure it out sooner or later. if i can random-walk my way into programming im sure they can too.

Yeah I only put up FLAs where i got permission from artists I worked with, which is why a few games are missing (some people have disappeared, some weren't comfortable with releasing it, some have just not responded yet, etc)

I'm not worried about people seeing how bad my AS2 code was. that's kind of the point of this. AS2 enabled you to do some stupid ass shit when coding games and i think it's important to remember that stuff

Maybe just me, but I learned a good bit from how you handle battles. In terms of like how to finish a game and not spend forever doing theoretical work. I think you did boss phases in static vars, which is stupid easy but also something stupid me would spend a month on trying to make elegant.

That's cool to hear.

EBF3 is roughly where I started getting serious about coding. I was learning Java at Uni, so I understood OOP stuff a lot better. EBF4 and 5 were re-written, but are still largely based on EBF3's coding style. The main battle engines are messy, but I think the Foe, Item, Skill and Equip code is always fairly understandable and fun to look at.

I guess I just need to double-check the libraries for stuff like "mario_coin_sound.wav" and then I might as well release them.

Well, it'll still work for Adobe AIR, although I think you'd be better off learning Haxe...it's almost the same as AS3 so it wouldn't be a big change.

Are we going to go from potentially the complete death of flash... to full flash emulation making everything on NG viewable on a phone?

This is just me realising that ruffle isn't a manual conversion and it actually applies to any flash submission on the site.

Killing flash just makes it stronger!!!

That's the goal! A lot of games won't play well on mobile though because they require keyboard input - Ruffle may eventually attempt a key overlay that could be used on mobile and each game could have control mapping for that. Something like that is a ways out though.

Blackberry has been preparing for this with their upcoming 5G phone.

Remember the days of the Droid? That was some sleek design

i refuse to let this thread die

its currently on life support

must've been covid

its cause we're all old now ;(

will flash be classified as a covid death

:thonk:

I truly underestimated how much time living takes. Even just 5 years ago in college, I figured 8 hrs sleep, 8 hrs job, 8 hrs whatever I want.

Oh yeah, I had my first game idea in forever today. I found a haxe library/VM for bullet hell patterns (Firedancer), and I remembered the typing game idea I had in 2013 (fuck). Maybe the letters of a word follow some kind of pattern and you type the word, while also changing lanes to dodge whatever is coming at you by typing left/right. Or it's an actual BH with every bullet being a letter, and you type to dodge or get rid of them? Idk something.

i think ill share more of my in progress stuff in this thread starting next year. It's not neccessarily game dev but its built in flash(mx) so it counts and i respect the people in this thred so much.

I got a warning for downloading a SWF from the project system. I don't remember that ever happening before, but I'm not surprised.

How was it tracked, and by whom? I've downloaded SWFs from the project system on unpublished projects just recently with no notices to date. Is it related to copyright?