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Comment by MattRix | Hacker News Reader

It is such a shame that no modern game development tool comes close to Flash in terms of ease of use, development speed, and integration of art+animation (I say this as someone who worked as a professional Flash developer for 5 years and then spent a decade working in Unity).

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Yep. It was also an amazingly natural way to learn to code. Gen Z has a lower barrier to entry than before for creating just about every form of multimedia content except games — I’d love to see someone build a fully integrated, easy-to-learn game design platform to encourage more of them to get into programming.

You might be impressed by the things some kids make with Scratch. I understand that Flash was ultimately a more powerful tool, but in terms of Flash games that a child could have made, they're definitely pretty similar.

It's impossible to tell which games were made by kids, but take a look at this:

https://scratch.mit.edu/explore/projects/games/

I'm a bit out of the Adobe Animate loop, but was a lot of functionality removed from it?

It hasn't had functionality removed but it feels clearly like an unloved product at Adobe. The updates have mostly managed to make it feel worse instead of better.

On top of that, for kids learning to make games, the idea of getting a $20/month Adobe CC subscription is a massive stretch. For it to catch on these days there would really need to be some free tier.

What was the free tier before, piracy?

The core animation tools are still in place from the Flash era, but simple distribution via SWF files is no longer supported in browsers. The animation tools in Adobe Animate are still excellent and are still in the creative industry to produce cartoon series on broadcast TV.

I think what made it so easy was mostly because it was 2D, but more important than that, it was 2D vectors.

I did a few Flash games myself when I was young, it was amazing, so quick to achieve a result. A decade later I tried doing the same over Unity, and I couldn't do much...

Vector graphic allow you to easily draw something quick and animate it easily with interpolation. It also has the advantage of looking great whatever resolution you got. 2D graphic allow you to not be concerned about performance that much, nor does it require complex manipulation to be used quickly.

We've built Construct 3: https://www.construct.net

Which with the addition of timelines editor and ability to add Javascript code we think is pretty much on feature parity with Flash.

Be interested to hear if we're lacking in any way compared to Flash as we'd like to close any of those gaps!

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