Yeah :(

It's hard to find fun games that can be played in the browser nowadays. They definitely do exist, but there's no where near the variety that we used to have when Flash was still a thing.

I loved the days that Kongregate.com was thriving. Today, Armor Games is still up and running. It has quite some gems worth exploring: https://armorgames.com/games/rating#games

Armor Games has been porting classics to Steam. We've got Scriptwelder games and Crush the Castle.

Unfortunately, it's hard to find fun games on mobile as well. Mobiles games are an utter disgrace nowadays. Can you even call them games? They're an optimised engagement loop with some gameplay in between the "buy platinum coins" and "spin to win" popups.

I'm certainly not an expert but I think you're comparing apples and oranges a little.

Js and canvas is a code execution environment, but Flash had a polished authoring environment which I believe made it easier for less-technical people to get stuff happening.

Newgrounds is still alive and kicking. They’ve even ported all their Flash games to be playable on modern devices to boot!

That said, I’m not going to pretend like I go there frequently either. I just don’t have time to blow on popcorn experiences anymore.

My go-to for these types of games is itch.io. https://itch.io/games/html5

My experience with that is it usually never works, and for whatever reason the games never seem compelling. Not sure why, flash games never had that problem. They were always full games with rich graphics and often a story.

I literally tried to pull up itch while tablet shopping yesterday - the site never rendered on the tablets and the one game I tried about crashed the whole tablet. Audio/video worked fine. I'm sure if I sat down at a high powered beefy windows desktop maybe they'd work - I remember flash working great on 1GHz celeron processors with maybe 1 or 2 GB of memory and windows 95. Html games are still a bunch of nonsense, on average.

I just pulled up "Farmers Stealing Tanks" on my BlackBerry KeyOne and played for a minute. It was playable (though not perfect), and that's on a 5 year old phone with a chipset that emphasized battery life over performance.

Some games can be iffy, but I haven't really had any major problems with the site. My computer is from 2015, so not exactly high-end.

You could also install the desktop client, then you can play all the games easily (including the non-web-based ones).

I'm partial to this one: https://leef6010.itch.io/projectkat

Interestingly, it appears a great many of those are unity games and won't run on phones.

At this point in time. In what way was Flash superior to JavaScript and canvas?

There was even SWF player implementations in JavaScript at this point in time.

Somehow, I don't think the death of Flash had much to do with it. Rather, the app ecosystem replaced a space that, that for a limited time, was occupied by Flash based web stuff.

Former Flash game developer here. A big part of it was artists and coders could use the same tool. An artist could create some flash animations and then I as a coder would go in and hook up all the code to make it functional without having to spend any extra effort to make the graphics or animation work (in other platforms you'd have to pack sprite sheets, color encoding, sometimes fight memory (at least I did on iPhone 4 back in the day), and then you'd have to set up all the animations manually and get each one working.

With Flash I was just sent an FLA, browsed through all the animations, went "awesome", and started setting up hitboxes and dropping them into the game.

Like I've wanted to port some of my Flash games to HTML5, but the intense frame by frame animation would be a bear to export and hook up in other formats.

And non-frame-by-frame animation was easy enough that I could help fill in the gaps when needed, no big deal. I even made a few simple animations just for the hell of it back then since it was so easy to work with.

I eventually migrated to console dev with XNA, then mobile dev with iOS, then some 3D development with Unity, and I've dabbled with Monogame, Phaser, Java, Pico-8, PlayDate, Unreal Engine, and currently working on a game in Unity again, since it's pretty much your only choice right now besides Unreal if you want good VR support. But yeah, nothing I've worked with has felt quite as nice as Flash as far as synergy between art and code, especially 2D art.

Examples:

I teamed up with an artist to make a 7 character head to head fighting game: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047

I teamed up with another artist to make a richly animated (espcially the boss) short platformer.: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/116067

Did a lot of Flash back in the day myself. The workflow was nice. Simpler times but surely you could roll your own framework today that did all these things in a similar fashion? There's nothing about the web today preventing this...

Is there authoring/creation tooling anywhere near what Flash had?

I made Flash stuff when I was a lot younger and it was insanely straight forward thanks to the tooling. I haven’t tried to animate anything since… 2007 perhaps? Does JS or canvas have a similar experience to author content?

Depends on what you need. For simple stuff Wrick Editor[0] might be good enough.

[0] https://www.wickeditor.com/

Tumult Hype: a Mac application that uses a graphical timeline UI to manipulate CSS and JSS for animation, and includes a physics engine to simulate collisions, bounces and things needed for game design. Exports to HTML, GIF and MP4.

https://tumult.com/hype/

Authoring tools.

There's nothing as good and as easy as Flash was to create 2D games. It was wysiwyg. Even kids could do it.

If there was a demand, game developers would find a way. It’s just that kids are playing games on phones these days.

I think it was mostly mobile games. Why make games for small amounts of money when you can make actual money on the app store. The decline was happening even before Flash was removed from chrome.

Google decided to, and successfully, killed a whole software system. In hindsight, what was the reason, and was it justified?

Let's be honest here: what killed Flash was years of neglect by Adobe. Google removing it from Chrome was a downstream effect, not a cause.

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember how absolutely fucking garbage Flash was, and the source of many a web-based malware that haunted many a Windows user. I don't really blame Apple's decision not to support it. There's no way Jobs would've allowed such a disease prone plugin infesting his new platform.

Are you sure it's any better? Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful. Flash had bad bits to be sure but it could be snappy. I had hope we could do better but a lot of sites seem as bad or worse on arguably better hardware.

I'm not sure the tech stack was ever to blame...people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash.

> Last time I've used a JS heavy site the UX was just utterly awful.

That's an issue with the web site, not the underlying technology.

> […] people would have eventually fixed the bad parts of flash.

The Flash plugin was a closed-source component. (Various attempts were made at open-source substitutes, but none ever reached a fully usable state.) The only people who could have "fixed the bad parts of Flash" were Adobe employees, and they didn't.

Isn't there a bit of an anachronism in your post? I thought the end of flash support happened before his death.

It was Apple that decided Flash's fate, ever since Steve Jobs refused to support it on the most important end-user platform, like, ever.

Which is funny, because for years Flash only ever ran well on Mac OS 9 in Internet Explorer 5. Any other browser/OS combo and you were looking at dropped frames, and/or audio that couldn't keep in sync with the video. It really was a tool for designers, and accordingly Mac OS was the platform that got the most love.

It’s funny because after his first comments about it’s performance being the reason Adobe magically fixed it in about 6 weeks and we finally had close performance parity with windows after years of Adobe saying it’s not possible.

Anything that damages Adobe’s bottom line is completely justified.

The amount of tech they’ve squandered or mismanaged or just plain destroyed is disgusting.

And over the last 10 years of being a monopoly they’ve just let their software rot and now it’s so janky to use, photoshop even freezes for 4 seconds when switching between selection tools these days.