[zeveb]

> I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.

The thing is, all that's been replaced with JavaScript, which has all the downsides (well, it's not really proprietary, but JavaScript-heavy websites aren't really usable as something to learn from & modify, especially once minification comes into play) and has the great new flaw of not realistically being disablable, unlike Flash tended to be.

We even saw this week Google deciding not to support non-JavaScript browsers.

JavaScript is a boot stomping on a human face, forever.

[omg_ketchup]

I'm not even talking about the consumption side of Flash. I'm just talking about the tooling for creating Flash content.

Did you ever use Flash? It was incredible. Draw right there on the canvas with basically Illustrator-esque tools (or just File->Open whatever .jpg you want). You can add a keyframe in the timeline, and just drag the image to wherever you want. Then you hit play, it looks right, then you hit publish, and it would play exactly the same in any browser ever.

Also, ActionScript 3 was basically typed javascript, back in like 2004.

[cableshaft]

I'm with you. I used to be able to crank out a Flash game, with art, in a or two in my spare time, no big deal, not have to look anything up, I knew exactly how the whole system worked (I literally made games completely disconnected from the internet the entire time, my productivity was crazy high), never had to waste a bunch of time fighting frameworks or seeing how things interacted, and could get it to sing (although it had definite limitations. Everything existed in a movieclip object, for example, so when I was asked to port a C++ game that had 900+ objects on the screen at a time it really slowed down).

With Flash, I once ported a game to Flash, from scratch, with art (but no sound...although I could have added sound), in the span of 12 hours, and while it wasn't my most popular game or anything I still get people telling me how much they enjoyed it 15 years later.

In fact, the most popular game I ever designed and released, Proximity, I designed and released in a single week of work (in my spare time).

I have never been able to match the speed and flow of development that I got with Flash since with any game engine since then, and I've tried a whole bunch trying to find something.

The closest thing to it now seems to be Unity but that's a much bigger beast that I don't have a full grasp on and have to look things up or download various things from the asset store. It's possible to make games quickly, but they'll probably play and look like garbage if you don't take your time with them and hire a proper artist, judging by the flood of garbage Unity games released on Steam.

Pico-8 is also fun to program with (it includes a built in sprite editor, level editor, and music editor), but it's a little too limited for my tastes, since I can't really make a commercial product with it, and I'm not that great at doing 2d pixel art. But I still spent some time doing most of a port of Proximity while playing around with it and for people who can do pixel art it's a lot of fun to use.

* 12 hour game, Squarez: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/91933 * Proximity: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/183428

[jsjohnst]

These same tools exist now for generating similar content sans Flash. Heck, the company behind Flash (well, the acquiring company behind Flash) even makes some of said tools.

[tannhaeuser]

Flash did use JavaScript. More precisely, ActionScript, which is the abandoned JavaScript 4 with classes etc. very much like Java. What Flash had was a usable scene graph + synced audio, though, rather than half-arsed attempts to use the DOM/CSS, canvas (immediate mode 2D), undermaintained SVG, or WebGL. I wonder why we were so fast to kill Flash (myself included); maybe it would have been worth to try and open-up Flash. Many, many more designers could author Flash and create valuable content compared to the schizophrenic web stack we have today.