Flashpoint: a webgame preservation project

> A plethora of games that had no monetary reason to make them.

I don't know for Newgrounds but actually many website paid quite a bit of money to sponsor games. Gemcraft for example was sponsored by Armor Games and I believe they were in the 10k ranges. The ECPM was also not bad, I believe some were able to reach 10$ because of video ads.

MochiAds, which was one of the most used ads provider also had a distribution platform which was quite useful.

Once I made a game during a boring math class, I was able to get 500k views out of it (sadly mostly from China which had an ecpm of like 0.01$, it wasn't a market that MochiMedia was developing much for ads, they tried later on but Flash killed them before they were able to increase it enough). I made a bit over 100$ over that game made in an few hours. I was able to reproduce the experiment a second time, with similar result, less views, 300k I think, but much more in the US, a bit under 100$ that time.

I was hoping that Unity would bring that back, because they came during the crash of Flash, but while they still push toward faster development, they were going toward a different market.

Take a look over at itch.io

There's some of that on itch.io, there's just also plenty of paid stuff there too.

Cocos2d-X might be a better option.

Phaser[0] is Javascript based (you can also use TypeScript), and has a ton of documentation and community.

[0] phaser.io

p5.js and p5.play where what I used to make a SHMUP.

https://nortyspock.github.io/Viktor/

Before that I made asteroids. https://nortyspock.github.io/asteroids-p5/

Godot[1] is free and open source, similar to Unity, builds to mobile, desktop and web. It supports 2D and 3D, as well as VR through some addons. It has a built in python-like scripting language called GDScript that's easy to pick up and understand, and you can also use C#, C++ or many other languages through bindings (even Javascript[2]).

It's a really impressive effort for an open source project. There's a channel on YouTube called KidsCanCode[3] (not just for kids!) which has a load of project-based tutorials to build lots of types of games.

[1] https://godotengine.org/

[2] https://github.com/Geequlim/ECMAScript

[3] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNaPQ5uLX5iIEHUCLmfAgKg/pla...

The replies talk about engines, but you asked about which Flash game would be good to convert, right? Or did I misunderstand?

Not flash games, but these are ones that I have done in the past that were good for learning:

For puzzle games, Set is a good one that will let you practice the UI aspect and recording state, as well as scoring. The PDFs here have the rules, https://www.setgame.com/set/puzzle_rules, and you can play the game at https://www.setgame.com/set/puzzle.

For real-time games, Pong is a great first project and can be followed up by a top-down 2D game (probably a shooter is the most common one). For these you'll need to use Canvas.

Unless you're doing something unusual, the game mechanics are usually not the hard part. A lot more work has to go into polishing it and making a finished product.

I would suggest staying away from Unity in the beginning, it adds a lot of complexity and you'll be able to get started much faster with a bare canvas (which you can easily learn to draw on, and create a game loop with setTimeout or requestAnimationFrame) or React project.

The opcode’s were documented, and tools like Haxe do compile to swf. There is a lot of information available about the scripting part, but indeed it would be a great task. However I can’t wait to compile some C++ code using FlasCC [1] and run that in a wasm player.

[1] https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/

Not having the source code sucks, but it's not a showstopper ; some videogame preservation websites have managed to workaround this issue.

It's possible to play "Prince of Persia" in the browser (through DOSBOX recompiled to Javascript).

It's even possible to play the original Windows 95 (!) Pinball in the browser. Seeing the Windows 95 cloudy boot sequence in a Javascript canvas is disturbing. The game isn't as smooth as native, but it's definitely playable. ( https://classicreload.com/win9x-3d-pinball-space-cadet.html )

Yeah, if I remember right they couldn't open source parts of it because some parts had other licenses in it. I'm recalling (but I could be wrong) that they wanted to in 2011 or so... but couldn't because of that. Don't remember the source though.

I wish Adobe would start making publications though, they know Flash has been end-of-life for ages yet there's a lot of earlier internet media still in that format.

> The attempts at building something compatible like shumway have all been rather unsuccessful.

Alternative proprietary implementation was rather successful for game development. Sadly Scaleform GFx is now discontinued too and obviously we'll never see Autodesk publish anything under open source license.

> I don't think Adobe ever open-sourced the Flash codebase, right?

This shows we should only allow technologies on the web if they have a clear path to preservation.

I think a similar thing should hold for DRM'ed video. Such videos may be supported on the web, but we should demand they lose their DRM when their copyright expires.

This sounds like a fascinating approach. How old is your company? Do you already have clients who you've ported stuff to the web for this way that you can share?

> I don't think they failed to port it - I think they were not invited to do so by the people building the mobile platforms.

I don't think they were not invited to do so - I think they were not paid for the work or licenses

> I don't think they failed to port it - I think they were not invited to do so by the people building the mobile platforms.

There was an android version for a while. I don't think it worked very well.

This is correct. Adope actually developed a flash player for the iPhone but Jobs said no. A year or so later, Apple allowed the Desktop-bound version of flash on the iPhone (it's called Adobe Air)... probably because they wanted users to get their games through the App Store.

Rapid and often is a little irrelavent in my opinion. YouTube provided a degree of centralization that has allowed certain kinds of creatives to flourish but it could never recreate the old flash games and cartoons for the simple reason that centralization enables easy censorship and progressive/tolerance culture is 100% censorship culture these days. Tons of flash games were violent satire, YouTube knee jerk banned gun related content. Lots of flashes were anti-pc teen humor, YouTube is aggressively pro lgbt. The old flash sites were less practical for tolerance tyrants to take down because they were too small and quickly replaced to be worth the effort, but YouTube is now the only real game in town for content creators with ambition and Google has no interest in anything besides pandering. The modern platform environment simply doesn't facilitate the kind of free creativity that existed before.

Or they were written as 32-bit apps, which became verboten on iOS not long ago. I had a bunch of games I had paid for and enjoyed for a long time vanish suddenly because their creators didn't deem it worthwhile to go back and recompile them as 64-bit.

Thanks - regardless though - really really poor explanation on whats going on here, on their part.

Of course I know how torrents work, but to have a single zip is just stupid practice.

Not if it's an archived file, which it is in this case.

It's a single 7z file.