I had a formative experience with Flash as a middle schooler. I loved Albino Blacksheep, Newgrounds, etc. I thought the videos were hilarious and the stick-figure-style animation was approachable. So I acquired Flash, and I was blown away by how easy it was to create these silly animations. Automatic tweening was a miracle to me.
Since then I've done a lot of video editing with different tools, but I still think back to Macromedia Flash and how I, a child with no ability to code and no knowledge of HTML or Web tech, was able to make my imagination come to life on the screen.
I believe it's that powerful experience for novices that we're missing. I'm not sure how we should get it back.
I think the essential thing about this era is a gradual cultural rediscovery of ownership. We've just been through a very lengthy race to the bottom for all sorts of information - pretty much anything ephemeral and disposable is free or extremely cheap, and then heavily locked down to protect property rights. And it's built a kind of event horizon to culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital universe just disappear into a little footnote on a wiki page saying "yes, this happened". Memes, blog posts, videos, games, etc.
There is a game product called "Fortnite", and it's just had a huge in-game event, so it's clearly here, alive and well, but you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever.
And yet future culture is, as Alan Kay puts it, "the past and the present". It's our reaction to that hole, where nothing really builds on anything else, that, in turn, is motivating interest in products with longer time horizons, longer stories and histories to them.
An obvious metaphor for this is video games vs pinball:
* Fundamentally digital vs fundamentally analog
* Mostly design & marketing vs mostly manufacturing
* Trivially cloned vs scarce, unique
* Black-box artifact vs maintainable assembly
* Perpetually caught in the breathless hype cycle of tech, vs increasingly existing outside of that cycle
Pinball's days as part of the traditional amusement business ended with the 1990's, but it's found a resurgence of interest in the home market as a kind of collectable furniture - something to put in a rec room or a basement arcade, that retains decent trade value if maintained. A whole array of small manufacturers have appeared this decade to serve that market. It's much easier to understand a collector's market for it being sustained 30 years out, versus video game collecting, in which any product with a modicum of popularity will have had its primary content either already preserved through piracy(if emulated), or else impossible to reproduce(if a service). It's a much stronger version of interest in vinyl records or dead-tree books taking precedent over streaming music and e-books.
Because digital media has so little physical value, it is beholden to be entirely marketing driven, front-to-back, and to treat you as either a product marketer or as the product, and sometimes both. The true form of the medium remains always hidden behind the UI. Even your personal work, done on systems you wholly control, just disappears into a collection of files, where it is easily forgotten.
And in that sense I think we are not really asking, "Where is Flash? Where is Hypercard? Where is BASIC?" - because in different eras each of those tools did the kinds of things we wanted and expected from a beginner's tool - so much as we are asking, "Where is the actual medium? Where can I do work and preserve the original source material? Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless? How can I curate software when nobody can make any promises?" Tech continues its warfare for a platform monopoly, and so on this front we keep starting from zero, over and over. It's not hugely different from the space we've arrived at in professional software development, where dependency hell and code rot is an ever-increasing concern for all codebases.
> you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever.
Isn't that true of all one-time events, not just digital ones? I'll never be able to attend a Beatles concert or see "The Empire Strikes Back" on opening night or be celebrating on the streets of New York City on V-E Day.
It’s more that only a few years ago, the same experience could have been revisited - the technology and the means exist - but business reasons say otherwise.
In this case, it’s the Fortnite world.
If Fortnite were a game in the 1990s-2000s, the data (map, world, characters) would be on a CD or DVD and the multiplayer server would also be included on the CD: the community runs its own servers. If the developers release a huge new update - including over digital distribution - users still have the original discs and server software, thus if they want to relive “Fortnite 1997, v1.0’ they can - just reinstall it from the original media.
With the iOS App Store we used to be able to make versioned backups of the IPA files and restore them using desktop iTunes so if an over-the-air update for... say, Angry Birds, added an obnoxious amount of pay-to-win functionality then we had the choice to downgrade before things went to shit.
Now, we can’t do that. This is why I don’t buy mobile games anymore: I have no guarantees about my ability to keep what I paid for.
Angry birds was such a disappointment... I bought it, thought it was a neat game, and well worth the $2.
A few years later I wanted to show it to my kids, and the game I bought had turned into an abomination of ads, in-app-purchases, and dark patterns, and there was no way to get back the charming little game that I originally bought...
Wow, yeah so many dark patterns in kids games, lots of games that look cool and then you install them and have to watch a half minute ad for another video game every time you die. I remember renting NES games over the weekends and so I had to choose between a limited number of choices. The seemingly infinite number of games that exist now via the android play store is crazy but most of them are completely bad and would never get approved from any curatorial perspective yet they make money for the platform and the developer (evidently).
The same could have been said about World of Warcraft, but here we are with WoW Classic.
Digital experiences can be recreated, especially if motivated by profit. What won't be created are some of those moments that were unforeseen consequences (e.g. the Seed of Corruption exploit in WoW)
I fully agree with you, but anyway an online game cannot be repeated once the community has moved on. For example my son says that fifa, a soccer game that gets a new version every year is not the same after one year: the whole community has moved on the next version and thus you'll be playing alone to the preceding version.
> Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless?
If you had a Pentium 1 PC, would you not still be able to run DOS and BASIC on it? Software "breaking" only happens if you let it - you can still use Windows 95, or XP, and run all those old programs that no longer work. If you have a copy of Flash 4 you can still run that on supported hardware, make media using it, and probably still have people with modern Flash installations be able to play it back?
The difference between the pinball machine and video game is not so wide a chasm. The vogue of pinball came and went, and now it is a small community hobby. Hobbies come and go - just look at the resurgence in Dungeons and Dragons the last 10 years adjacent to a huge decline in "AAA" PC game RPGs.
In the same light, while the Fortnite gamer might never be able to re-experience the event that just passed, there are thousands playing Doom maps written in the mid 90s today on engines refined through decades of hobbyist volunteer work to provide features not even often seen in modern titles. And simultaneously there are new Doom maps being made all the time, entire games (look up the Adventures of Square) made with its engine, etc. That technology is now over 25 years "obsolete" but lives on through its community.
You touch on it - but it really does matter if you own it. All these transient experiences being offered as a moment of engagement by corporations all of which are held under lock and key and never see a bidirectional creative process between maker and consumer are all vapid and empty. The digital experiences that endure are those that go both ways, and that everyone involved can lay claim to and participate in.
Modern video games are themeparks, but the tooling available through projects like GZDoom, OpenMW, Godot, etc are sandboxes for creativity that no corporation can take away. This is why the free software movement even began, and why it has only gained relevance as technology has permeated society and culture.
But that concept extends beyond just video games - Blender makes its open movies, there are repositories and communities around free music, art, etc. Communities built around shared worlds all licensed permissively to encourage participation and collaboration in opposition to the common proprietary reality of creative products being weaponized against their own fans through copyright to reject participation. You just have to look for them - they don't have the billions in advertising to permeate your every waking second of consumptive behavior.
You brought up Doom, I'm still mapping for Quake. Quake and Doom are awesome because they are indeed sandboxes with open source code that you can play with at will. Also, these older games are quite a bit less complicated to make content for than some of the newer engines like UE4.
I don't think this is realistically true in the age of cloud services and forced, automatic updates.
Maybe it is if you painstakingly stick to decades-old software or FOSS - but this will mean you're missing out on a lot of progress made in modern software.
(edit:)
> ...and probably still have people with modern Flash installations be able to play it back?
Even if you got Flash running on your old PC, this is where things would break. Browsers deliberately increase the friction and technical expertise needed to enable Flash content, with the openly stated goal to drop Flash support completely in the mid-to-near future.
Learning Flash might still be a fun experience if you can keep it on the PC it's produced - but if you want your kid to pass their movies on to anyone else, Flash is nowadays a dead-end.
I agree though with the Doom thing. My suspicion is that in 20 years, many of today's games will be forgotten but people will likely still play FFIV on emulator - not because some artistic quality were better but simply because you can.
> My suspicion is that in 20 years, many of today's games will be forgotten but people will likely still play FFIV on emulator - not because some artistic quality were better but simply because you can.
Inn 20 years, emulators will probably progress enough that the (non-server-based) games people still care about will be playable -- anything where there's no server, or the server is just a DRM check and all the gameplay happens clientside. Some of the servers will probably be replicable locally for single-player or small-group play, too; I think there's already reverse-engineered server emulation for some online-multiplayer DS games, some of it even having been made before the official servers went offline.
Godot, Doom, and Blender are all great but none have the level of approachability that Hypercard and Flash had for the amateur. They allow determined creators to soar, but they aren't enabling people who would not otherwise be creative to make interactive media in the same way. The 2d/3d gulf is a huge one to cross, and that may be the main issue. There was also something very wyswyg about both flash and hypercard-though Godot definitely approaches that. It's just hitting it's stride popularity-wise, so I guess where people take it remains to be seen.
What a lovely, lyrical comment that inspires engagement. Let me start with a question, what do you mean by "things pressed up closest":
>culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital universe just disappear into a little footnote on a wiki page saying "yes, this happened". Memes, blog posts, videos, games, etc.
Is this just a fancy way of saying "digital things that are very cheap/free to distribute"? If that's true, then I'd argue that digital things have an outsized impact in people's lives, even more than physical things sometimes. After all, whats more important to you, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or the car you're currently driving?
And since that's the case, what's wrong with charging money for data that was expensive to make, even if it's super cheap to distribute? I feel like that's far more honest than giving away free entertainment data that's been marred by an ad stream.
I think the thing that's pressed up closest is a briefly filled container of code (the browser), that briefly redirects a server thread in front of your eyes. You have a chance to affect it's future course. But there is no ownership at all, not even of the blob that corresponds to the runtime image.
I think its funny that open-source software has created a world where software is even more proprietary than ever - not even the binaries every reach your machine! In that world, distributing binaries only doesn't really seam so bad!
Um, it's possible to play simulated pinball games that work just like the real ones except the "table" is a huge-ass monitor. Recreations of classic tables, like Addams Family are available as well as entirely new tables like Portal that do things no physical pinball table can do.
Sure, it's not like playing the real thing. Neither, in most cases, are emulated video games.
I think you have deftly described a bigger problem, as the whole industry gets more and more sophisticated and complex. The barrier for entry is so high now that I think it stifles young people's interest too quickly.
The great thing about Flash was the developer tool. Part animation studio, part simple programming IDE. It was a great balance.
Maybe there is a place in the market for framework to implement a flash-a-like in a HTML5 Canvas?
Not just young people. As in other creative arts, if the tooling is over-complex or high-friction it can simply kill the creative flow. We should aim to make things pleasant to use for experts as well as beginners. There is a great deal of philosophical resistance to this idea hiding just under the surface, driven perhaps by a sense that difficult interfaces are a test of worthiness. Consider the barrier to entry to create a 'hello world' mobile app - it seems awesomely, perversely difficult compared to the intrinsic simplicity of the task. I would argue that this is deliberate gatekeeping - if ordinary people could create content, this would threaten an awful lot of business models, including and especially the business models of people who run app stores and take a cut of the profits. Can't have the techno-serfs programming, can we?
I don't think it's gatekeeping. I think it's because experts need different tools to beginners, and have louder voices when a tool doesn't meet their needs.
Consider Ruby on Rails. It was the most beginner-friendly way to create a web app when it was popular, but the very things that made it that way - opinionated design, sacrificing speed/correctness/scale by using Ruby, "batteries included", and a cultish fanbase that drew new users to it - made it the target of justified criticism from experts who wanted flexibility, type safety, speed, lightweight design, fewer CVEs, and fewer annoying fanboys. Flash came under fire for similar things: performance issues, poor UX when used in the wrong place, constant security vulnerabilities, being a proprietary standard.
These are actually good criticisms! There's no shadowy cabal who arranged feigned outrage over flash vulnerabilities, people were genuinely upset that a proprietary piece of software was turning their browser security into a sieve and stopping screenreaders from working. The criticisms just failed to ask why it was so popular with beginners anyway.
I agree with much of what you say, but I disagree that RoR was "beginner friendly". It had/has a steep learning curve.
From personal experience, and from the (continuing) weekly HN "Hiring" posts that are looking for Rails devs, Rails is popular because it allows you to build an MVP for an entire product or company over a week. It gets rid of all the distractions when it comes to assembling the perfect stack and just works. It's not perfect by far, but, like Flash, it allows you to shortcut the technical work and get right to the creative work.
Of all of the areas where there is legitimate gatekeeping, like with the AMA and residency limits, software is one of the worst examples you could have picked.
Software is one of those spaces where there is an incredible amount of capital invested in making things easy for the lowest common denominator.
There are so many resources for people of any age and background to learn practical skills in this field. There are summer camps where 7 year old kids learn to program.
Not exactly. Such camps certainly exist, but they're not for everyone. I was tinkering with Linux at 7, but only because I had a technical parent who put it on the family computer. I'd say the important part here was that I wasn't given a coding bootcamp course to go through, I just got to play. Eventually, I figured out how to use single-user to re-set the root password and play as much supertux as I wanted. This probably shaped my passion for technology and "solving puzzles" of a technical nature more than anything else.
I'd say if you really want youth interested in technology, you basically need a "montessori model" for computers. I don't believe that's likely to happen in school; you need funding, which requires measurable results. There's also too much bad stuff on the internet for schools to run that risk at that scale.
There are two rough classes into which I would break "tech guys". The first is the sort who enjoys it for what it is. Shaves yaks configuring his system, tries out new languages for the heck of it, that sort. The second has a perfectly respectable career in software, and enjoys other things when he comes home at five p.m. I'm not saying one is better or worse, but at seven years of age, you'll only have the few of the first type _really_ interested. Type two will often switch to a different toy once frustrated (i.e. upon a serious bug). You can't expect everyone to derive the same level of marginal benefit from just playing with tech.
Type twos necessarily better or worse, but we don't put kids into "plumbing boot-camp" at seven expecting them to develop life-long passions. Maybe a few will, but not many. To put it another way, you'll get a lot more kids into architecture letting them play with legos free-form than handing them a kit and saying, "Build this model by following the instructions."
I had similar experiences to you and definitely fit into the yak-shaving variety (or at least I did before work destroyed my soul).
There's no question to me that early exposure and encouragement makes all the difference in educating kids. I can't understand why we're not engineering experiences in all these different fields for kids to build real stuff that can eventually turn into a trade. If you're a kid, even today, and you want to learn an adult trade young, your options are still pretty much just artist or programmer.
If there was a way to start doctors or lawyers young, maybe it'd make a difference. As a kid, I knew one girl that was a hospital volunteer, and she ended up going to Africa as an adult to try and make the world a better place by helping others. People don't realize how activities in formative years really stick with kids.
Instead of giving kids meaningful work, we're raising a generation that's going to be great at self-promotion and fortnite.
There is a way to start children young to become lawyers and doctors. Lawyers need perfect English. Doctors need perfect English and biology.
Our entire school system is wrong. :)
I am working on it. We force parents to go to school and that is wrong.
The key to rapid education is teaching the correct subjects. All science is functionally math. Physics is math and chemistry is math. Music is math. All written homework is functionally English. Art is functionally understanding of light and shadows, which is best taught through photography. Photography decouples ability to render (drawing) from ability to compose. Until the child is fluent at algebra and written English, teaching other subjects except for athletics relies on the child's innate talent or, more likely, their parents.
There's _at least_ one more critical component you're missing, logic and analysis. It will also be harder to keep a pupil's attention on two subjects for half a day than on a multitude of subjects for forty-five minutes apiece. After three hours being lectured on the same subject, I would get tired even in college; how do you plan to force eight-year-olds to pay attention in such a manner?
In other words, you cannot swap all time for study of english and mathematics and expect to simply achieve twice as much in english and mathematics.
> The first is the sort who enjoys it for what it is. Shaves yaks configuring his system, tries out new languages for the heck of it, that sort. The second has a perfectly respectable career in software, and enjoys other things when he comes home at five p.m.
I have found out that these are not in opposition at all. In fact, workplace that holds you in 80 hours a week largely prevents trying out new tech. People dont stay long because trying out new toys. If they do, then they are being dishonest with employer, honestly. They stay long because of stress, pressure, disorganization, etc.
The conflation of the two really not logical, it does not even makes sense. Why cant you go home at 5 and "try out new languages for the heck of it" wherever you feel like? Should you even try out that new language production project? (you should not)
You're misinterpreting the OP, he's saying that some people do non computer things after 5, not that they work 80 hour weeks. And it's not really the time spent, it's the intellectual approach to computing, where tinkering is an end in itself, vs a more transactional approach.
>Software is one of those spaces where there is an incredible amount of capital invested in making things easy for the lowest common denominator.
This is true for _education_, however the design of the tooling itself, as well as the purely code-based interface with which we like to rely on (no WYSIWYG or visual creative tools) is what makes it creatively difficult
Compare the experience of making some HTML5 canvas game to making a song in modern day DAWs. In the latter there has been so much investment into improving the workflow and the quality of the software to make the creative experience smoother. In programming, almost no effort is put into the creative experience, outside of niche fantasy terminals (e.g. PICO-8)
Actually, if you use Processing with Android mode, it's pretty easy to create a simple app. I made something with circles falling down the screen that you have to tap and they explode in a nice satisfying particle explosion (it was mainly to test and demonstrate the surprising addictiveness of even such a simple game feature). This took about an hour, starting from a clean Processing install, including having to select and install (checkbox + button) the Android mode and writing about 50 lines of code. In all fairness, I'm already quite familiar with graphics programming with Processing, but even that is super easy, I teach it to kids starting from age 10-11 (if they're clever and curious enough).
But these kids, the clever and curious ones, they'll find this on their own too, and truly many more cool and free things to create stuff with online. A few years back, they were all over these free github student developer packs, especially the credits for a Digital Ocean droplet server, which they used to host sites, minecraft servers (IIRC) or Discord bots.
In my experience Flutter does make getting a simple mobile app running quickly easy. It's not a drag and drop experience but the programming model is such that it doesn't take much code to get something interesting.
As an older programmer, Flutter is the closest thing I’ve felt to programming as a kid. It’s given me some hope that the JavaScript era will fade as a dark night of the programming soul. Kudos to the development team that put Flutter together.
ah yes, the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device...
...perhaps you mean the countless drag-and-drop code-free frameworks that enable people to create apps without writing code? Or that a basic Swift tutorial to do just that takes about 15 minutes, including downloading Xcode? I just can't understand this confused nostalgia.
Ironically, actual embedded devices are far easier to program, with Arduino. You type your code in a window (with all boilerplate and build system abstracted away) and click a button, and boom it's compiled and uploaded and running. This is because it was designed to be easy to use - ostensibly to teach young people, but in practice it means lots of hackers use it too.
It's not the default, but you can have that kind of experience with various toolkits for mobile devices too. I've seen workshops which kids left after an afternoon with their own simple "game" deployed to their phones.
> the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device.
90% of apps can be replicated as web pages, which are far, far easier to program and deploy. Frameworks do add a lot needless of complexity for little benefit. The reason is not a "test of worthiness" though - the purpose is developer lock-in and make it as much difficult as possible to switch to the competing platform. The only way to win this game is not to play
Why designing most mobile apps should be harder than slamming together VB6 form applications is something that is not entirely clear to me.
Although when people start arguing that programming a web page is easy, it really brings home how awful modern programming is, and how long it has been since there was widespread usage of really decent and simple RAD tooling.
My company has been using expo for mobile development because you can build a React app and expo does all the work to make it work on Android and iOS. It's not perfect but since we're doing React for the web app, it's allowed web devs to become mobile devs with almost no additional training.
It's called OpenFL[1] and it is exactly that! Supports canvas and WebGL, as well as a whole bunch of native targets too. This is a reimplementation of the Flash API in the Haxe programming language.
And ruffle-rs[2] is a reimplemenation of the flash player itself in Rust. (So you'd still be using ActionScript for authoring)
The first beginner tutorial is about displaying a bitmap and starts with a terminal [1]. This is not as discoverable as Flash’s tools, which felt more like MS Paint when first opened.
...yeah there's no way the creatives we're talking about are gonna use that. There must _not_ be any command line or scripting involved for most of the population to be able to use it.
But why reinvent the wheel? I think that the key to Flash's success is in its roots as an excellent, intuitive vector graphics editor called SmartSketch. (Way easier to use than Inkscape, IMO) They added animation to compete with Macromedia Shockwave in 1995, and the rest is the well known history of corporate greed and a victim of its own success.
The Flash IDE is still around, however (https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html), but Adobe's giving it up at the end of 2020 :( I can only hope that they open source it.
Anyway, Flash 5 Player .swf files can be exported as standalone .exe "Projectors". For example, the IDE tutorial one (https://www.sharhon.com/files/flash5test.exe) stands at 405 KB and still runs on Windows 10 as well. Surely it would be possible to wrap _real_ Flash projectors in a WebAssembly Windows NT emulator using a drag-and-drop webpage...and let the games begin.
Adobe Flash Player, the web browser plugin, will no longer be updated in 2020.
The Flash IDE, now called Animate, continues to be developed by Adobe. They have not announced an end of life for this tool. It will still be updated after 2020. In fact, it can now export a variety of new formats other than SWF files for Flash Player, and they've been expanding the animation features quite a bit in recent years.
It's unfortunate that many people are confused about what exactly Adobe has discontinued. So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020.
It’s worth noting that it’s no longer a user-friendly tool for making interactive experiences, though. The current version of Actionscript is working hard to be a Real Programming Language, with a lot more code to write to make anything happen. It feels like Java to AS2’s Basic, and you just can’t write stuff in AS2 any more.
(AS1 is gone too, it was something you had to write by selecting verbs in a massive dropdown, and good riddance to that.)
> So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020.
Animate really isn't as simple to use as Flash is, and bluntly in the modern Era the CC suite is too expensive to get those young users.
I wonder if Affinity will have a go at this in the long run.
I would love to see something with a Flash-like UI. I'm not sure if there is a place for it in the middle-school market anymore, though. I'll explain why:
I think an interesting part of my experience was that it started with watching. I just loved the videos and thought they were hilarious. I admired the people who made those videos and I wanted to join that circle of creators. And Flash didn't prevent me from doing that. Not only that, but it was a specific low-effort style of animation. The path from consumer -> producer was short.
So really, I think you have to look at what people are consuming, and then try and make it easy for them to "participate." I'm not sure if people are consuming Flash-style animations anymore. (Maybe they are, and I just aged out of the demographic.)
It seems like a lot of that creative energy has moved to sandbox games like Minecraft for now, where that community of creators and would-be creators still exists, and away from animation and Web design.
That's an interesting way to look at it. I know the Minecraft era definitely had its equivalent code-related fanbase who'd make plugins and mods in Java. The age of Minecraft has also faded away though (besides the most recent Pewdiepie revival) and I'm not sure Fortnite or the other shooter games of today have a programmatic side.
With Minecraft, even just watching a Youtube video and copying their build-style to make something cool is enough for a kid to learn that they can be a creator.
They realize that there's no magic; all it takes to make something nice is a little knowledge, and a lot of work.
From what I've seen of Fortnite, it promotes a different kind of creativity, which is more like creative problem solving (boxing people in, riding rockets, etc.) But it does have a sandbox mode that I've seen some interesting creations from.
Fortnite defintely doesn't AFAIK, and their nature as a multiplayer game invites competition, and therefore, cheating making it important for the developer to actually de incentivize modding. I am very disappointed that modding of famous games is going down honestly.
I think the place of animations might also been taken by video now. Back then, there were no ubiquitous video cameras and apps around them. Now, everyone can start making and sharing video clips with overlays/music/...
Totally agree. The creativity is still there, it just shifted to the latest medium that's easily available. Nobody could make cheap quick videos back before iphones and certainly couldn't view them easily on the web until YouTube came along.
And on that point it seems that Flash helped to kill itself by accelerating ubiquitous web video.
I would love to see something with a Flash-like UI.
The 2D GUIs of many 3D games were written in Flash. There are non-Adobe Flash players which can be embedded. The advantage was the authoring tools - the GUIs could be elaborate and graphical without much effort.
It's funny, I worked so intimately with Flash in my day job that I clocked this before I even knew the tech (Scaleform?) existed because badly made Flash content has a certain jankiness to it that I recognized instantly. The Borderlands 2 menu system comes to mind in particular.
As a kid, I could kinda understand how to go from programming in Basic to Pong or Space Invaders.
A kid these days has _so_ many more expectations if they're wondering how Fortnite works...
I had enough hubris as a 12/13 year old to write Space Invaders in ascii in Basic on an Osbourne2, and later to get a quite creditable imitation using sprites on an AppleII.
I wonder if kids these days look at computers and think "I could do that" about anything they care about?
These days though- kids have access to much higher level languages and libraries and frameworks that can make some of these processes much easier. While it is much harder to understand the tech stack from the ground up- you can do a whole lot with the high level tools closer to the surface.
Kids may not no how to go from BASIC to a video-game- but they don't have to write their games in BASIC. There are point and click game studios, there are really great physics engines available, there are libraries that attempt to make it simple.
I remember learning how to build mods in minecraft ~10 years ago- there were tools out there that allowed you to make creatures or blocks that inherited behaviors programmed in other parts of the game- and you could do a lot with that!
Do you have any pointers to, or keywords I can google, for some of those point and click game studios?
I've not tried to do anything like a game for decades, I'm kinda curious about that readily available tools kids could get their hands on these days... Closest I think I've come is launching Scratch from a RasPi's stock linux install...
Scratch 3.0 (released Jan) is great, if you want the shallowest learning curve. I was astounded-- played with it for 2-3 hours to know what my kid was learning and in that time wrote three simple games.
I've heard great things about 001 Game Creator (free for 7 days, then $60) for more substantial use.
It's been many years since I've looked into it- but I remember using a program called GameSalad back in the day. I used another couple of similar apps in middle school but I don't remember the names
There are options, at least if you want something to begin coding with; they're just a bit hard to find for the layperson that isn't following developer news.
For example, apps that run directly on mobile platforms (specifically, ones that don't need to connect to the 'cloud' to do their compiling):
- For iOS: Codea [1] (Lua), Continuous [2] (.NET), Swift Playgrounds [3] (Swift), Play.js [4] (Node.js + React Native) plus probably more (on that note, I really hope Continuous isn't abandoned, but it doesn't seem to have been updated in awhile).
- For Android: AIDE [5], TIC-80 [6], probably others (I'm not as familiar)
Moving up from mobile, you have FUZE4 Nintendo Switch [7] for the Nintendo Switch (excellent, but needs a bugfix update as there's lots of little annoyances). Probably the most kid-friendly thing there is right now IMHO, if you take into account the platform.
On the PC, there's just a huge amount of stuff. Minecraft [8], GameMaker [9], GDevelop [10], Godot Engine [11]. These are at least suitable for early teens.
Game Maker is hugely underrated and often dismissed because of its name.
It’s an incredibly powerful and easy to use game/interactive-app maker that can export packaged programs to Windows, OSX, Linux, and HTML5, then with additional licensing/fees to game consoles.
It has a drag-and-drop mode for absolute beginners that can let someone with zero experience be creating simple games in their first weekend playing with it.
Then it has GML mode which is their programming language with excellent documentation and a decent community cranking out tutorials and guides, which has put out some seriously legit indie games such as Red Strings Club, Hyperlight Drifter, and Hotline Miami.
It’s also not just for games. It’s great for making interactive stories (I’ve made interactive kids books with it), HTML5 demos and interfaces, 2D physics demos, and even does basic 3D stuff.
(Not affiliated just a big fan and use it extensively).
Game Maker was my first approach at "serious" programming after messing around with javascript in the browser (not that I ever finished anything, mind you.)
But I would suggest Godot as an alternative for beginners now. Even though I don't like the proprietary scripting languages either uses by default, between GML and GDScript, the latter seems more powerful, and thus more educational. You can do "drag and drop and make a game for some defnition of a 'game'" in any of the modern game frameworks. But really, that only teaches you how to use the GUI, not how programming works.
Also Godot has a version that uses C#, and there are bindings for other languages out there (I don't know how complete or useful they are, though) whereas unless I'm wrong, with Game Maker you're stuck with GML.
No sorry, I mostly make small games/interactive-stories/educational-things for my own kids. None of them have really been publish worthy yet.
I do hope to start publishing some children's games and educational interactive stories one day though, I just need to find an artist (or practice more myself).
There is http://www.stencyl.com/ also. Used it many years ago, so not sure how it stands now. But back then, it was a very cool product. Used at a couple of game jams.
Also Unity's HTML export, and most notably Adobe Flash (which is "Flash but on a canvas" in the most literal way, even though the main demographic are now animators)
>> Maybe there is a place in the market for framework to implement a flash-a-like in a HTML5 Canvas?
If by "framework" you mean "easy to use tool" then I agree.
Programmers are often the last people who should design tools - they dont bat an eye at having to edit a config file, tweak settings, install plugins, manage dependencies, run a compiler or other batch processing tool.
Except, except ... having watched my teenage daughter play some games recently, there seems to be a trend for pixel art going on, half the things she is playing have the graphical sophistication of the stuff I was playing on my ZX Spectrum (only a modicum of exaggeration).
It looks kinda interesting but the apparent mobile-oriented interface makes it highly unusable (and wastes a ton of screen space). The "legacy" version that used a more compact UI, menu bar and right click menus is much easier and faster to use (it took me a lot of time to figure out how to add a keyframe with the mobile-oriented interface which basically was moving my mouse over everything i thought was an interactive element to see a tooltip about what it does -- ironically this most likely wont be possible on a mobile device).
I was introduced to programming in middle school with Batch. A friend of mine was making a script to chat between computers and being able to make something interactive on a computer was so cool to me that I had him explain it. I learned Batch, then I learned Lua, Python, Java, and kept going. Minecraft which was really big at the time, drew me into making servers for my friends, which introduced me to plugins and programming them.
I think there will always be easy ways to break into tech, they just might change from year to year.
The barrier to entry is higher because people's expectations for what a website is is higher.
You can still make crappy HTML pages with very basic inline JS, but if you're a kid starting out, that's not enough. You should probably learn a JS framework and some graphic design if you don't want it to be laughed at.
Our field is just becoming more mature and advanced. Cars used to be easier to work on, too.
On the contrary, I loved VB and Delphi, and it is the reason why I mostly focused on Java and .NET as my daily tools.
Developers are users as well, and I think too many fail to understand this.
Whatever tooling makes it easier to develop for, means that I can focus on other parts of the problem.
I don't miss working like I did during the late 80, early 90s. Our computers are so much better for them to be reduced to a green phosphor VT-100 terminal.
You and I agree, but look at the market for end user programming, it is vastly under developed. You are a single data point, not the whole population.
End users are way smarter and more capable than programmers give them credit. Applications should be empowering users not capturing them in a walled garden fed by their masters.
> Our computers are so much better for them to be reduced to a green phosphor VT-100 terminal.
So much this. Every time someone harps about this or that great terminal application that looks worse than even MS-DOS applications from the late-80s (when most users had moved on from MDA cards) i die a little inside.
The opposite is the case, actually. It's far easier than ever to make animations and write software.
I would contend Flash was a miserable developer tool, a near feature-free IDE, and rather than "balance", it took a kitchen sink approach to letting you put any kind of code anywhere...in an object, on the document, in a UI event of a button, on a frame.
Meanwhile, there are quite a few flash-likes for HTML5, and many of them are smart enough not to use Canvas (much)!
What you describe as miserable was my introduction to software development. I never had any technically minded friends or family, and growing up I looked at programming the same way I looked at professional sports; out of my reach and not worth attempting. I started my career as a graphic designer and flash became popular a few years after I started working. The ability to "put code anywhere" allowed me to experiment without having to learn an entire language or ecosystem just to get started. The fact that the IDE was all you need to design, script, and publish content made "hello world" as easy as installing a single app. When I consider the landscape of programming tools in 2019 I can't imagine that kid from a poor family with no training or support being able to make the transition from novice to professional. It's true that browser dev tools and online tutorials have drastically lowered to barrier of entry for application development, but the leap from browser dev tools to being able to actually author and deploy a fully functioning app is enormous. In the flash days there was no difference between the hello world and the professional development environment. It's sad, because becoming a software developer completely transformed my life and provided me with an income over 4x greater than my parents' combined salaries when I was a teenager. When I read comments deriding the old flash IDE for its simplicity it makes me sad for today's generation of underprivileged kids. I hope there is still a path for them to lift themselves out of a life of few opportunities through the joy of programming.
Yes! My entry point as well, back in the Macromedia days, making interactive animations with gotoAndStop. When AS3 appeared many years later weaned myself into the concepts of OOP, partly out of need, partly out of curiousity ... but mainly to understand other's work. Looking up to guys like mr doob. Frontend tooling today is insane. The flash ide and actionscript felt like a standard at the time, with a huge amount of power abstracted away. I feel like it's only in the past 5 years that the real standards have caught up with the (admiteddly inaccessible) possibilities of pre-2008.
Maintenance doesn't really matter when you're trying to just get into something as a novice and voraciously create.
A larval developer's gateway project is all but guaranteed to end up as an incomprehensible mess of spaghetti that'll fall to pieces at the lightest touch after a summer of plugging away at it, but that's not what's important. What's important is that they could make something -- something real. By the time it's left as a shambling pile of kluges and bad practices that'll never see the light of day again, it's still gotten far enough to inspire something, and serves as a great point to move on to greater ambitions -- or even start from scratch with one's lessons learned and make it better, perhaps with a more advanced toolset that now seems infinitely more approachable than it did at the beginning.
This isn't a discussion about tools to create software that'll be refined, depended on, and passed on to new developers over the span of years. It's about bridging the gap between restrictive toys and actual non-trivial projects for novices to tinker with.
That part is (hopefully) obvious to the typical HN reader, but the fact that some things that make maintenance harder also make it easier for non-developers is sometimes missed.
The barrier to entry kinda needs to be high. The attention economy combined hordes of capable creative content producers means there is just not room for people who are not willing to
work really hard at something.
If you go back and watch some of the old flash stuff or play old flash games they are not good, they would be completely unnoticed today.
Lots of animators are still making indy animation, it's
just been drowned out on the major platforms due to how time consuming it is to create and it's basically not possible to monetize well outside of Anim8 now (YouTube algorithm favors frequent uploads and high video duration - not compatible with animation).
This reminds me of my discovery and learning Hypercard probably 15 years before you learned Flash. To me it was the same kind of creative spark. I was encouraged by Cosmic Osmo, and later Myst and the like. I never did learn to program with it.
I don't know where the modern equivalent is. Maybe they only pop up every couple of decades...
Everything young people do now outside of schooling and dedicated hobbies seems to be mobile-based, so Tiktok is probably the equivalent to Newgrounds these days.
This "novices" thing seems to me to be overblown though; Alan Kay has been beating the "programming for novices" drum for decades with Smalltalk and basically nothing happened. I would rather have professional-quality tools with decent Youtube tutorials, like Blender, Unity, Python, etc. have been developing.
> I believe it's that powerful experience for novices that we're missing
I think we have more "powerful experiences" for novices than ever before, which is part of the whole attention problem. In the early 2000, we didn't have YouTube, Netflix, WhatsApp, TikTok, etc. where tons of teens spend many, many, many hours in nowadays. Those who got access to Flash found a sink for their free time and after just a few hours will have figured out the basic elements. Try to get kids to focus for just these initial few hours on their own, without them getting distracted on some other platform or immediately trying to find a YouTube tutorial, instead of just trying things and actually learning the tool, rather than copying whatever someone else is doing in a video.
I know a lot of early Adult Swing shows were made with Flash (I think Aqua Teen?). What are studios using today? Is there anything equivalent today that matches the power of Flash for young animators?
Isn't Flash still viable for animation studios? I thought Flash Player is what's going away, effectively killing Flash playback on the Web, but Flash itself as an animation platform continues to be a supported, actively-developed and commercially available tool.
Adobe Animate is the successor to Flash's animation toolset. Animators use a number of different tools today, many that implement tweening, depending on studio needs.
Also, low or no-cost applications that are accessible to newcomers include Blender and the upcoming Procreate 5.
Yes it’s still very commonly used by animators. They actually changed the name of the application to Animate but not too much has changed over the last 10 years. We still use it heavily at our studio for 2D game animation and short form animation for TV/web.
Since then I've done a lot of video editing with different tools, but I still think back to Macromedia Flash and how I, a child with no ability to code and no knowledge of HTML or Web tech, was able to make my imagination come to life on the screen.
I believe it's that powerful experience for novices that we're missing. I'm not sure how we should get it back.
(edit: phrasing)