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Not Flash? Then what?
7 years ago
splingmer posted to my shouts about how Flash is going away. And they're not the only ones; I've been notified that by multiple people. I heard about it, but never really cared. If Flash was killed off, there's other ways.The only reason I created games in Flash was because a friend had given me the Adobe suite back in college. I used the suite for photoshop way back when, but then the UTG thing happened, I saw how it worked, saw how I already had the tools and said "sure, why not?" and just continued from there. No active thought about it, it was just the thing I had on hand at the moment of inspiration.
Now that Flash is really dying off (though it might still be playable through hosted sites like FA anyways?), what do people think is the best way to play games through a browser at this day and age? HTML5? Unity? Something else?
I don't keep up on this stuff. I still don't really care. Coding languages are coding languages, jumping between them isn't a problem. And while I could do a bunch of research myself to figure it all out, many of you keep up on these things much better than I, so it's much more efficient to ask. What do you guys think Nimin and other text games should be built with?
you could poke fenoxo, he got TiTS compiling into a .exe wrapper for people to download
https://www.w3schools.com/graphics/game_intro.asp
There's also Unity, which is free at this level.
Depends on what sort of mechanics you want to do and what you want to support... HTML5 and Unity have the advantage that they work on both mobile platforms and PC/Mac.
Demo thingy at https://dragontamer8740.gitlab.io/unnamed-game/
Git repo at https://gitlab.com/dragontamer8740/unnamed-game
BTW, if you (@Xadera) were to put the .FLA on github so we could more easily compile it, I'd love to try to make some additions. Not having the .fla is a real bummer when it comes to wanting to test my contributions.
Basically, it's just a framework made specifically for games. Write a game once, and it will run on all supported platforms, usually with some modifications.
OS, Android, Tizen, Windows, Universal Windows Platform, Mac, Linux, WebGL, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Wii U, 3DS, Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, Steam VR, PlayStation VR, Gear VR, Windows Mixed Reality, Daydream, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, tvOS, Nintendo Switch, Fire OS, Facebook Gameroom, Apple ARKit, Google ARCore, and Vuforia.
That'll suck.
It's also easier on users since you don't have to create executables for different platforms. Compiling an exe wrapper works for Windows users, but it leaves Mac users out in the cold.
I'm working on things like your game but in ReactJS and a few other languages, for me it's about the writing more than the playing.
Other suggestions could be Ren'Py, which is a visual novel engine, RPG Maker , which is Ruby based, and Unity CAN do 2d quite well, but it probably is massively overkill for this type of game.
There's probably better options for text-only though.
Learning Unity can have some big humps to get over before you get comfortable using it, and it is absolutely overkill for a text-based adventure game. Unity's forte is 3D games and object-based realtime graphics. I will admit it has some really handy UI options though.
It saddens me that Flash is being deprecated. There is too much content out there that runs on it...
https://nim-lang.org
For text game alone then Twine maybe easiest, but is not good for games with combat. Twine has every choice or action is a hyperlink that must reload the whole page, which can be slow. For Nimin, combat in Twine would get very slow, frustrating.
Java is not easy to write in, and needs user to install stuff first (Java runtime) before they can use the game.
C# is a silly suggestion.
HTML5 would probably be the best for most other types of browser games but if it where up to me i would just have a download link for the game.
what made flash great back in the early 2000s was mostly the low bandwidth usage which mostly is not a concern any more because people have internet connections that can keep up with more detailed formats.
I mostly find downloads for old flash games i want to play anyways so i can run them on a local flash projector for better performance.
even then they still run like garbo.
(lol didn't mean for this to turn into a flash rant.)