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.
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
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
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
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.
To be fair, flash filled a gaping hole in html and css standards for a hot minute. Heck for the longest time flash was the best way to serve a video player because of those limitations. It also was instrumental in enabling animated videos on the Internet in a time when video on the web was too bandwidth intensive to be viable. We're talking the days of Internet connections measured in individual megabit per second being "fast" and dialup not being uncommon
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.
One of them started with a guy in a bathroom shaving and playing techno music before going to find a date.
They had funny as heck endings like the girl spinning on the ceiling fan at the end (During sex). Just crazy stuff.
Anyone remember what they were called? I swear I had them archived but I can’t find them anywhere. I think there were 20-30 of them from the same creator.
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.
I mean adobe kept releasing security updates for years too. The problem was at its core it wasn't designed for security so the entire architecture couldn't very well be secured without breaking all compatibility
If you browse on itch.io by popularity and go down the list until you find one you've never heard of (or never played, if you want easier standards) that's where the "newgrounds culture" is nowadays. Plenty of stuff that works in browser for free.
They all seem to be the same boring stardew valley/dead cells/anyotherauccessfullindiegame clones with pretty pixelart and too much time e commitment needed
As if flash games weren't 75% dressup games, tower defense, and shit platformers. We still got plenty of that slop don't worry, we just have other kinds of slop to go with it.
The game you are talking about is Age of War and is arguably one of the most well known and beloved flash games ever. It might just not have clicked with you but I have very fond memories of it and find it to be more enjoyable than most recent releases as you could just launch a game, play a bit and be done with it, no toxic mechanics, no forced wait, no super extensive (and kinda boring) content.
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
There was a lot of lazy copies with flash games too. And that's not unique for indie games or even video games. Every form of media has people copying what's already successful
Some of the best games are copies of earlier games that flopped, because they were poorly implemented or lacked good marketing or were just ahead of their time.
They definitely skew to the pixel games and the rogue-likes, due to the limitations of a cell phone interface. But Idk if I'd call stardew valley boring.
I had a lot of fun with Slay the Spire and Balatro. There's a bunch of indie board games that are on mobile as well, Root being one of my favorites. And then there's all the digital CCGs (basically the only way I play MtG anymore is on mobile).
I would say the bigger problem with finding good indie games is the nightmarish volume of bad games (both indie and otherwise) that crowd out everything in the marketplace. I learn about the ones I like through word of mouth. Anything I just randomly install and fool around with, I inevitably hate.
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.
We celebrated the downfall of Flash because every other week, some horrible vulnerability was found. And because of the ease of distribution in games, it was super easy to jack people's computers.
What killed the prevalence of all these wonderful free games was developers' ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
Plus those of us on Linux desktops didn't love the workarounds we had to do with gnash or whatever. The rise of the mobile device cemented the need to have open web standards not tied to proprietary formats and proprietary software.
was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
And Valve/Apple/Google getting a 30% kickback.
They are absolutely fine with all the garbage because it buys them many, many megayachts. Newgrounds, Kongregate, Addictivegames and all those flash websites did not get megayachts.
was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
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.
I engage in the community - just like the good old newgrounds days. There was also tons of unplayable, eyecatchy stuff back then, we just dont remember it as much.
The most effektive way is to participate in game jams, get to know people and find out who makes the quality stuff. Pretty much exactly like finding good new podcasts or youtubers. It takes some effort but it is totally worth it.
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.
Thry would probably jack up the license fee for devs, force everyone to use a shitty app store and when enough users are on the app store, start charging to use the app store.
Nothing except for the use of Flash has changed... There are still tons of free to play games without MTX or other greedy bullshit made by passionate people, and just like back in the day, 90% of them are straight doodoo.
FFS, Newgrounds is still around and gets new stuff posted daily. Anon should leave 4chan and check out the rest of the internet.
The issue is anon's peers on 4chan called itch dot io "full of indieslop", now anon cannot get themself to check what it has, because the games don't feature slurs and racial stereotypes, for "comedic" purposes.
It never died though?
The Devs just pivoted to different platforms. Itch, Newgrounds, and even the major app stores have endless content from indie devs.
Flash games were just never mainstream enough. And let's not forget that the most popular flash games were those shitty FB games, like FarmVille and Candy Crush, or that the shitty mobile games all started off as clones/ports of already popular flash games, like Angry Birds/Crush the Castle.
To those asking "who celebrated"...Linux was not always well supported by Flash. The promise of HTML5, with first class Linux support, was very appealing.
I only celebrated the downfall of flash because it was an insecure piece of shit software. It just happened to have people make a ton of fun and interesting content on it.
Yeah, this post is celebrating Flash like it enabled creativity when jt was just the popular framework. That era didn't die because Flash went away. Companies killed that era and propped up parts of its body to trick people.
While yes it is, but I was responding specifically to the 'celebrating its downfall' part, which we should have because flash was insecure as fuck.
As I noted, there were a ton of fun and interesting items people made for it, and you can even still find them out on the net to relive those days and even see new shit on places like newgrounds. But let's not pretend that flash itself didn't need to die well before it did.
Everyone who had a laptop getting more than 20 mins life out of the battery, because flash would turn the CPU and fan up to 100. Of course there where also a lot of ads using flash on each website...
I didn't celebrate per se, but Flash was incredibly insecure and HTML5 was good enough for most of these simple games and it came out in... 2008, so 13 years before Flash went EOL.
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.
Only the ones that had enough staying power to be turned into microtransaction shit on new engines. Remember how many horrendously grotesque and edgy games there were for no point other than to be horrendously grotesque and edgy? Sure we have some of those now but scrolling Steam or Itch it isn't a constant stream of edgelord suicide simulators or whatnot
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.
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?)
My general approach is to find any gamejam (if you just browse the free games lists many will happen to be from gamejams and link to whatever gamejam they're from) and look through the games that resulted from it. Gamejam games tend to be high quality short experiences
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.
I don't know anyone who celebrated except maybe the shitstains at adobe who planted the timebomb in Flash Player. Though that was pretty short lived because people found a way around it, either out or necessity (in china) or because they wanted to keep using the Flash projector to play games on Desktop.
For anyone not aware of the workarounds it was likely pretty shitty for people who needed or want to use software that depends on Flash Player.
Of course now we have ruffle.rs but it still isn't perfect, and there is still software that relies on unimplemented functions. Hopefully those get resolved soon.
Funny that Club Penguin made it into the picture. It's one of the earliest games I can remember that pushed subscriptions and micro transactions and was aimed heavily at young children.
Also, Adventure Quest had a subscription (not necessarily micro transactions) and the image for Bloons TD is, as far as I understand, from modern Bloons with micro transactions.
Celebrated? That's not how I remember it at all. From what I recall, everyone pretty much immediately understood what was about to be lost and mourned it when it was gone. There was a huge effort to archive all the flash content people could find, so many people obviously felt flash content was worth preserving. I've got a flash emulator that natively has pretty much every flash game and animation I remember from when I was a kid. I might have to boot it up for a bit tonight for old time's sake.
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.
yeah it was "all the rage" in the early 00's up to like the early 10's. Pain in the ass to build, even worse to maintain and update. but EVERYONE wanted a cool interactive flash site. It's just trends with companies. I remember after flash it was all paralax. everyone wanted paralax. thankfully that was a lot easier to build since it was just HTML5. but yeah web dev trends are annoying because you're constantly having to learn new stacks that you know will become irrelevant in like 3 years or less once some middle manager discovers something "cool".
I'm all about using Astro + Tailwind because it reminds me of building Geocities sites and I like that.
I did, it was a horrible medium littered with security issues and most of them were hot garbage in the first place.
The best fun was being asked to modify the menu on a website only to find the "webmaster" who built the site used Flash for that, and having to figure out how to reverse engineer it.
It was way past time for it to die when it was finally forced off the Internet... One of the few things I thank Apple for doing
https://ruffle.rs/ webasm OSS impl of flash. But yeah the world has changed in a less fun way. At least many of those flash game devs became game devs for pay
To be fair, Macromedia had peak Flash and Dreamweaver for "Website dreams can come true!" era. When Adobe acquired them, they started ruining it and leveraging legacy. Yes, the tech improved as would be expected over time, but the passion was gone. Adobe killed Flash but had already taken its soul years earlier.
People don't realise many of their favourite Flash games were from 2005 or earlier—the larger parts of the golden era. They were Macromedia games then.
Yeah. I remember as a teen, my father said I should look at learning Shockwave as a potential career pathway after school. It was taking the web by storm and many people were convinced that Macromedia's visions was the future of the web.
I still kind of remember Macromedia Lingo. I had taught myself HTML—which was an extremely easy thing to learn for a child back in that day—and I started learning Director, JS, and Shockwave.
By the time I was older and out of school, Adobe had aquired Macromedia. But in a few short years during that time, websites had gone from basic HTML, images, frames, etc. to entirely animated opening scenes vectoring together beautifully over the top interfaces. UX was out the window because everyone's brain was happy to explode at how cool an interface functioned...once it finally loaded lol. We used to visit websites to show friends how cool they were, still amazed at a cool "loading site" Shockwave animation, happily sitting there waiting, because we knew soon sprites would follow the cursor around lol
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.
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.
I honestly miss those flash games. Like I'd spend hours upon hours scrolling through websites like bored.com playing all kinds of games. I could play any game in any genre and have a great time.
I miss those times. Maybe I miss them because they remind me of my youth but they were amazing either way.
There's still games, and the old ones aren't dead because the people in middle and high school are still playing them at school, just using flash emulators or html5 versions. People play run 3,slope, Henry stickmin, old version of 1v1 lol without micro transactions, etc.
I was working as a flash developer when they killed it. I was definitely not on board haha. I had to pivot my whole career but I learned such a valuable lesson.
Flash was the tool that really made programming click for me. It was easy to pick up but hard to master and I spent so much time learning how to write all kinds of code patterns
Awe man, I couldn't afford a console or PC until I was an adult, so these are the video games I'm nostalgic for. Plus the local 2-player games where you share a keyboard! Boxhead, Fireboy & Watergirl, etc
Does anyone know the name of the game that features that particular 4 coloured ball under "Anonymous" in the image? I remember that ball very well, but I can't find the game.
Nothing has really changed on this front. Nothing is stopping you from making and playing flash games, and flash itself is just as vulnerable now as when it was still supported. The only thing that's really different is that dropping support seemed like a good excuse to massively shift culture away from it all.
Even more annoying is when some of those games were garbage but they ended up being turned into phone microtransaction hell or overpriced Steam games anyway.
Absolutely, anyone who thinks it was a golden age didn’t have to live through the broader flash based website hell. Flash games and videos were just the silver lining on otherwise noxious Adobe shit scented cloud
158 Comments
bruhbeans@lemmy.ml · 234 pts · 157d
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.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works · 107 pts · 157d
Iirc, wasn’t flash deprecated because of unpatchable bugs that created a gaping hole in your browser security?
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de · 43 pts · 157d
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
kautau@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 157d
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
kautau@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 157d
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
ByteJunk@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 156d
Risky click of the day...
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 43 pts · 157d
Well, it used to be a brilliant innovation by Macromedia.
JDPoZ@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 156d
Then like all things bought by Adobe… it became complete shit.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 24 pts · 156d
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.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com · 11 pts · 156d
To be fair, flash filled a gaping hole in html and css standards for a hot minute. Heck for the longest time flash was the best way to serve a video player because of those limitations. It also was instrumental in enabling animated videos on the Internet in a time when video on the web was too bandwidth intensive to be viable. We're talking the days of Internet connections measured in individual megabit per second being "fast" and dialup not being uncommon
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 156d
Y'all had megabit connections?
sadparty@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 155d
I had dial up. Load a page and walk away and do something else for a bit. 56 kbit/s was theoretical max. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-up_Internet_access
DemBoSain@midwest.social · 3 pts · 157d
Point: early_to_risa.
Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world · 146 pts · 157d
Who the fuck celebrated? I remembered many pissed off millennials and Gen x
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 53 pts · 157d
The people mistakenly claiming html5 was going to be the next Flash, I guess
Skullgrid@lemmy.world · 75 pts · 157d
It... Is? Check out itch.io and there's still.shitloads of browser games around.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 35 pts · 157d
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.
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de · 24 pts · 156d
All those flash games got preserved and you can still play them:
https://flashpointarchive.org/
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works · 25 pts · 157d
Also some of them are high quality porn games. This is both a warning and an advertisement depending on ones temperament.
Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 156d
I remember a lot of dating sims.
One of them started with a guy in a bathroom shaving and playing techno music before going to find a date.
They had funny as heck endings like the girl spinning on the ceiling fan at the end (During sex). Just crazy stuff.
Anyone remember what they were called? I swear I had them archived but I can’t find them anywhere. I think there were 20-30 of them from the same creator.
Eyekaytee@aussie.zone · 35 pts · 157d
I did, flash was a pile of garbage especially on anything not windows
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
Denjin@feddit.uk · 10 pts · 157d
Once Adobe got their grubby hands on it, everything went down hill but Macromedia at least did security updates.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 156d
I mean adobe kept releasing security updates for years too. The problem was at its core it wasn't designed for security so the entire architecture couldn't very well be secured without breaking all compatibility
captainlezbian@lemmy.world · 105 pts · 156d
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
RagingRobot@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 156d
It's just hard to find the good games now since there are so many
pory@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 155d
If you browse on itch.io by popularity and go down the list until you find one you've never heard of (or never played, if you want easier standards) that's where the "newgrounds culture" is nowadays. Plenty of stuff that works in browser for free.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 156d
I was fucking about in Flash back when it was Macromedia Flash.
Yeah, a good many of us did not 'celebrate' its downfall... maybe we took it for granted, but that's not the same thing.
Thankfully, NewGrounds is still up and operational.
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz · 0 pts · 156d
They all seem to be the same boring stardew valley/dead cells/anyotherauccessfullindiegame clones with pretty pixelart and too much time e commitment needed
Samskara@sh.itjust.works · 17 pts · 156d
There are lots of other games as well. Let me recommend a couple:
Juice@midwest.social · 18 pts · 156d
Your "couple" is a whole extended polycule
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 12 pts · 156d
Disco Elysium by itself is an extended polycule.
Juice@midwest.social · 4 pts · 156d
The polycule is a state of mind
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 156d
Some people just have more exciting ... gaming lives.
pory@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 155d
If you like these narrative driven games especially Disco, you owe it to yourself to check out Esoteric Ebb and Many Nights a Whisper
Samskara@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 155d
Thanks for the recommendations.
I’m not specifically into narrative driven games. I love Tetris Effects Connected, Boomerang Foo, and Mario Kart.
procapra@lemmy.ml · 15 pts · 156d
As if flash games weren't 75% dressup games, tower defense, and shit platformers. We still got plenty of that slop don't worry, we just have other kinds of slop to go with it.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 155d
XiaoXiao stick fighter games were absolutely awesome.
TheSeveralJourneysOfReemus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 156d
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz · 3 pts · 156d
The game you are talking about is Age of War and is arguably one of the most well known and beloved flash games ever. It might just not have clicked with you but I have very fond memories of it and find it to be more enjoyable than most recent releases as you could just launch a game, play a bit and be done with it, no toxic mechanics, no forced wait, no super extensive (and kinda boring) content.
TheSeveralJourneysOfReemus@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 156d
captainlezbian@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 156d
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
TheSeveralJourneysOfReemus@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 156d
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 156d
There was a lot of lazy copies with flash games too. And that's not unique for indie games or even video games. Every form of media has people copying what's already successful
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 156d
Some of the best games are copies of earlier games that flopped, because they were poorly implemented or lacked good marketing or were just ahead of their time.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 156d
:: looks around nervously as someone who loves those specific games::
ChexMax@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 156d
Yeah, I love the clones, it's like bonus levels
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 156d
They definitely skew to the pixel games and the rogue-likes, due to the limitations of a cell phone interface. But Idk if I'd call stardew valley boring.
I had a lot of fun with Slay the Spire and Balatro. There's a bunch of indie board games that are on mobile as well, Root being one of my favorites. And then there's all the digital CCGs (basically the only way I play MtG anymore is on mobile).
I would say the bigger problem with finding good indie games is the nightmarish volume of bad games (both indie and otherwise) that crowd out everything in the marketplace. I learn about the ones I like through word of mouth. Anything I just randomly install and fool around with, I inevitably hate.
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz · 0 pts · 156d
Oh stardew wasn’t (ok, the start of year one, maybe)
Yeah, that seems to be the issue. It became so easy to make games (and now even more with vibe-coding) that the market is flooded, often with clones.
58008@lemmy.world · 85 pts · 157d
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.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 156d
Metaphor game on point.
darklamer@feddit.org · 5 pts · 156d
This is the best explanation of Flash I've ever read!
eah@programming.dev · 2 pts · 156d
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7&carts_tab=1#sub=2&mode=carts&orderby=featured
rumba@lemmy.zip · 72 pts · 156d
We celebrated the downfall of Flash because every other week, some horrible vulnerability was found. And because of the ease of distribution in games, it was super easy to jack people's computers.
What killed the prevalence of all these wonderful free games was developers' ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 156d
Plus those of us on Linux desktops didn't love the workarounds we had to do with gnash or whatever. The rise of the mobile device cemented the need to have open web standards not tied to proprietary formats and proprietary software.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 156d
A bunch of the original flash games just got straight ported to Steam (or the various Apple/Google Play stores).
You can buy them for a few bucks and play them to your heart's desire. Or find pirated copies and sideload them.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 156d
And Valve/Apple/Google getting a 30% kickback.
They are absolutely fine with all the garbage because it buys them many, many megayachts. Newgrounds, Kongregate, Addictivegames and all those flash websites did not get megayachts.
Muffi@programming.dev · 68 pts · 157d
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.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 25 pts · 157d
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.
Muffi@programming.dev · 5 pts · 156d
I engage in the community - just like the good old newgrounds days. There was also tons of unplayable, eyecatchy stuff back then, we just dont remember it as much.
The most effektive way is to participate in game jams, get to know people and find out who makes the quality stuff. Pretty much exactly like finding good new podcasts or youtubers. It takes some effort but it is totally worth it.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 156d
Browse by genre and you won't see any visual novels unless you want to
antsu@discuss.tchncs.de · 54 pts · 156d
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.
frog@feddit.uk · 5 pts · 156d
Thry would probably jack up the license fee for devs, force everyone to use a shitty app store and when enough users are on the app store, start charging to use the app store.
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk · 6 pts · 156d
If I remember correctly flash was never cheap, everyone just bootlegged it.
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 46 pts · 156d
Nothing except for the use of Flash has changed... There are still tons of free to play games without MTX or other greedy bullshit made by passionate people, and just like back in the day, 90% of them are straight doodoo.
FFS, Newgrounds is still around and gets new stuff posted daily. Anon should leave 4chan and check out the rest of the internet.
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 156d
Robot unicorn attack is a masterpiece.
tomenzgg@midwest.social · 2 pts · 156d
Being reminded of it, 'had to go play it for the first time in years, just now.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 155d
The issue is anon's peers on 4chan called itch dot io "full of indieslop", now anon cannot get themself to check what it has, because the games don't feature slurs and racial stereotypes, for "comedic" purposes.
Meron35@lemmy.world · 42 pts · 156d
It never died though? The Devs just pivoted to different platforms. Itch, Newgrounds, and even the major app stores have endless content from indie devs.
Flash games were just never mainstream enough. And let's not forget that the most popular flash games were those shitty FB games, like FarmVille and Candy Crush, or that the shitty mobile games all started off as clones/ports of already popular flash games, like Angry Birds/Crush the Castle.
makeitwonderful@lemmy.today · 39 pts · 157d
Flashpoint Archive is attempting to archive all the flash games and animations.
qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website · 38 pts · 157d
To those asking "who celebrated"...Linux was not always well supported by Flash. The promise of HTML5, with first class Linux support, was very appealing.
https://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/flash-installer-confusion.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620537
Passerby6497@lemmy.world · 33 pts · 156d
I only celebrated the downfall of flash because it was an insecure piece of shit software. It just happened to have people make a ton of fun and interesting content on it.
qarbone@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 155d
Yeah, this post is celebrating Flash like it enabled creativity when jt was just the popular framework. That era didn't die because Flash went away. Companies killed that era and propped up parts of its body to trick people.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 155d
While yes it is, but I was responding specifically to the 'celebrating its downfall' part, which we should have because flash was insecure as fuck.
As I noted, there were a ton of fun and interesting items people made for it, and you can even still find them out on the net to relive those days and even see new shit on places like newgrounds. But let's not pretend that flash itself didn't need to die well before it did.
you_are_dust@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 156d
Who? Who celebrated?
rockstarmode@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 156d
Who celebrated? Everyone at the time who wasn't trying to write flash exploits did
GenosseFlosse@feddit.org · 7 pts · 156d
Everyone who had a laptop getting more than 20 mins life out of the battery, because flash would turn the CPU and fan up to 100. Of course there where also a lot of ads using flash on each website...
SGforce@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 156d
They got the corporate greed hit the exact same way as cellphone games. Pushed graphics and bloat too hard the, medium couldn't handle it any more.
EfreetSK@lemmy.world · 31 pts · 157d
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
agent_nycto@lemmy.world · 29 pts · 156d
I don't remember a single person being happy with Flash going away
Limonene@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 156d
Flash had a ton of vulnerabilities. It felt like one zero-day RCE per year.
Flash never had a good FOSS implementation until years after Flash Player was discontinued.
I was very happy about the death of Flash Player, but neutral on the death of the Flash format.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 12 pts · 156d
I didn't celebrate per se, but Flash was incredibly insecure and HTML5 was good enough for most of these simple games and it came out in... 2008, so 13 years before Flash went EOL.
What I did celebrate was finding out that Ruffle is a thing and most of your old favourite Flash games websites use it now so you can play your old favourites again! It's also open source and written in Rust so everything necessary to give the programmer nerd in me a boner.
SunshineJogger@feddit.org · 8 pts · 156d
I was a flash dev back then. People were very happy because of no more plugin need, no more badly scripted flash-ads that ate 100% cpu, etc.
Also Apple......
smeenz@lemmy.nz · 7 pts · 156d
I was happy.
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz · 28 pts · 156d
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.
Visstix@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 156d
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.
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 156d
Yeah, it's just unsubstantiated "looking back through rose tinted glasses" kind of thing.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com · 3 pts · 156d
Only the ones that had enough staying power to be turned into microtransaction shit on new engines. Remember how many horrendously grotesque and edgy games there were for no point other than to be horrendously grotesque and edgy? Sure we have some of those now but scrolling Steam or Itch it isn't a constant stream of edgelord suicide simulators or whatnot
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 4 pts · 156d
Web Assembly will always be better then Flash(the Engines you mentioned turns the code into Web Assembly)
tetris11@feddit.uk · 3 pts · 156d
itch is full of low quality generic slop made by restrictive game engines. A few good games. A few.
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de · 13 pts · 156d
So exactly the same as flash games?
tetris11@feddit.uk · 4 pts · 156d
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
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 156d
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).
tetris11@feddit.uk · 2 pts · 156d
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?
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com · 3 pts · 156d
My general approach is to find any gamejam (if you just browse the free games lists many will happen to be from gamejams and link to whatever gamejam they're from) and look through the games that resulted from it. Gamejam games tend to be high quality short experiences
A couple that I've enjoyed recently:
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 156d
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
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 4 pts · 156d
so like Gamemaker and Unity??
i also seen alot of Godot which is not restrictive.
Draconic_NEO@sh.itjust.works · 21 pts · 156d
I don't know anyone who celebrated except maybe the shitstains at adobe who planted the timebomb in Flash Player. Though that was pretty short lived because people found a way around it, either out or necessity (in china) or because they wanted to keep using the Flash projector to play games on Desktop.
For anyone not aware of the workarounds it was likely pretty shitty for people who needed or want to use software that depends on Flash Player.
Of course now we have ruffle.rs but it still isn't perfect, and there is still software that relies on unimplemented functions. Hopefully those get resolved soon.
Echolynx@lemmy.zip · 10 pts · 156d
There is a Flash-animated webcomic I read years ago that really excelled in the medium. Thank goodness for Ruffle, or it would be lost forever.
SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 156d
All the web developers I know did a little jig that day. YMMV
DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz · 21 pts · 156d
Funny that Club Penguin made it into the picture. It's one of the earliest games I can remember that pushed subscriptions and micro transactions and was aimed heavily at young children.
JackbyDev@programming.dev · 6 pts · 156d
Also, Adventure Quest had a subscription (not necessarily micro transactions) and the image for Bloons TD is, as far as I understand, from modern Bloons with micro transactions.
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 21 pts · 156d
I heard somewhere that Flash itself is garbage (not the games in it)
tetris11@feddit.uk · 22 pts · 156d
It had massive security holes, but its vector handling is sublime
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 5 pts · 156d
yeah i agree.
Loco_Mex@sh.itjust.works · 19 pts · 155d
Flash was so good, I'm sad it's gone. The HTML5 era has been a massive let down.
chunes@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 155d
"Hey guys, hear me out... what if we take all these great tools and replace them with... nothing?"
TheKingBee@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 155d
Depress_Mode@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 157d
Celebrated? That's not how I remember it at all. From what I recall, everyone pretty much immediately understood what was about to be lost and mourned it when it was gone. There was a huge effort to archive all the flash content people could find, so many people obviously felt flash content was worth preserving. I've got a flash emulator that natively has pretty much every flash game and animation I remember from when I was a kid. I might have to boot it up for a bit tonight for old time's sake.
rozodru@piefed.world · 18 pts · 156d
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.
vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 156d
I completely forgot about this trend of building actual websites in flash. Fuck disabled people right?
rozodru@piefed.world · 1 pts · 155d
yeah it was "all the rage" in the early 00's up to like the early 10's. Pain in the ass to build, even worse to maintain and update. but EVERYONE wanted a cool interactive flash site. It's just trends with companies. I remember after flash it was all paralax. everyone wanted paralax. thankfully that was a lot easier to build since it was just HTML5. but yeah web dev trends are annoying because you're constantly having to learn new stacks that you know will become irrelevant in like 3 years or less once some middle manager discovers something "cool".
I'm all about using Astro + Tailwind because it reminds me of building Geocities sites and I like that.
QuiteQuickQum@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 157d
Who celebrated?
laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 15 pts · 157d
I did, it was a horrible medium littered with security issues and most of them were hot garbage in the first place.
The best fun was being asked to modify the menu on a website only to find the "webmaster" who built the site used Flash for that, and having to figure out how to reverse engineer it.
It was way past time for it to die when it was finally forced off the Internet... One of the few things I thank Apple for doing
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de · 11 pts · 157d
Everyone who liked free and open source software and open standards and such things, which Flash was very much the antithesis of.
lung@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 157d
https://ruffle.rs/ webasm OSS impl of flash. But yeah the world has changed in a less fun way. At least many of those flash game devs became game devs for pay
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz · 14 pts · 157d
Adobe went from "You should implement your entire website in flash, see how modern and unique you can make it!" to "We're terminating flash in a year"
saltesc@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 157d
To be fair, Macromedia had peak Flash and Dreamweaver for "Website dreams can come true!" era. When Adobe acquired them, they started ruining it and leveraging legacy. Yes, the tech improved as would be expected over time, but the passion was gone. Adobe killed Flash but had already taken its soul years earlier.
People don't realise many of their favourite Flash games were from 2005 or earlier—the larger parts of the golden era. They were Macromedia games then.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 157d
People don't even talk about Shockwave any more. Early 3D games in the fucking browser! It was amazing.
saltesc@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 156d
Yeah. I remember as a teen, my father said I should look at learning Shockwave as a potential career pathway after school. It was taking the web by storm and many people were convinced that Macromedia's visions was the future of the web.
I still kind of remember Macromedia Lingo. I had taught myself HTML—which was an extremely easy thing to learn for a child back in that day—and I started learning Director, JS, and Shockwave.
By the time I was older and out of school, Adobe had aquired Macromedia. But in a few short years during that time, websites had gone from basic HTML, images, frames, etc. to entirely animated opening scenes vectoring together beautifully over the top interfaces. UX was out the window because everyone's brain was happy to explode at how cool an interface functioned...once it finally loaded lol. We used to visit websites to show friends how cool they were, still amazed at a cool "loading site" Shockwave animation, happily sitting there waiting, because we knew soon sprites would follow the cursor around lol
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 157d
I remember being told at school not to learn HTML because flash is what websites are going to be made in now.
kepix@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 157d
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.
Scrollone@feddit.it · 11 pts · 157d
QWOP was hilarious though.
sidebro@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 157d
For five minutes, maybe.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 9 pts · 156d
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.
Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 156d
AdventureQuest though..
I must've sunk hundreds of hours at the library playing that
Also honorable mention to danball powder game
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 156d
AdventureQuest is somehow still in development
Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 156d
They actually ported it to their own flash client for just their games I think to keep it alive, and are making ports of aq world in its own engine
Static_Rocket@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 156d
Ah, but raft wars
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 156d
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.
Pat_Riot@lemmy.today · 13 pts · 156d
Gen X misses Flash, too. My Geocities page featured a beat maker with samples you could trigger to make cool drum and bass with.
ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 157d
I honestly miss those flash games. Like I'd spend hours upon hours scrolling through websites like bored.com playing all kinds of games. I could play any game in any genre and have a great time.
I miss those times. Maybe I miss them because they remind me of my youth but they were amazing either way.
parzival@lemmy.org · 11 pts · 155d
There's still games, and the old ones aren't dead because the people in middle and high school are still playing them at school, just using flash emulators or html5 versions. People play run 3,slope, Henry stickmin, old version of 1v1 lol without micro transactions, etc.
margaret_erine@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 155d
That is absolutely true 💯
jcorvera@quokk.au · 10 pts · 156d
If Anon misses flash, Anon should look into Flashpoint and Ruffle.
stringere@sh.itjust.works · 9 pts · 156d
Relevant: Newgrounds Flash Forward Jam 2025
Edit: oops that was last year. Flash Forward 2026
kandoh@reddthat.com · 9 pts · 156d
What's Plant's vs Zombies doing there? That was a post-iPhone game
RagingRobot@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 156d
That was a flash game if I remember correctly. It was just ported to everything
JackbyDev@programming.dev · 9 pts · 156d
I hate shit like this. Fym we celebrated it's downfall?? Excuse you?? I was not happy about it.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today · 8 pts · 156d
I tried to become a flash developer back then 😞
RagingRobot@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 156d
I was working as a flash developer when they killed it. I was definitely not on board haha. I had to pivot my whole career but I learned such a valuable lesson.
Flash was the tool that really made programming click for me. It was easy to pick up but hard to master and I spent so much time learning how to write all kinds of code patterns
SethTaylor@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 157d
Newgrounds still works. They've adapted
jcorvera@quokk.au · 3 pts · 156d
Along with Homestar Runner. I think Newgrounds and H*R were the two big flash sites to pivot to using Ruffle.
Mac@mander.xyz · 6 pts · 157d
Fancy Pants, Falling Sand, various stick fighting games, Whack Your Boss, moto trials games, Punk-O-Matic, Line Rider, etc etc
Gooooood times
0ops@piefed.zip · 4 pts · 156d
Awe man, I couldn't afford a console or PC until I was an adult, so these are the video games I'm nostalgic for. Plus the local 2-player games where you share a keyboard! Boxhead, Fireboy & Watergirl, etc
GottaHaveFaith@fedia.io · 6 pts · 157d
one of the fastest way to get computer AIDS. But yeah, we alla missed it
RamenJunkie@midwest.social · 6 pts · 156d
There are a shitload of free in browser and not games on itch. Anon OP is just a fucking lemming who thinks they have to pay $80 for the latest COD.
Fuck even some.AAA shit like Overwatch and Fortnite are free.
JOMusic@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 157d
Making things is Godot actually feels a lot like making Flash games used to
Little_mouse@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 157d
There are plenty of other places to play games online still, Like Pico-8
https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Object@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 157d
Does anyone know the name of the game that features that particular 4 coloured ball under "Anonymous" in the image? I remember that ball very well, but I can't find the game.
missingno@fedia.io · 4 pts · 157d
Ball Revamped
Object@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 157d
They really made my childhood game only to give it the most generic name possible huh
nek0d3r@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 155d
Nothing has really changed on this front. Nothing is stopping you from making and playing flash games, and flash itself is just as vulnerable now as when it was still supported. The only thing that's really different is that dropping support seemed like a good excuse to massively shift culture away from it all.
DupaCycki@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 156d
I don't know if people working at Artix are passionate, but I definitely wouldn't call their games 'free with no microtransactions'.
Etterra@discuss.online · 4 pts · 156d
Even more annoying is when some of those games were garbage but they ended up being turned into phone microtransaction hell or overpriced Steam games anyway.
XaetaCore@lemmy.neondystopia.world · 3 pts · 155d
TAKE ME BACK 😭
zeca@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 155d
i never celebrated this nor has seen someone do, wtf
AffineConnection@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 155d
Mata Nui Online Game
banazir@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 156d
Flash was trash that made the web almost unusable for a time. I was glad it died. Shit never properly worked anyway.
porkloin@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 156d
Absolutely, anyone who thinks it was a golden age didn’t have to live through the broader flash based website hell. Flash games and videos were just the silver lining on otherwise noxious Adobe shit scented cloud
mo_lave@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 156d
JackbyDev@programming.dev · 2 pts · 156d
Donko Donko Literate Club
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca · 0 pts · 155d
Still peak humor
https://youtu.be/66X68DtrPRM