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Comment by salt-licker | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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