About 15 years ago there was a cute flash game where you had a little cube world that was a puzzle to grow into a bigger fancier environment by clicking on trigger points in the correct order.
I have no idea what it was called, and can’t describe it well enough to search for it if it still exists. Every couple of years I try.
Resources like this give me hope that little gems and works of art from the past will live on, even if the underlying tech is gone.
I used to love the eyezmaze games and for about a year or so, I would eagerly await the next instalment in the series. Recently I learned that the developer has cancer and his wife seems to have left him. I think his Twitter also went silent a while ago. Very sad, considering how much joy these games brought me and certainly countless others in the mid-2000s.
Edit: it wasn’t cancer but a heart defect of some sort.
This site ripped its entire database from Flashpoint Archive (https://flashpointarchive.org/), including all of the metadata, screenshots and "Hall of Fame" list. As a contributor to Flashpoint, I'm not opposed to sites like this (as long as they remain nonprofit endeavors), but I think they should make these facts clear.
In addition to its desktop client, Flashpoint Archive also offers its own experimental web frontend called 9o3o (https://ooooooooo.ooo/static/browse/), also using Ruffle for playback. It's not as fleshed out as Flash Museum yet, but games are embedded at their intended resolution and other efforts have been made to improve game compatibility, so I think it is already a worthy alternative. Check it out!
Holy moly, honored to see my game Bloody Fun Day in their hall of fame.
Unfortunately there seems to be some bugs in their player, the RNG isn't working so all the cuties spawn the same color.
I also wonder if these newer html5 flash players are able to spoof the domain, so all these games can bypass their site locks. which was the style at the time...
Maybe someone can help me find this, as I can't remember the name: There was a Flash "game" where you control a prince, leave the castle, fight a dragon, and the prince increasingly questions and then resists his (your) irrational choices.
E.g. in the beginning you jump from the balcony into the garden simply because that is the only way forward. Then he says to himself "Why did I jump from the castle balcony in the middle of the night?! I should go back immediately!"
It's a side scrolling platformer in pixel art, and more a short art project than a game. (Though maybe it was one of those early canvas based HMTL5 games.)
Ruffle[0] can be embedded in your website to make flash work in modern browsers. Neopets actually did just this a few days ago[1] to bring back their catalog of old flash games.
So if you can find a way to write Flash (the old tools should still be fine, but I haven't looked too deep) you can leverage it and let folks play today.
Absolutely. Get the authoring software, (I hear a certain animate archive has them) and post to NG like all the Flash forward jammers have
Ruffle works wonders
I think you may underestimate how approachable flash was to non devs. There is something about an animation engine that triggers code on a given frame that upends how most devs think about code. The main reason to keep it around is I’m not sure there’s anything else like it. Hypercard I understand was close.
That said, part of what made flash approachable was also the ecosystem and the world in general. I don’t expect to see another cambrian explosion that was flash again in my lifetime, and it’s probably ok to let it die, given how tied it was to the zeitgeist of the early 2000s. Still, working for a replacment platform rather than just exporting from existing platforms is probably something the world will likely always need every generation. It’s all about what catches the interest of kids, and there is a known dichotomy between building for experienced users and building for beginners. And platforms will tend toward experienced users over time (mosty because repeat customers are much more profitable than new customers).
Ya, it's not that we want to keep flash alive, it's that we want a similar approach to building web content. Unity has some similarities, but it's much more complex to do basic things.
The difference is that 9o3o is Flashpoint's official (experimental) site, whereas Flash Museum is a third-party site that imported Flashpoint's database into WordPress and reuploaded the Flash files into an S3 bucket (without preserving directory structures or accounting for multi-asset items).
They have a bunch of neutral's games, which I'm very happy to see. They've made some of the best escape the room games I've ever played. Neutral is still actively developing (https://neutralx0.net/) but I don't think they've ported their old stuff over.
Edit: I tried to load a few but unfortunately none of them actually work. Tried a game from another dev I like and though the game loads, the screen is cut off so you can't see all your inventory.
Or... you know... Newgrounds.com. That's also a "living flash museum" in a way, as it has been around continuously since 1995 and still will show you flash movies from any date.
Shameless plug, my original Flash puzzle game Psychopath was recreated as a modern react site (with the original levels imported) and native app and many of the players who are from the original community back in 2005 are playing and creating new levels https://pathology.gg
I loved playing Psychopath back in 2006 and built a Java clone in 2007 for a class. I love how many awesome puzzles emerge as people pieced them together to make levels on top of the simple rules. I also remember enjoying Stick Avalanche & Boomshine. Thanks for all the fun times & awesome to bump into you!
I never officially released the Flash version of Proximity 2, just posted it on a forum once to get feedback. I abandoned the Flash version of Proximity 2 and instead ported/refined it to iOS and Xbox 360 (released on Xbox Live Indie Games service). But I probably should have released the Flash version officially anyway, it was pretty far along.
I keep meaning to at least make executables of these and release a few of these on itch.io, maybe clean a few rough edges, although I keep putting it off. Maybe someday.
On another thread domain locks came up. I found this issue on ruffle's GitHub which was closed-- I'm not sure if it was actually implemented-- it would require the dev integrating ruffle to specify a URL to emulate.
Related, the person who made classics like “Mud and Blood” has kept up development of a new version of it on steam. I’ve been a bit addicted to it recently!
Aw, I was super exited to see the Requiem for a Dream website again - this really was my first big WTF moment for artsy stuff on the internet (after frog in a blender). Unfortunately it only works for the first 20 seconds or so, than it ends with a white screen :(
Oh wow, Ruffle can finally do blurs, shadows and other bitmap effects! Lots of late Flash games relied on them and weren't rendering quite right last time I checked. Gotta re-test my collection.
Sometime between before 2008 until ~2019 (!), Citi (then Citibank) had a virtual credit creation Flash-only widget that could create virtual cards with optional limits of amount and/or time.
It's just checking the url header and can probably be spoofed easily enough.
It was a minor protection to stop the rampant copying and posting to hundreds of Flash sites that would take people away from going to your site to play the game, where you might have some ad revenue on it. It became less popular to do that once libraries existed that could embed ads within the game itself.
I never did either, and didn't make any money off my Flash games (except a little money from a commissioned game, seems like a pittance nowadays) :/. Did help me get into the game industry professionally, though.
Sometime in the late 1990s early 2000s there the website for bomb hip-hop - which was an amazing indie hip-hop production group - had this really great flash demo that I think is gone from the web forever.
Basically just a looped beat and you could play with different elements that made scratch or other hip hop sounds- might have even been what amounts to an interactive link box
If I had any money I’d pay if someone could find it again but alas I think it’s gone forever!
In the early aughts it was fashionable for web sites to have elaborate "intro" pages, usually animated using flash. They were so ubiquitous and annoying that someone created a parody at skipintro.com. Does anyone know if the skipintro animation can viewed anywhere today? It looks like the Wayback Machine has snapshots archived, but trying to load it returns an error.
I get "Something went wrong :(" because flashmuseum.s3.amazonaws.com requires Referer HTTP header to be set, but I actually like this as error details shows me the link to .swf file to use in a standalone Flash player.
> On our website, Flash content will run on your browser using the Flash Player emulator ruffle. Ruffle is an open source emulator built using the Rust programming language. It uses WebAssembly to run Flash content on modern browsers
Amazing. Is this related to efforts by archive.org to get all of their archived stuff working? (Believe they also are using Ruffle)
I contributed to Ruffle. They don't reverse engineer (this is explicitly a no), the knowledge comes from the (poor) documentation and from the open sourced flash virtual machine.
That’s really impressive. And good to see. I assumed all this flash content was just lost. Surely there are lots of bugs or unsupported features but hopefully it continues to be developed.
I suppose another option is to just use a browser tgat does support flash? Seems like some exist.
Ruffle isn't a reverse engineered project, from what I can tell. it seems like they're following some spec, and comparing with the flash player, not decomping it
Where are they getting all the Flash files from? Just downloading them all out of the Internet Archive? Kinda weird. Why not just support IA's archiving and hosting efforts
I have no idea what it was called, and can’t describe it well enough to search for it if it still exists. Every couple of years I try.
Resources like this give me hope that little gems and works of art from the past will live on, even if the underlying tech is gone.
Edit:
Wow, this time I found it: https://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/cube/
HTML5: https://www.eyezmaze.com/sp/2016/08/growCube.html Original: https://www.crazygames.com/game/grow-cube
HN is just serendipitous