Mochi Media closing was huge. I went from getting a steady trickle of money for games I wrote to nothing.
As far as I can see there is no Mochi for HTML5 games. Every portal is its own closed environment.
Just remember that the average age of a Roblox player is like 8, so in-depth RPGs or complex sim games probably won't get a lot of traction.
It's incredible how much money they make through tactics that make many of their games not really enjoyable unless you spend a lot of money in them.
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/12/18/roblox-engin...
Haxe is somewhat a flash clone. https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/
You can have an engine like Love or pygame where the engine is literally just a shared object or dll and you need to basically supply your own tools for level design, programming, etc.
Engine-IDEs are one-stop-shops with nearly everything you could need built in (level editor, code editor, particle effect sandbox, etc.).
Seems like people crap on it not because of the tool itself but because Adobe dropped the ball and let it become a crashy, resource-hogging mess, aligning powerful people (like Steve Jobs) against it.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but the golden age of Flash content was certainly over before HTML5 hit in a big way.
Adobe had a site building tool that was more productive than ASP, but only barely so, and created sites that would break on about every computer. The few times they were working, they would have completely non-standard UI elements, including buttons and links, and break nearly all interaction modes.
I feel like the issues most people have with Flash are one of two things. It isn't a great choice for rich interfaces (especially things that aren't games) when considering accessibility and different screen sizes. It also presents security vulnerabilities when it was intended to be sandboxed.
By moving it from web browsers to standalone applications, you lose any expectation of sandboxing. When only using it for games, it ceases to have the same accessibility constraints.
Here is one that would be a tad awkward:
- The concept goes appreciably (if not crazily) viral, people start distributing "SWF-lectron" containers, and much fun is had by all.
- Flash is officially deprecated (incidentally 20 days from now, the 11th of January 2020). It dies; the bitrot process is exponentially accelerated because of the huge installed base yet abrupt and utter lack of updates. Many, many, MANY vulnerabilities are found in the platform. How much impact do they have? Theoretically little to none. But you never know.
- The Electron containers used in this idea probably never get updated. It proves surprisingly easy to just wait for Chrome 0days to float to the top of the pond, scoop them up, and rework them.
Practically speaking I know the above will never really eventuate. But it's what I envisage; more generally, that anything that leverages Flash will fall victim to a very mature ecosystem of hackers (the cracker kind) who've been studying the platform for years, and have a once-in-a-lifetime moment to attack while the platform remains installed.
Flash will have a half-life of years, but it's going to become a VERY big target, I think.
I think.
Maybe I'm wrong/being overdramatic/freaking out/am wearing too many security hats at once/none of the above?
It’s not the browser, so it’d be easier for hacker to just distribute their malware directly than go to the trouble of making malware that hacks an unrelated game, then does something else.
That said, Pico-8 is (purposefully) very limited, and if you want to do something a bit more advanced than C64-era gaming, the limitations show. Flash is limited too, but not as much.
It's obscenely fun to play with, definitely agree with you there.
Flash was a huge boon for indie games.
A friend of mine recommended just Scirra Construct if I want something similar to Flash that exports to HTML5.
It will always be a cherished toolset to me.
Except nothing replace it in a one-stop do it all like Flash was able to do. You open it, you had a timeline that could contains both graphics and code, you could easily reference them on the IDE directly, and then when exported, it was a single binary file that could be shared everywhere and could easily be made quite secure. That meant that there was platforms like Mochimedia that allowed you to import a SWF, that added the ads and it was shared on multiple thousands website for people to play on.
Nowadays you have to use a bunch of different tools, which sure is more flexible in a way but it's a barrier big enough to remove any desire to do a quick prototype for fun. There's software like Unity which is amazing (and a proof that a one-stop software is highly preferred by people), but it's made for bitmap or 3D graphics, which both are made over an other platform and are more complex to handle than vectors that just works great in any context.
That's while considering that everything can be done, which isn't really true because even in term of performance, it took a decade for JS to reach a performance similar to what Flash was able to do at the time. The vector editor was so good that I knew many people that preferred it over Illustrator. I was able to do some nice graphics easily on it, I tried to do the same with Illustrator nowadays and I just can't.
> As a former flash developer (hobbyist level) I do not miss Flash at all.
Lucky you.
It's not really about the language or about the Flash player itself. There was something special about the direct integration of the code and the visual design/animation tool with Flash. Nothing else really comes close these days. Nothing else allows such rapid development.
With Flash, I felt like a nice "one-stop-shop" in a lot of ways; you could draw your graphics, animate them, and code them, and you could get a simple game made in an hour or two.
I haven't tried Unity or really any other dedicated game engine, so maybe you get that feeling with those, but I will always be nostalgic for Flash; it really helped make programming "fun" for me.