[amitt]

This is missing a pretty big chunk of the end-game(s) of Flash: social network gaming. All of the top Facebook games were using Flash. We built the engine for FarmVille, CityVille, etc. using ActionScript3. Our artists would author the animations and sprites in the Flash editor and we'd be able to drop them in seamlessly into the game.

Additionally, PC/Console 2D & 3D games were using Flash to author and render their UIs for a very long time via ScaleForm. They only discontinued it in 2018.

Flash gaming became much bigger than Newgrounds and had massive influence on how to build future WYSIWIG tools to empower designers and artists.

[ragona]

Yeah that’s a huge oversight. AS3 was in fact the highest paid language in the industry for some time, and it was all of the social games. Then we all mostly jumped ship to mobile or PC or VR or whatever.

But it was a very significant industry, every major games company had divisions building FB games, we had games hitting 20+ million DAU overnight, it was big business.

I made Flash games (among other things) at Sony, Disney, PopCap, and Amazon. I’m not sure people understand how widely it was used.

Now... I also saw the writing on the wall and made a hasty exit in 2012 because it was clearly dying. But for a while it was a vibrant and well-paying niche.

[meheleventyone]

The videogame industry is terrible at knowing about anything that isn’t in the ‘cool’ bubble. FB games were definitely deeply uncool and whilst people will have heard about and even played them they will never be part of games haiography. Same thing with games like Neopets and other predominately ‘girl’ games.

Even stuff like Roblox is only just getting noticed by game development influencers and it’s a huge platform pointing at the road towards the next big thing in games.

[ragona]

Yeah Roblox is nuts, when my son talks about a “new game he’s playing” he’s usually talking about Roblox.

[whywhywhywhy]

> ScaleForm

Glad this is no longer a thing, still remember playing Borderlands for the first time and thinking the UI was really janky and unresponsive feeling, then I googled ScaleForm because the logo was at the start and I hadn't heard of it and suddenly it all made sense because the UI had that jank that was really unique to poorly coded Flash content.

I'm pro Flash on the whole because of the explosion of creativity in the web game scene but ScaleForm was one case where the technology made a few engineers lives easier at the expense of making the end user experience way jankier.

[Kapura]

In AAA game development Scaleform has yet to make a complete exit. I just get used to seeing those several ms of unrecoverable time lost each frame.

[CountHackulus]

I currently still work on YoVille/YoWorld. I definitely understand the pain.

[0xy]

How did you find ActionScript compared to other more modern languages?

[BorisTheBrave]

Imho it holds up quite well.

Here's an article I wrote about it when flash was still a thing:

https://www.boristhebrave.com/2010/05/04/x-gems-of-as3-langu...

[ragona]

Major FB games were all AS3, which was a very standard language. If you’re familiar with C# or Java you’d be totally unsurprised.

In fact, Adobe hoped it would become the new JavaScript. The history of ECMA 4 was fascinating[1].

1: https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/

[collective-intl]

AS3 added classes and static typing on top of ECMAScript, but lost out to regular ES3 in browsers.

In a surprising twist of history, AS3's ideas were rediscovered years later with a language called Typescript that among other things added classes and static typing...

Flash development's language and tools were surprisingly ahead of their time!

[jordic]

There is still no replacement tooling on the web, the way you can manage movie clips (as instances), attach animations, control the timeline.. (compose them)... That was really a joy.. Also was awesome the feedback loop within the ide (just hit ctrl+enter) to run it and try it. On these times, flash was also the predominant option for embedding video on websites.. (there are lot's of stories that are coming back to now: preloading, lazy loading, easing... (I still follow Robert Penner for they ease equations). Thought people still uses tweenlite ;)

[ragona]

Ha hey, Greensock was and was and is the best, and it’s still going strong for Js. Frankly we could probably get half the experience of flash if we all just went and worked with that library!

[fenomas]

> AS3 added classes and static typing on top of ECMAScript, but lost out to regular ES3 in browsers.

That's a bit jumbled. AS3 was an early implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition spec - Macromedia/Adobe implemented it expecting that the same changes would soon be coming to standard JS. ECMA later wound up abandoning that spec (for reasons unrelated to Flash), leaving AS3 sort of stranded as its own separate language.

[ragona]

They were! We had much better build and art pipelines than many of the PC games I’ve worked on. And the metrics data tracking and ugly anti user behavioral stuff was years ahead of itself.

[zackbrown]

Apt that it was originally called Future Splash.