Nitrome to convert its Flash game library to HTML5

http://www.nitrome.com/blog/articles/1427/

by danso • 6 years ago

167 88 6 years ago

jjice• 6 years ago

I'd be interested to see the metrics for a browser game site. When I was a kid, Flash games were our go to when we had time in class, or even at home. I can remember my sister and I crowded around the family computer playing countless Flash games.

But what about now? Now that phones are so common among children, and they offer such a large library of free games (granted, many are packed with ads and micro-transactions), is there still a large market? I don't have a modern perspective since I don't really play mobile or web games anymore, but I'd be interested to see how websites like this are doing in terms of traffic.

dangerboysteve• 6 years ago

Google got into HTML 5 games a little while ago with Game Snacks. Here is a blog post with about it.

https://www.blog.google/technology/area-120/gamesnacks-bring...

heeton• 6 years ago

Anecdotally: flash games got a LOT of plays because of that play style.

I was a kid at the time, and released a few crappy flash games (“Tilt” where you literally just had to balance a plate on your cursor).

Over 5 years it go something like 100million plays... I never quite believed it.

robotbikes• 6 years ago

My daughter was super excited to find a game website that had just cloned a lot of games from the play store because it worked in the browser and I had adblock on so it was like magic to her, not having to watch an ad every 30 seconds. Like when I was a kid video games were ad-free and TV was the source of ads but its the opposite for a lot of kids growing up these days.

darepublic• 6 years ago

You also had to buy those games.. the shareware titles were five bucks. I never asked my mom or dad to fork up for the additional episodes either

frenchie142• 6 years ago

This past weekend I uploaded a small game to Kongregate. It's been played 1000 times in the last 24 hours. I'd say the community is still surprisingly alive! Also, if I had uploaded the same game with zero marketing to mobile, I'd have expected zero downloads.

https://www.kongregate.com/games/Frenchie14/factions

aabeshou• 6 years ago

thats awesome! what technology are people using these days to make "flash" games?

avolcano• 6 years ago

I built a tiny, kinda crappy multiplayer web game a few years ago (https://manygolf.club/), and while it's mostly dead now, it was relatively popular with 5-15 active players at any time for a few months (I know, small potatoes, but as someone who had never made a game played by _anyone_ outside of friends and family before, it was cool to see).

I noticed one of my biggest traffic referrers appeared to be from some kind of school proxy, and the most common Google suggestion for "manygolf" was "manygolf unblocked", so I imagine it is a lot of bored kids with locked-down devices. I also still get an occasional email every now and then from a "game portal" site that wants to license my game in some way, so I guess that stuff is still a market unto itself.

KingOfCoders• 6 years ago

Astonished to see this in 2020.

dijit• 6 years ago

I grew up with nitrome as a staple of the internet, so I’m happy they’re doing this, even for nostalgic reasons- their games really shaped my youth and we definitely lost a wealth of content when flash died.

I feel like in general the “spirit” of the old flash games has died, I’m not sure why but there was an incredible amount of low grade content around during the flash days, and thus we had breakout successes like “the stick guy vs the web designer“ and line rider. Maybe it’s because I’m old, but I don’t see those kinds of incredibly Indy things anymore.

I don’t miss flash as a web technology though.

lilgreenland2• 6 years ago

I've been working on a html5 game. I'd like to think it captures some of the old school flash feel. https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/index.html

episode0x01• 6 years ago

This is really great!

the_af• 6 years ago

Very cool. Your game definitely captures the Flash era (Kongregate!) for me. Thanks for sharing.

MH15• 6 years ago

Woah! I've been working on a multiplayer game and I stumbled upon an iteration of your source code for this sidescroller a few months back. I was looking to solve some problems in my Matter.js collision code, and found a solution from your repo. Thanks!

owenshen24• 6 years ago

This was really fun to play. Thanks for sharing! Agree w/ the old flash feel.

viraptor• 6 years ago

There's a lot of low grade and awesome ideas in scratch. https://newgrounds.com/ is still alive and kicking. The community seems to still be out there.

Swizec• 6 years ago

I think we had this on the app store for the first 5 to 8 years before it got eaten by ads and pay-to-win.

whywhywhywhy• 6 years ago

And even then most of the great games from the early years of the app store are long gone either their developers never updated them to 64bit or stopped paying their yearly App Store licence and unlike Flash games where the executables and runtime could be saved [1] they're all gone for good now because of the locked down platform.

[1] https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

phailhaus2• 6 years ago

Did you ever dabble with Flash? I did, and it's frankly amazing how easy it was to make games with it, especially since it gave you tools to draw right there in the app. It had a low barrier to entry and a high skill ceiling, which is why we saw such a massive amount of content those days from high school and college students.

I don't know of an equivalent program to help build HTML5 games. It's basically on you to pick the engine, choose the drawing program, and cobble the entire thing together with only code. The barrier to entry is way over kids' heads.

cableshaft2• 6 years ago

This. I made Flash games back in the day, some of which were fairly popular. My most played game, Proximity, I came up with the idea at the beginning of the week and had it released on Newgrounds by the end of the week. It was just so easy to make games on that platform, and to collaborate effectively with artists, who could create the art directly in the software and you could incorporate it into the game easily.

I haven't found any platform that's been as easy or quick or easy to collaborate with artists, while at the same time not having too many restrictions in what type of game you want to make, since, and I've floated around from platform to platform since then.

I'm still making games, but I'm doing more analog game design now (board games), which is giving me a little bit of that easy to make (at least the prototypes) and collaborate vibe that I haven't gotten from video games. Currently using MonoGame for video game development at the moment. I've used Unity professionally before, but it's too cumbersome for 2D hobby game development.

I'm actually a little surprised that lightning in a bottle hasn't been able to be replicated properly since then.

AshleysBrain• 6 years ago

I don't know of an equivalent program to help build HTML5 games.

We make Construct 3, a web app aimed at exactly this: https://www.construct.net

city41• 6 years ago

I've only lightly played with this so far, but it feels about what you're after: https://phasereditor2d.com/

robotnikman• 6 years ago

This so much. I've been messing around with the Phaser framework for fun to try and create an HTML5 game, but its nowhere the same as the days of making games and animations in Flash, especially in terms of simplicity and user friendliness. I hope something similar comes along at some point.

AgentME• 6 years ago

Doesn't Flash-the-creation-tool live on as Adobe Animate? It supports HTML5 export now, so the death of Flash-the-browser-plugin shouldn't be an issue.

ummwhat• 6 years ago

I think the spirit of flash split. The innovative / experimental side went on to the Indy section of steam and Xbox live. The vehicles to hijack 30 seconds of your attention went in the direction of mobile.

Causality12• 6 years ago

Is this approach different from what sites like Newgrounds did for their Flash libraries?

jimbob45• 6 years ago

Didn't Newgrounds force new games onto HTML5 and build a player to play old flash games?

Tajnymag• 6 years ago

It is. Newgrounds rendered old flash animations to a video container. To NG flash games, you are directed to their pre-set offline flash player.

Causality12• 6 years ago

Ah. I can see disadvantages with that approach. Bandwidth usage for a given video would be increased as well as losing the vectorized nature of Flash video that allows them to be losslessly upscaled.

vijaybritto• 6 years ago

The text is so hard to read! Even after zooming in. I think I am used to modern sites so much that I completely forgot how it used to be before 10 years

asiachick• 6 years ago

Your screen was probably 800 pixels wide or something less than it is today so the characters were bigger.

HN is not so great in this area either

bdcravens• 6 years ago

While it wasn't a game, so the bar was pretty low, a fun project (it was a sporting goods company I think) I did was converting a ton of Flash widgets into the HTML5 equivalent - this was probably 8 years ago, when the options were pretty much limited to jQuery plugins. (short of rewriting in vanilla JS, which was tougher then than now, given that older version of IE were still somewhat in use)

jpeter• 6 years ago

https://htwins.net/scale2/

this needs a html5 version

Aardwolf• 6 years ago

I wish Newgrounds would also find a better solution than its current Windows-based Flash player to play its enormous Flash games collection (which currently still works in browser, of course)

jonkoops• 6 years ago

It should be possible to make a Flash player that works for the most part using web technologies (e.g. WebAssembly). I remember Mozilla created Shumway (https://github.com/mozilla/shumway) but it looks like they have given up on it.

LEARAX• 6 years ago

I believe that's exactly what Newgrounds is doing. See https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

gramakri• 6 years ago

I want the same for http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

cmehdy• 6 years ago

The music in "rainmaker" is one of the most soothing loops I can think of.

apignotti3• 6 years ago

We are working on fixing this problem "the right way" by virtualizing the x86 Flash plugin in WebAssembly. For more info see here:

https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...

cupofjoakim• 6 years ago

First time I hear about this and it brought a smile to my face. I'm one of those "web assembly sounds great, but when am I actually supposed to use it"-guys, but this use case is so perfect and makes me really happy. We forget that flash games wasn't just a way to pass time, it's now also a part of internet culture that, without people like you, will go lost forever. HUGE props if you pull this off.

mcphage• 6 years ago

Redistributing the Flash binary is not normally allowed, so we are going to directly download it over HTTP the first time our system is started.

How will this work when Adobe stops distributing the Flash installer?

traverseda• 6 years ago

Maybe get archive.org to handle it? My understanding is that they have some pretty good legal counsel, so that's something they might be cool with?

apignotti3• 6 years ago

Since we wrote the post we started discussing with the appropriate parties to solve the licensing issues.

bogwog3• 6 years ago

Is "the right way" in quotes because it's sarcasm? This is a really cool idea, but very impractical. I think most would agree that "the right way" would be to port the game to HTML5, either using straight JS or a technology like Haxe and OpenFL.

apignotti3• 6 years ago

We believe this is "the right way" since it's the only possible way of _accurately_ preserve all Flash content.

Sophistifunk2• 6 years ago

This is a pipe dream, as Flash has capabilities you just don't get in HTML+JS without writing an entire VM, such as text metrics and weak references.

dashlite2• 6 years ago

Now that's impractical, because of cost. There's a wealth of SWF content that will never ever be ported.

An SWF runtime is feasible, it's actually not a very complicated format. The devil is in the details, but a lot of content does not use that many features.

aclelland• 6 years ago

I've been looking into how to best make a large collection of flash games available after flash is removed from browsers. An electron app was looking promising but that plan has been scuppered by licensing issues with the Flash runtime. Adobe have told us they'll be removing flash installers from their site and the cost to embed Flash into the app itself makes it a no go.

Maybe before December there will be a good HTML5 converter but I'm not holding out much hope. Shame to see so much content disappear.

Glad to see that Nitrome have had the resources to port their games over and some content is being saved!

gibspaulding• 6 years ago

For anyone interested in playing/archiving old flash games, BlueMaxima's Flashpoint has some 49,000 games packaged up to be played offline. I haven't messed with it yet, but it seems like a really neat project.

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

bubbab• 6 years ago

I did not know about Nitrome, but wow I love the site design!

On a related note, Neopets has also been migrating their huge catalog of Flash games to HTML5 over the years. I have no idea how that's going though.

azhenley• 6 years ago

Flash was an amazing, low barrier way to make games that could be distributed with almost no effort. In a single weekend I was able to make a game, do all the art, integrate a video advertisement API into it, and release it to hundreds of websites. I made tens of thousands of dollars doing this from my dorm while going to school and working two jobs. I have yet to find an alternative that can come anywhere close to this.

I wrote a bit about this on my blog, if you'd like to know more: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/8lessons8games.html

richardlblair• 6 years ago

I have a good friend who's passion projects were flash games. He went to conferences, would send over samples, and honestly they were good. I think it made him a better programmer than me too.

The hate against flash is warranted in the contexts the hate originates, but there is a niche where it belongs.

babaganoosh892• 6 years ago

Same with me, Flash games were an amazing side business for a college kid. I made over a dozen games and paid for college completely :)

zerr3• 6 years ago

How were you monetizing it?

freehunter2• 6 years ago

I grew up drawing Flash animations in high school just as a hobby. I probably did hundreds of short animations over the years, things like the popular Stick Fight animations.

To this day I've never found any drawing/animation tool I'm comfortable with, which means I rarely draw anymore which means my drawing skills are getting worse which means I draw even less.

I'm not sure how much of that is just the realities of getting older vs the actual change in tooling, but it's definitely fuel for some nostalgia.

newacct5832• 6 years ago

I have yet to find an alternative that can come anywhere close to this.

It wasn't the technology, it was the economy. In the late 90's consumer internet uptake was growing literally exponentially, but the population of hackers who could provide content was lagging terribly.

I mean, obviously Flash was probably the best option for that particular niche, but if it didn't exist something else would have happened.

barry-cotter• 6 years ago

And yet no one has built anything like it since. No one has even built a tool that’s has as low a barrier to entry for either of creating animations or making games, never mind one with both that low barrier to entry and no upper limit to the quality of what you can make with it.

skocznymroczny• 6 years ago

It was the technology. It was the drag and drop IDE. HTML5 is not a replacement because it doesn't have the drag and drop element.

ansgri• 6 years ago

Flash is the Delphi of the web. It was trivial to code a complex native GUI app in Delphi 7 with VCL, and now it's effectively gone, not quite replaced by Qt with its overcomplicated C++ nature.

zerr3• 6 years ago

Off topic: if possible, can you please share more details/materials about your course - COSC 493: CPU Emulation?

Lorin• 6 years ago

I hope 'Flight' from Armor Games where you fly/upgrade a paper airplane gets an HTML5 treatment.

ladberg• 6 years ago

I loved Nitrome when I was younger and I am super excited for this! I haven't visited in years mainly because I don't have Flash.

berbec• 6 years ago

Someone script convert homestarrunner.com quick

antigirl• 6 years ago

Flash was a lot of fun to use. The possibilities were endless. Especially because web isn’t what it is today. I used to do a lot of flash banners for Vodafone. It was a lot of fun and made good money whilst I was doing my MSc too.

I eventually picked up Flex because flash was all the rage and did a really nice UI for an exhibition that was in the museum for a year. I think you’d still need to use something like imagemaps now for what I achieved with flex and flash together

Nitrome to convert its Flash game library to HTML5

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