Nitrome to convert its Flash game library to HTML5 | Hacker News Reader

Nitrome to convert its Flash game library to HTML5

nitrome.com

167 pointsdanso91 comments

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

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.

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 :)

How were you monetizing it?

Not GP, but there was a huge economy around banner / ads being embedded in Flash games, and those games being shared widely / distributed on many different sites.

There were many "portal" sites that showed (hosted) many games and showed ads alongside or before the games started, and then a second sub-ecosystem of ads embedded in the games themselves by the game developers.

Instead of feeling like their games were "pirated" when somebody copied the game's .swf file, developers had this (viral) mechanism which made those games lucrative wherever they'd appear on the web!

Source: know someone who ran one of those "portal" sites and made an absolute killing.

I had a portal like that as a teen (GameGum.com) before they blew up (once people started selling the “one click all in one arcade scripts” it was all over, even though ours was far nicer and had a nice community).

Made good money for a few years and bought my first car off it!

Ads through a network like CPMStar were the majority, averaged about $0.50 per thousand views. At the time there was also a flash game marketplace at fgl.com, that let game portals like Addicting Games or Newgrounds bid to "sponsor" your game which involved adding their branding and links to their site. On my most popular game I made $100k over a few years.

There are still lots of such portals with Flash and HTML5 games - so is that economy still thriving well?

I did two games for fun when I was younger. I only made 200$ in total, but they were made in less than 4 hours each (I did them both in a math class, thus why the time restriction). To monetize them, I used MochiMedia, which sadly died with Flash, and they were the one that distributed them. I got about half a millions views on both of them, mostly from China (which had an ecpm of 1 cent too :')).

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.

> 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.

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.

> And yet no one has built anything like it since.

Because it's not the technology, it's the economy! You can't build another Flash, because no such product could exist. We're awash with talented content generation for the connected modern society. There's no niche for hacker students to fill, with any tool.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

This is really great!

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

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!

How is matter.js in multiplayer? I can imagine how local would multiplayer would work, but server-based seems like it might be hard to keep the physics the some for the clients.

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

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.

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.

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/

Google Play has many sites that scrape and back it up. Even on iOS, apps can be backed up as ipa's and installed without jailbreak with something like alt store.

I doubt those last long enough to act as a meaningful archival solution. Piracy sites maybe, but the links rot really damn fast.

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.

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.

Thank you for making Proximity! I spent many hours playing it and enjoyed immensely.

You're welcome :) Glad you had so much fun with it.

Currently trying to bring it back, actually. I released a sequel on Xbox 360 a while back, and I'm trying to clean it up, add some things, then release it on desktop, then mobile, then hopefully more modern consoles.

Now that Flash is basically completely dead from modern browsers, I'm trying to figure out what I should do about the original. I might eventually make an HTML 5 version, but in the meantime I'm considering making downloadable executables of the Flash game and releasing it on itch.io or something.

I also finally prototyped a board game version, and at some point I'm hoping to find a publisher for it. Figured I need to bring the video game back so it can be played again before publishers will give it a shot, though.

Speaking as a fan, do you have any opinions on what I should be doing with the game?

> 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

Wow, impressive! You're helping make the web a more fun place, thank you.

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

AFAIK all of these editors lack art and graphics tools that were the original Flash authoring tool selling point. So you would need to combine the scripting engine plus online animation editor plus vector drawing program to offer the aamel value.

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.

I honestly believe that the mid 2000s were a golden age of easy to use programming tools.

Wanted to make a professional looking website with little code? Dreamweaver.

Wanted to write a desktop application with little code? Visual Basic.

Wanted to make a game or animation? Flash.

Want to write a web application? PHP, just drop it on a server.

Even as you started to get more complex into the late 2000s, Ruby on Rails on Heroku is still worlds easier than pretty much anything that's come after it.

Today you have buildpacks and webpack and deployment pipelines and confusingly named cloud services and yet another Javascript framework. Maybe it's rose tinted glasses but everything seemed easier back then. And I'm not sure what we've gotten in return for the complexity.

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.

The HTML5 backends are garbage. The workflow isn't streamlined like SWF and none of the Actionscript ecosystem carries over. Adobe just doesn't care about the product anymore.

You're better off using any of the game frameworks with HTML5 export, but from an accessibility standpoint, those are still a notch above Flash.

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.

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...

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.

> 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?

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?

Security is another concern. Unless WebAssembly itself is immune

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

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.

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

It's certainly not the only way. It's just a more convenient alternative to running Flash player locally and downloading SWFs. The convenience is definitely a major improvement to the process, but it could potentially end up in a legal gray area after Adobe stops distributing their binaries.

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.

Hence WebAssembly + WebGL/WebGPU.

WebAssembly not gonna give you access to syscall that are simply not there in the Web API

There is functionality that is just not available while in the browser sandbox, so some flash apps will never work. But I'm happy to see this happening.

Preaching to the choir my friend, this is the correct path.

Reconciling those differences is part of the porting process. I do agree that it's a "pipe dream" to expect every single SWF out there will be ported, but it is definitely the right way to do it if you're trying to save a SWF.

Relying on old binaries of Adobe Flash Player is probably not a good idea from a legal perspective. I'm not a lawyer, and I haven't read the EULA, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't allow that type of redistribution.

Even if JS+HTML5 dies for some reason in the future, it's not a closed-source proprietary platform like Flash was, so preserving stuff will be much easier.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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

There's a lot of options! I use Unity3D. For 2D games, I'd recommend something with a more native web build.

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.

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

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

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/

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!

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.

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)

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.

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

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

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)

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.

Astonished to see this in 2020.

https://htwins.net/scale2/

this needs a html5 version

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

Someone script convert homestarrunner.com quick

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Plus interactive elements are suddenly unavailable or, depending on how the original video was rendered, smashed together at the end or beginning or wherever the developer put them in the timeline. Strongbad Emails are an example... the SWFs frequently had secret links and hotspots that would take you to Family Guy-style cutaways. In sbemail's latter years some of them were quite involved. You could even hit tab repeatedly and flash player would highlight them for you. I don't think any of this appears in the DVD release, or on rendered versions on Youtube.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com