/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General

well, there's good money to be made with flash games on the internet

you can slap some ads on it

also, if it's good, some websites will pay big bucks for it

>>22728

If you respect your would-be gamers, you wouldn't make it in flash. Use HMTL5.

Regarding money concerns, that's irrelevant. It doesn't makes any impact what your game is written in. But flash will die sooner than HMTL, that's for certain.

>>22730

>also, if it's good, some websites will pay big bucks for it

More like "if it's good, someone will copy it, dump it on the app store, and make big bucks off it"

But if you become good enough at it, make a template for a dress up / dentist / surgery "game" and use stolen Frozen / Minions assets, slap ads on it, and boom, money.

>>22728

You're better off using JAVA.

HTML5 canvas has succeeded Flash.

I developed in Flash for around eight years. You can still use it for everything and it is a very good starting point for new people. As far as the job market goes, it is mostly dead.

There are flash to .exe converters and you could easily make a game like castle crashers that would be a success.

The problem with Flash is that anyone can unpack it and see exactly what code and graphics are in it. You could never make anti cheat and it is difficult to do multiplayer.

If you want to make a game for desktop I would encourage you to try SFML. SFML is absolutely amazing and runs ontop of openGL, you can draw 3d with it if you so desire. It also comes with networking and sound.

>>22831

>SFML

Seconding this, I'm currently using a python port of SFML and it's a nice balance between being too high level and something like pure openGL which is a pain in the ass to use.

>>22831

>HTML5 canvas has succeeded Flash.

I'm pretty sure flash still has higher market penetration.

If you're not going to make beyond web portal tier games there's nothing wrong with flash.

https://www.fgl.com/#about is great place to monetize your game if you want to rake in some buckaroos

If you want to make desktop games, Flash has always been a pretty meh choice. It's better for browser games. If you want an easy way into desktop games, use Unity.

>>22736

Flash is still enabled in every browser by default, unless there's been some issue. I've had to fight with Java to get it to run in the past. Flash is better than Java for browser games, but that's not saying much.

>>22831

>The problem with Flash is that anyone can unpack it and see exactly what code and graphics are in it. You could never make anti cheat and it is difficult to do multiplayer.

HTML5 has this too, but slightly worse. It's just downloading a JavaScript file instead of decompiling the SWF.

>>22728

There are still devs out there who use Flash for game development, and even release to PC and mobile and stuff.

Flash isn't as bad as everybody's making it out to be, it's just the plugin that gets bad rap. Several libraries exist that radically improve graphical quality and performance (try out Starling/Snapdragon and Spine), as well as libraries like Flixel and stuff, and Adobe AIR is a thing if you want to publish to other platforms.

>>22831

Huh, I've tried to do that for ages, but I could never find anything good for free. Do you guys have any suggestions for free decompilers?

So you mean I could see the source and get access to assets from any Flash game if I just found a good decompiler?

If you simply want to learn for your own personal enjoyment, or if you are planning to travel back in time and live in the year 2002, I would say go ahead and make games in Flash. If you have any serious aspirations of making games that people in the present era will take seriously, I would say don't even bother with Flash. Nobody plays Flash games anymore, and Flash itself is on its way out. I would be willing to bet money that by 2018 it won't even be supported anymore and by 2020 the world will have forgotten it ever existed.

GameMaker is OK if you have literally no idea where to start working on games, but I would recommend trying to learn an actual programming language simultaneously. GameMaker's built in language is unwieldy and you'll want to move away from it as soon as possible.

The one that everyone wants dead is the flash browser plugin, for a good reason. It's just a pure clusterfuck at this point. If you're targeting the browser, you're better off with HTML5.

AS3.0 itself is still useful, however. It is like javascript except more sane and readable. The structure is quite similar to C# and Java, so you can mentally migrate to those languages without much problems.

Its biggest plus in my book is that when it is used with Adobe AIR you can target multiple platforms in just a single codebase. You can target PC. You can target Android. You can even compile to IOS in Windows without using XCode. It also compiles to binary so it is far faster, and a bit tougher to decompile than your normal swf.

TL;DR: I don't think learning AS3.0 will be a waste of time. However, the flash browser plugin can die in a fire for all I care.

>>22728

I suggest you try Godot or C#/HTML5. Flash's strong point is its visual design which allows fast prototyping but once you have lots of code its pain to organize since code is attached to frames (at least in CS4). Flash can be decompiled to fully readable source code (AVM2/ABC bytecode) but this is common to all bytecodes.

Flash, Java, Silverlight and Unity plugins can be abandoned for all I care.

>>23339

> its pain to organize since code is attached to frames

Jesus christ son, it's called AS3.0 you only need two frames in a movieclip to do a game with preloading.

>>23256

But cant you convert swf to html?

>>23798

There are online tools, though I haven't tried them. I cannot vouch for their effectiveness. You can export html5 straight from flash cc, though.

Anyone got a good decompiler and a guide tutorial for it?

>>23818

Flash decompilers are hard to crack and the code comes really messed up, there are better ways to learn it, its easier to find tutorials for as3, not so much for as2 since it is really old.

I started developing with as2 a while ago, the game code is simple but im thinking about letting people have the .fla file since tutorials are shit or just make tutorials myself about what i know.

I dont know much about engines, but i have seem some people here tell thats not a good idea to learn it.