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Comment by TomGullen | Hacker News Reader

I wasn’t a big Flash user back in the day but I think our product Construct 3 (https://www.construct.net) can do just about everything Flash did, especially with the addition of the Timeline editor and scripting we’ve just added. I’m a little hesitant to overtly market Construct as the “next flash” as that I think would receive a mixed reception depending on your experiences with it!

Tom Fulp from Newgrounds has nice things to say about Construct, and we’re getting very positive numbers from other portals and platforms (some very big) that a lot of volume of games and good quality ones at that are being published with them using Construct 3.

I’d like to hear from more experienced Flash users if there’s anything Construct 3 can’t do that Flash could as it would likely be an important feature we’d be keen to add!

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It needs to be able to name a platform, media type, IDE, all at once. E.g., "I'm going to use Flash", "It's a Flash game", "Hold on, let me animate it in Flash". The name should be able to go in domain names; e.g., "superfunflashgames.com".

Basically, it has to have a name amiable to becoming an umbrella term. That gave Flash such a "universal" connotation.

I hope this makes sense - trying to convey the _peculiarities_ of "Flash" which made it (as I see it) successfull and distinct in character.

Flash was fundamentally just a file format. You made the format using the program in the same way you make a Photoshop file in Photoshop. It was a noun and a verb because you make thing and both the part that makes and the part made are called the same.

Due to the nature of present browser APIs you cannot name your editor WebGL or something that produces WebGL. But if you made an editor called Sparkle or something that produced .sparkle files that had native browser support you would have the same nomenclature going on. But native browser integration and containerized file formats with external editors aren't a well made match.

Why aren’t they a well made match? Isn’t WASM “containerized”? Quotes are not sarcasm.

A game development camp I used to teach at here in Austin, Game World's, uses Construct and it is a fantastic tool that's readily accessible, even to children. Once you get them going with game design concepts, they can really knock out a solid game within a week. I think it's a fantastic platform and seems comparable to flash in ease of use.

Is it a good platform to make animated movies? Can output be distributed as a single shareable file, like .swf?

With the timelines editor theoretically yes, although there's no good easy way to export in a single shareable file (some technical hurdles). Definitely something it's lacking right now.

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