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Comment by thebouv | Hacker News Reader

And yet, there's still no good replacement for building those types of Flash games. HTML5 game development isn't close.

Have you seen some of the html5 games on itch.io? Very impressive https://itch.io/games/html5

It's a lack of IDE. There's nothing stopping a game riding atop the browser's engine from being performant and fun, but the tooling to get there is nearly non-existant for a lot of people.

We desperately need an HTML5 based game dev IDE with feature parity of Flash. Is such a thing even possible?

Shooting from the hip:

Technically, yes. Commercially, no.

Wouldn't unity qualify? Personally I think the decline in browser based games has more to do with a lack of interest in that gaming format, not the limitations of current web technology.

Complaining for lack of tooling and doing some research require different efforts :)

Unity is just one example that can export to web. There's https://playcanvas.com/ too and a plethora of other stuff :)

Unity demo: https://wasm.bootcss.com/demo/Tanks/

This is what I figured, that today's equivalent of Flash gamers are just on mobile games instead. I do miss the anarchic quality that the Flash ecosystem had in the 2000s, but I think that's more a function of the type of people who spent time online back then.

Construct 3 is pretty good, but it's just not as easy to deploy self contained applications, and browser variations are an issue.

I'm curious whether Adobe ever looked at outputting HTML5 with their Flash tools, and what the outcome of that was.

They did. They renamed Flash to Animate.

They did and it was pretty good 3 years ago when I last used it. It's possible to merge it with your own code, but it was bad at managing images and SVGs. Flash's strong suit, at the time, was the vector rendering.

The major components of Flash are a vector graphics engine, a timeline based video editor, and a scripting language. Leaning on browser SVG support and exec(), you could write an extremely bare-bones version in a couple of weekends.

It'd be a great open source project. As a commercial product, it'd probably be enough to support a small team, but I don't see a way for it to get huge.

Construct 3 is not a perfect solution but is one of the best;

I created quite a popular tower defense in flash back in 2007 and I’ve been thinking about redoing it in HTML5 but realized some major issues around tab backgrounding that will cause complexity in the remake vs Flash.

Construct is suitable for that.

https://www.scirra.com/

Haxe plus OpenFL or HaxeFlixel?

Isn't Haxeflixel built on top of OpenFL? So by using it you should get both the higher level HF stuff along with lower level Ofl stuff.

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