We absolutely didn’t celebrate its downfall. Flash had issues, but the culture of flash games was awesome.
That said, indie games are way better these days
That said, indie games are way better these days
They all seem to be the same boring stardew valley/dead cells/anyotherauccessfullindiegame clones with pretty pixelart and too much time e commitment needed
Yeah there’s a lot of copycats, though even within that there’s some great stuff. My wife has been loving fields of mistria. But also I’m currently playing slay the spire 2 and loving it. You’ve got games like cult of the lamb, Rogue Legacy (1&2), every supergiant game, Cassette Beasts, and less well known ones like Song of the Deep. Flash games were their own thing and it was awesome, but with limited time for games these days I’d rather be playing modern indie games. But I understand why some people would feel the opposite
the time commitement bit is real.
:: looks around nervously as someone who loves those specific games::
Flash was trash that made the web almost unusable for a time. I was glad it died. Shit never properly worked anyway.
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.
If Anon misses flash, Anon should look into Flashpoint and Ruffle.
However, consider: if Flash was still popular, by this point Adobe would have enshittified it to hell and back to milk its customers. It would no longer be the thing you miss.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Gen X misses Flash, too. My Geocities page featured a beat maker with samples you could trigger to make cool drum and bass with.
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.
nostalgia has made these crap games great. they never were good in the first place. you had a good laugh as a 12 year old at tech class, but thats it.
Plenty of mobile games are clones of free Flash games with added monetization.
For example Angry Birds is just Crush the Castle.
Noe, I’m not going to argue that these mobile games are good, but they’re shitty because of their monetization schemes. As free flash games that were short enough to not overstay their welcome they were fine.
Add to that there being a few flash games that were genuine attempts at art. Which I think are valuable if for no other reason than to see the history of indie games.
There were a couple of gems though.
I remember going to the library to play specific games over and over. We tried fresh ones every day, but kept going back to games like those motorbike racing sidescrollers.
QWOP was hilarious though.
For five minutes, maybe.
AdventureQuest though…
I must’ve sunk hundreds of hours at the library playing that
Also honorable mention to danball powder game
Ah, but raft wars
Flashpoint Archive is attempting to archive all the flash games and animations.
The amateur game dev community is thriving like never before. Itch.io has become Newgrounds on steroids, full of incredibly creative, fun and free games.
People like to complain about what has been lost on the modern internet, without spending any time actually looking and trying out the new niches.
How are you finding decent free games on itch? Every time I go it’s a flood of visual novels, shit “horror” games, or whatever the latest streamer bait is but poorly copied 1000 times. And the filtering tools are just limited enough that I can’t seem to get a good “feed” going.
Newgrounds was far from a neverending fountain of pure quality, but I feel like finding quality stuff on it is an order of magnitude harder than it used to be in the days of flash. Used to be curated lists and sites with new quality stuff like every week.
To be fair, flash was garbage proprietary tech fully under control of fucking Adobe. All the shit people hate about JavaScript now, the spying, the adtech, was done in flash first.
All the shit people hate about JavaScript now, the spying, the adtech, was done in flash first.
And the shitty slow overly complicated ‘web app’ pages that could’ve presented the same content in a hundred lines of HTML. That was done in Flash before it was done in JavaScript.
Iirc, wasn’t flash deprecated because of unpatchable bugs that created a gaping hole in your browser security?
Risky click of the day…
Ironically I believe flash mostly died for that as a founding moment on why apple would not support it on iPhones. Adobe only finally killed it after safari decided it wouldn’t support it
maybe that too, but mainly it was the move from desktops to smartphones and tablets, which Flash was (at minimum) not very suited for if it was supported at all
This may be the only good thing caused by the existence of iOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
There’s plenty of criticisms to be made against Apple, iOS, etc, but “the only good thing” is a super generic and reductive statement. Proper sandboxing, app review by humans for people just hitting “install” the A chips leading to the M chips which are forcing competition, are all good things, and there’s more. Apple is overpriced, molds the market, fights against being a monopoly, takes advantage of international supply chains and people, that’s where they deserve the most criticism rather than their engineering specifically which has caused a bunch of really good tech things, not perfect, and not binary
Well, it used to be a brilliant innovation by Macromedia.
Then like all things bought by Adobe… it became complete shit.
Point: early_to_risa.
Who the fuck celebrated? I remembered many pissed off millennials and Gen x
The people mistakenly claiming html5 was going to be the next Flash, I guess
It… Is? Check out itch.io and there’s still.shitloads of browser games around.
Well ok, I guess it eventually got there, but at the time Flash was getting shut down there wasn’t any equivalent self contained game engine IDE that compared, it was a big setback.
All those flash games got preserved and you can still play them:
Also some of them are high quality porn games. This is both a warning and an advertisement depending on ones temperament.
I did, flash was a pile of garbage especially on anything not windows
Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
I’m not a fan of Steve Jobs but here he was just laying down facts
Once Adobe got their grubby hands on it, everything went down hill but Macromedia at least did security updates.
It wasn’t about the technology, it was the zeitgeist of that era. If HTML 5 was available at the time, people would code in that
