I've owned Clickteam Fusion 2.5 since June, and in that time I've gathered a good bit of knowledge on game development and programming. Of course it isn't the same programming as Unity or UnrealEngine 4, but I've learned how to make games with it. I've collected my knowledge into one game, a platforming game, with simple vector graphics. I'll be explaining various aspects of how I made it in a few sections. The art, the code and the design. The art: I went with my tried and true minimalist vector style, designing assets in Illustrator before rendering them and sending them to Fusion. As for backgrounds, I used my traditional style which are much more complex than my foreground graphics for an interesting blend of styles that mesh rather than clashing. Image one is of 'Level 3' and image two is a background. They weren't hard to make and maybe took about 15 mins to make each one. Next I worked on the code. Fusion's coding can be confusing to look at but is rather simple when you get the hang of it. The gist of the coding is that instead of writing out commands, I make qualifiers on the left and results on the right. This way I can see exactly how every object is interact with each other and if there's a red X it means there is a bug (which there are none!) and that saves me a lot of time. One confusing thing though is how there are different "tiers" of code. This screen is for one level and has to be replicated for every single level, but other pieces of code are universal and don't require me to relist them every level. Learning what code should go where is part of the learning curve. The game's design came from many places. The first influence was a fangame I was working on. It was an extension of an unfinished Flash game which I've talked about on here with my blogpost about "Coding with Unicode." That game was a platforming game and the knowledge I aquired working on it was very important for this game and influences from that game can be seen in mine. Another key part was earlier games I have made in Fusion. Both art and code wise, the game shares a lot of it's "DNA" with another game I made. That one was complete and can be seen below: It was a horror puzzle game and I'm currently working on a sequel that has a lot better graphics and animations, plus an into animation made in Adobe Animate and multiple endings and many secrets. I'll have to talk about it in the future but for now this is my current project which I'm excited to see how it turns out.
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2020 has spelled the death for a lot of things, but one that sticks out to me is Adobe Flash. With the rebranding of Adobe Flash to Adobe Animate and my browser Opera no longer supporting Flash along with Google Chrome, it really is the end of Flash games. I keep Firefox on my computer for that one purpose, it still supports Flash. Flash Games were in their peak when I was playing them in elementary school (2010-2015) and much like me, a lot of people stopped playing them in 2016-2019. And finally in 2019, it was announced that 2020 would be the discontinuing of Flash. Flash has gone through many rebrandings and changes through the years, but the concept was created in the 90s by a rarely discussed company called FutureWave. In 1996, their experamental multimedia program called Flash was sold to Macromedia. In the early 2000s, Macromedia was king. One of their former products called Clickteam Fusion, I use to make games which I think I've discussed in a previous post. Macromedia Flash 8 was a huge success when it released in 2004 which combined the ability to code and animate at the same time.
This was vital as it created an in-house way for people to make animations and programs. Many pieces of online software that weren't games were coded in ActionScript, which is the coding language of Flash 8. I own a copy of Flash 8 Professional edition and it holds up to this day. A window for animating with all the pens and keyframes you would expect, and another window for coding. It was clear that many great games could be made. The scene exploded with games and dedicated sites to go along with it. ArmorGames, Kongregate and AddictingGames were all sites I used to surf when I was nine. Thousands of little passion projects to play, with some bordering professional levels of polish. These sites still exist to this day. AddictingGames was purchased by Nickelodeon which shows how the corporate side of the industry saw the potential of these sites. This lead to the purchase of Macromedia Flash by Adobe. It was initally another huge innovation for Flash technology. It was merged with Shockwave for even more power and the application was streamlined for ease of use. It was pushed to it's limit, but Adobe was more strict about their control over Flash than Macromedia. Under Macromedia, Flash was being freely used by the users, but Adobe was more corporate than that and their idea of what the product should be was dissonant than what users wanted. The nail in the coffin was Adobe Animate. While under the hood it's quite similar to Flash, it couldn't be any farther at the same time. The only recognizable semblence of Flash in Animate is the layout of the animation tools and with Adobe's rediculous pricing, Flash was dead. The real question is this: "Why care?" What exactly did Flash do other than provide entertainment for kids? It's very important for the history of the internet. A lot of modern internet culture stems from Flash. Whether it's memes or professional IPs, a lot of modern online communities owe it to Flash. There are a lot of games that were originally Flash games on free websites that are now "real" games. One that comes to mind is Motherload. A game about mining on mars that has a sequel called Super Motherload on Steam and it costs $15. It's very well polished and professional, and it owes its origins to Flash. So many animations were originally made in Flash too! It jumpstarted so many carreers and personally, it was the first kinds of games I played. My love of video games and their development comes from Flash. And that's why I think Flash is important for the history of the internet and in gaming. |
AuthorI am an artist as anyone else is an artist (if that makes sense). My style is abstract and I also draw cartoons. I am also a voice actor for a web-series. Archives
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