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Comment by phailhaus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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