I will miss you, Adobe Flash
(Originally penned Jul 2015)
Adobe Flash has been on the way out for years. If you're anywhere in the world of game design, web design or just nonspecific software development, this is something you've been aware of. At a time when far too many devices in use by the general public were of the Apple branding, the decision on their part was to not directly support Flash on their products, and I don't think there was ever going to be a return from that tipping point. There's a pretty well known article by Steve Jobs himself on why the decision was made, and we're definitely past the point of arguing whether or not he was right (he wasn't). For some reason another he didn't want Flash to continue and so it didn't.
At this point, almost everything on the internet that you think uses Flash, probably doesn't anymore. Google has switched to HTML5, meaning that so too have the services it owns, like Youtube. A quick internet search will net you dozens of articles from fairly high-traffic websites published over the last 6-8 months about how they're swapping their key services over from Flash to HTML5. And that's probably a good thing. I've spent countless hours ranting both on and offline about how garbage Adobe Flash is. It's slow and bloated, exceptionally buggy for what it is and frankly it just lacks about a million features that could potentially make so much more out of the unique, visual-focused format that Flash has.
So why then even now is it still used by 10.6% of all websites? Why is newgrounds.com, a website ENTIRELY dedicated to the Flash-based creation of visual and interactive media, still going strong after an entire decade? I've done enough bragging about this over the years, but without going into details, Super Smash Flash 2 has essentially the highest, and most consistent, player traffic of any free online game both as an in-browser AND downloadable .exe. It's because despite its flaws and limitations, Flash is capable of something almost no other development platform is.
It's capable of making programming look easy.
All of my first games were in Flash, and the same goes for a huge majority of any indie developer you've ever heard of, and countless more that you probably haven't. I think it's safe to say none of us would be game developers right now if Flash hadn't existed. Those hilarious, epic (see 'stupid', 'inane', 'repetitive') videos you watched on the school computers in class? They were made in Flash and probably would never have existed if there hadn't been a platform that was so completely inviting to those of us who didn't know anything about how computers worked other than that we knew we wanted to make stuff move on the screen and show other people. HTML5 can do an incredible amount of things that Flash can not, but it can't entice that incredibly important demographic of people that fall right on the line between inexperienced but passionate. In Flash you have a stage, which you can immediately drag things onto, a visual timeline that you can scroll through and quickly add more frames to, and tools that automatically animate your creations for you. There's no actual programming on-screen until you want there to be, and you won't need it until you want to implement user interactivity.
It's safe to say that Super Smash Flash 2, while probably not the most complex thing ever created in Flash, is certainly one of the most taxing on the relatively weak engine. I think it's fair to assume that the development team I've worked with has had more experience pushing Flash to (and sometimes beyond) its absolute limits. If you want to know what Flash can and cannot do, ask one of us, because we've probably tried it. When you say 'Super Smash Flash 2' functions pretty closely to a real Smashbros game, but...' we're ecstatic to hear it no matter what comes at the end of that 'but...' because it has been years of work to reach that point. If it runs at the correct framerate even most of the time, we're proud of ourselves. But every single one of us on the team can give it a go. Those of us with backgrounds in strictly art or programming, and those of us with backgrounds in neither, can open up Flash and look at our character/stage/whatever files and are generally capable of making the changes or additions to the game that they want to.
So yes, I know exactly how terrible Flash is and how much better HTML5 is. But Super Smash HTLM5 would never have happened. Youtube might never have happened. Everything you've ever watched or played that came from Newgrounds (which is probably a lot more than you think!) would never have happened.
After SSF2 is done, I'll be finished with Flash forever. But that doesn't mean the generation of developers should have to be.
