what a trip down memory lane.
for some extra nostalgia, check out "one finger death punch 2" game (and its prequel). i bet it's sort of an homage to those animations.
When stick figures fought
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Re: When stick figures fought
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel that way about a lot of things. Maybe it's just nostalgia...but heck we had Flash, Frontpage, VB,...we were spoiled. I sometimes wonder why such concepts went away, and everything became far more complicated.
Some tools were certainly better, like Flash. Mobile made a lot of things complicated. Half the game dev tools still don't run properly for mobile. HTML5 was supposed to make things easier, and for a while it did, but it got rapidly more complicated afterwards. Some things are much better today, like Procreate.
I dont think HTML5 was supposed to make things easier. It is just that major players wanted to get rid of flash for own reason (some of them valid) and HTML5 was something they were able to point at. It was never easier or even half replacement, it was significantly more complicated and crappier experience for an average normal creator.
It never even got some convincing demo. All those I have seen at the time were the "spend a lot more time to produce something much less impressive" kind of anti demos.
Re: When stick figures fought
#33Macromedia Flash had probably the best UX of all the programs ever created. It all goes downhill from there.
Is there any reason why they couldn’t be emulated with WASM+canvas?
No, and a lot of Flash projects have already been converted; notably, Google was one of the first to release a flash-to-html5 converter, because a lot of ads were Flash at the time.
But Adobe's missed opportunity was keeping Flash alive, "just" adding a html5 / canvas / JS version instead of the browser plug-ins that were killed when smartphones/tablets refused to support them.
Re: When stick figures fought
#34These animations got me into Flash and soon after into programming thanks to ActionScript, one copycat music video that maybe made even stronger impression in teenage me was a sad adult-themed music video from 2004, I just found ii after looking online for a bit: I love death - Lodger (Finnish band) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BoFQV4jXun4
Same, I had been making stickman animations in powerpoint of all things, before a friend mentioned I should try FlashMX.
I even made this terrible thing as my first foray into AS2:
Re: When stick figures fought
#35I remember a “choose your own story” stick figure Flash app, called Time to Die (I believe), where the “protagonist” was a condemned convict, used as target practice by scientists.
You could pick weapons used by the scientists. In most, he’d just get blown away, but in one scenario, he grabs the gun, and kills everyone in the facility.
Not sure if it was this guy, or was just inspired by him.
Re: When stick figures fought
#36SFDT was the first online community I was a part of. It was a special time on the early internet. I feel so lucky to have been a very small part of it.
Can't believe this is the only mention of sfdt so far on this thread. I have similar nostalgia about it being the first online community I joined. Collaborating with others, getting a glimpse into their personal lives, chatting off-platform on MSN/AIM. I wonder if that experience exists for kids in the modern day internet...
Re: When stick figures fought
#37This unlocked memories I forgot I had. Not only playing these games, but Flash introduced me to gamedev. I can clearly remember struggling in Actionscript, trying to get collision detection and resolution working. I never got it to work properly lol.
By the way, if anyone wants to relive some old flash games/movies, there is https://ruffle.rs/, an open source Flash implementation. It's great!
Re: When stick figures fought
#38This unlocked memories I forgot I had. Not only playing these games, but Flash introduced me to gamedev. I can clearly remember struggling in Actionscript, trying to get collision detection and resolution working. I never got it to work properly lol. By the way, if anyone wants to relive some old flash games/movies, there is https://ruffle.rs/ , an open source Flash implementation. It's great!
Man the Flash era, and the overall vibe of creativity on the internet back then (hey it was only 20 years ago), was the kind where you could feel a limitless potential for the future, where everyone would be awesome.
Then it all congealed into the tentacles of 4-5 corporations and now we're forever stuck in their "How do you do fellow kids" cringefest..
AI also ha[s/d] potential, but it's already getting crippled at birth by corporate idiocy and lawsuit fever.
Re: When stick figures fought
#39the Xiao Xiao Flash series were amazing. I always wondered when someone would come up with a beat'em-up game with that style. Simple, fast-paced, lots of free movement and use of tools/weapons.
Re: When stick figures fought
#40I remembered Alan Becker ( https://youtube.com/@alanbecker ) who creates stories with an array of his stick figure characters. Sometimes, they interact with real world too!
Yes when I saw stick figures mentioned on HN I immediately thought of his "Animator vs Animation" [1] (to which I've just rediscovered the title!)