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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I really really wish I was a little older during the Half Life / Flash era of game development. Will we ever get anything like that again? Nowadays this kind of creativity always seems to exist in walled gardens like Roblox. I feel like the concept of software freedom as the gnu folks pitch is the environment that that half life / flash area of modding and game dev existed in.

Ugh now even if you formally make a game you can't even publish it to anything other than PCs without getting permission from console companies or google / apple! Well I guess f-droid is an exception, or, if you make your game a browser game.

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Minecraft is comparable. I think the general trend is right though, there was a lot more creativity in random Warcraft/Half Life mods. Shit, DOTA was a Warcraft mod first.

Arma also comes to mind as a moddable multiplayer game. Crossfire as well, not super popular in the West nowadays though.

I miss Flash games!

Wasnt the modding scene a result of game dev from scratch being inaccessible? Downloading UE/Unity/Godot and making your dream game is probably easier nowadays than trying to make it as a HL mod then.

It had more of a cobbled together feel.

You could inject code in a lot of places and people were doing wonky things. I think it had to do with the user base being far smaller at the time. Knowledgeable people were still a significant part of it and security was far less of concern.

There was also far less money involved which is always a great filter for the kind of personality you want in this kind of community.

Yes and no.

Modding a game means that you have a specific starting point, the original game, which you are probably a fan of. And you may want your creation to be a part of this original world, share some (or most) of gameplay elements, design elements, story elements etc.

People modded Half-Life not only because modding Half-Life was somewhat easier than making an FPS game from scratch, but also because they wanted to explore the original story from another angle, or they liked how engine feels to play, or for whatever other reason wanted a starting point to be a complete game. Kind of the original asset store: the assets of the game you are modding.

To me it is about focus. If I am interested in game AI, I can mod a game and focus on just the AI. No need to build out the rest of the art assets and design.

If you are a big fan of open world games, GTA and Skyrim took teams of a 100 people, years of effort to make. Not something an indie is going to be able to reproduce. Modding allows you to create in that world.

Third would be reach. Getting people to try out a mod for a game is often much easier than getting them to try out a whole new game.

There is nothing stopping you from making a web browser based JavaScript game right now that you can throw up on a basic webpage and share a link for people to go play instantly. You just don’t want to!

I don’t understand the downvoted, you really can just make a pure JavaScript game. Pick up an easy rendering library like PixiJS and just start making a game loop, etc.

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