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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

Flash was great for banging out prototypes super quickly, thanks to its built-in graphics and animation support. I miss it.

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For what its worth, a friend of mine still makes a living from making Flash games. He even uses AS2!

Kongregate, Facebook, and Steam have quite a few users that play Flash games.

Chrome plans to make Flash click-to-play in December 2016 (with a temporary whitelist, to be removed in July 2017, for Facebook and a few other popular sites), so I would recommend he look into moving to HTML5-based game system soon!

The nostalgia! I programmed my first game in my early teens in AS2! Those were the days... Hehe. I think Macromedia Flash/ActionScript 2.0 were the perfect tools to get started with programming, I was really lucky. I don't think I would have done much with a mere C++ command line back then.

You can churn out a complete HTML5/JavaScript game in 2 evenings. Granted, you have to import images and don't have the convenience of just drawing something and making a MovieClip out of it. However, fundamentally, it's very similar - you just have to program the main loop yourself with requestAnimationFrame and/or timers.

HTML5 still can't handle the animation heavy games I used to make in Flash. It's still a pain in the butt to make those type of games with traditional spritesheets. The fast vector graphics engine really allowed for some crazy feats with a very snappy and reliable container.

That being said, I the type of games I make now, it could probably handle, but it hasn't been anywhere near as pleasant of an experience to work with, so I've been pretty bad about porting my games to HTML5.

For all its quirks (and there were LOADS) I do still miss it. Any recommendations of something thats quick to prototype games with?

processing.org and love2d.org are nice little platforms for interactive visual stuff

You might want to take a look at Haxe and the OpenFL library!

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