Alora Fane

It seems I'm able to make executables of my old games! Gasp! This means they'll be more accessible even without Flash. I've made a list of all the old games that I feel might be worth 're-releasing', some more finished than others. I might even 'remaster' them a little bit, fixing some little details and removing no-longer-relevant stuff (eg sponsor branding). This means I might also be able to release the original MARDEK chapters on Steam, unaltered. (EDIT: I've added a poll to gauge which ones have any interest, so then I can know where to focus first.)

Flash isn't Flash anymore; it's now a program called Animate, focused (shockingly) on animation, so I was concerned it wouldn't even be able to export these old Flash games anymore. I tried looking for old versions of Flash Professional, but found only dodgy links I was reluctant to click (I used to actually used cracked versions of Flash and Photoshop as a poor teenager, but as a poor supposedly-adult I just use Krita as a free alternative to Photoshop and I haven't had Flash since before it became Animate).

Annoyed by that, I got a free trial of Animate, and it does seem to work with these old Flash games! They can export as exe files with no issues, it seems, so that actually makes me quite excited! The trial only lasts 7 days, so that gives me an incentive to hurry with converting them all (it's also why I'm posting this now, so soon after the other post).

I spent much of yesterday playing these old games, and it was a mixed bag, emotionally. Nostalgic, for sure, but since I'm the creator, there's a lot of embarrassment too, seeing what I've long since moved beyond.

Still, they were an important part of my development, and many of us got pleasure from them during their time, so if I'm able to make them more accessible after Flash's demise, I'm happy to spend a while looking into that.

I'll post most of them on this site, as .exe files (I think I can do the Apple equivalent too?) available with a "pay what you like" system. If you don't want to pay, fine, you'll still be able to download them for free, but if you feel they're worth something, it'd be nice to get at least a little bit for what brought me so little money in the past. If I do that, I'll probably stagger the release so they're not all uploaded at once, with a new blog post about each one talking about how to play it, what inspired it, and how I feel about it looking back now. Perhaps each game would have its separate page, with a brief blurb about what it is, a 'get it' link, and the associated blog post permanently included there.

I might release the MARDEK chapters - all three combined - on Steam though. People have certainly suggested that often enough, and if nothing else I'd be curious to see the response to that. Maybe it'd earn more money than Sindrel Song will! Maybe it'll be received poorly, either because it's for sale when it was free before (or maybe I could do a pay what you like thing there too?), or because they'll see a lot of things are embarrassingly outdated. I suppose the people who wanted NO CHANGES!! will be getting what they want. I can imagine it prompting more people to ask for a continuation, but I have no plans to do that at the moment.

Here's a list of the games that I'm considering returning to in this way. They're roughly divided into four separate phases, and I'll go from oldest first:

These first games were from a period of naivete, when I was still trying to figure everything out (programming, design, Flash, life, who I was and what I wanted to make). They're quite derivative, sloppily-made, and mostly unfinished.

Fig Hunter

This was the first RPG that I made in Flash. While I was still figuring a lot of stuff out, it's actually not too dissimilar to how MARDEK turned out, in a lot of ways. You create a custom character, and can roam around a plotless world with awful dialogue for a bit before it just ends. I don't think I ever released it on Flash portals.

Deliverance

The next RPG I made, largely built upon Fig Hunter. This one uses the same pixel + vector blend as MARDEK. The writing's improved a bit, and there's more of a sense of story, but it's still very amateurish, and it still just suddenly ends at some point. There are quite a few hours of gameplay though. There are also several versions of this game with different stories; perhaps I could include them all in a bundle?

Beast Signer

This was actually the second Pokemon-inspired game I made, though the first is one of the few Flash files I've long since lost (to my great despair). The mechanics and creature designs leave a lot to be desired, but it's similar to Deliverance in that there's a hint at a story, the writing's going somewhere even if it's not there yet, and you can wander around the world for a few hours before it just ends.

Fig Hunter Online

This is quite different to the original Fig Hunter. It uses mechanics inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, and a tactical battle system inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics. There's not much content though.

Raider (Original)

This is the vector version of Raider, my first platformer (I think?), which is almost finished, except for bosses. There's quite a lot of content in it, though again it's rough around the edges. I like the music!

Super Mega Extreme Cyber Ortek Flier 2005 X

A deliberately-absurdly-named shooter thing which was my first official game release. It's actually a remake of the very first thing I made in Flash (also lost now), which was based on a simple tutorial for a side-scrolling shooter, though I decided to make the player a dragon instead of a spaceship. This is actually strangely similar to Sindrel Song in that it's got a lot of lore, though in this case it was based on a rather childish sci-fi setting I made up when I was little.

This next period is when I was actually active as a developer and some people actually knew who I was and cared about what I made.

MARDEK (1, 2, and 3)

You know what this is.

Clarence's Big Chance

It's weird in hindsight to think that I made this. It was born out of a joke with my then-girlfriend, and I'm amazed it got to the point of completion. It's a full game with four full levels, and I think it's not that bad all things considered, though I understand why it doesn't really get mentioned to me much anymore. I like the music!!

Raider (pixel version)

And it's even weirder to think I made this! Largely because it was just so forgettable; when looking through my files for these games, I saw this and thought "oh right, THAT thing!". It's a pixelated remake of the original Raider which was supposed to be released as five separate chapters, a level each - an attempt at doing a serialised game - though I never released more than two because there wasn't exactly much demand for it. It's actually quite solid to play, though the physics are weird and the difficulty's harsh. I had a third level mostly finished, which I'd include in the exe.

After that comes the decline, where I spent a few years trying to make something without much success...

Miasmon

Another attempt at a Pokemon clone, this time more fleshed-out. There's quite a lot of content to this, and I still like to play it from time to time, though the plot's rather bland (the writing's improved from the earlier phases though). It doesn't stand up to Pokemon, shockingly, but there are definitely worse Pokemon clones out there. I tried to return to Miasmon again several times, though I didn't do nearly as much with them as with this version; maybe I'd include them all in a bundle. I LIKE THE MUSIC.

Chamaeleon

A fairly simple platformer that I sort of worked on together with my then-girlfriend. It was towards the end of our relationship though, so it's quite an emotionally-charged thing for me. Difficult. I played it a bit yesterday, and it's actually okay, if not anything special. It mostly revolves around using your Yoshi-like tongue to pick up objects in your mouth. You can play a few levels before it suddenly ends. Guess what I like about this!

Marooned

This was actually an attempt to remake one of my pre-Flash games called LONEWOLF, which I've talked about here before (and I linked to the original command line version I made in C++), and which I tried to make in Flash years earlier. It's a text-based thing where you explore an island while foraging for items to survive and battling opponents using a limb-targeting system. I'm weirdly fond of it, though it wouldn't have had mass appeal. I'd probably include all versions of LONEWOLF in a bundle. They're stupid! Unlike the others, this has no music.

This final phase continues the decline into obscurity, though I was inspired by spiritual themes and started on the Alora Fane world.

Yden

A strange simulator thing built around a system I'd written to generate vector faces from code. You raise a bunch of randomly-generated people in a 'garden', and they grow and can breed to produce offspring that physically resemble their parents. I tried to return to it a few times with more sophisticated takes on the person-producing code. Definitely niche-y, but I found value in it and played it for many hours (though I think that's mostly because I really liked the 'graphics from just code' thing). No story.

Alora Fane: Creation

Something I can still look back on with some pride, this was an attempt to make an easy-to-use map editor that'd allow people to make their own adventures, like a stripped-down version of the Neverwinter Nights Toolset that originally gave me so much joy. It's one of the first explorations of the Alora Fane setting, and I quite like the comically cutesy graphics and overall tone. The only reason I never released it was because I was I was mentally in a terrible place, and the stories I wrote for it were representative of that. I feel this is worth looking at, though I don't plan to add anything anywhere that makes it easy to share quests with other people.

Taming Dreams

This is something I'm still obviously very proud of, despite its faults. It's a clever, heartfelt remake of MARDEK, set in the Alora Fane world. The response to the new direction was very mixed. It might be more tricky to get working as an exe, since it was developed for mobiles, but I'll definitely look into it. I'd also make the third chapter - which was originally behind a paywall - available as part of the download.

There are others (eg Alora Fane Regression, CARDECK, BE-a-St, 7 Heavens 9 Hells, Chimaera) that don't have enough content to be worth any kind of release, so I've not included those.

But those are the games I'm going to be looking into adapting for release on my site (or Steam, in MARDEK's case). I don't want to promise anything since there might be unforseen hurdles, but I do have at least some degree of excitement about dusting them off a bit and making them more cleanly accessible than before.

Which of these would you be actually interested in? Are there any I've missed? IS THIS NOSTALGIC?!

EDIT
I got the trial of Adobe Animate, and was excited earlier when it was able to export some of my old projects just fine. I've run into a snag, though: Animate doesn't support ActionScript 2 (for good reason; it's incredibly outdated), and it just removes all AS2 code from the file the moment I open it, too. I switched over to AS3 around the time I made Clarence's Big Chance, which is annoyingly after I made MARDEK in AS2.

These games are in AS3, so there wouldn't be major issues exporting them in their original form:

Taming Dreams
Alora Fane: Creation
Miasmon
Clarence's Big Chance
Chamaeleon
Yden
Marooned

These ones, though, are in AS2:

Fig Hunter
Deliverance
Beast Signer
Raider - Pixel chapters
Raider - Original
Fig Hunter Online
SMECOF2005X
MARDEK 1+2+3

Ugh.

Some of them don't have much to them, in terms of code, so I could probably convert the code from AS2 to AS3 in a few hours if I really put my mind to it. Others, like MARDEK... Now that's daunting.

The worst part is that they're built in a profoundly stupid way, since I didn't know what I was doing back then. Dialogue in particular. A sensible way to do that, which is what I do these days, is to have conversations as separate .txt or .xml files which are run by line-by-line or node-by-node. In MARDEK, from what I recall, it made heavy use of Flash's 'MovieClips' system, which were objects that had a number of frames that could be run through. Frames could have code embedded in them... and I, in my naivete, thought a good way to handle conversations would be to make each conversation a separate MovieClip, with each line stored as embedded code on its frames.

I don't know if that means anything to you if you don't program or never used Flash, but it's stupid, and the amount of work to fix it - considering how vast MARDEK is - would be enormous, probably.

It's enough to make me think "I might as well just remake the whole thing in Unity then, ugh!" But even if I did, I couldn't exactly port all the assets over, especially the vector character models. "I might as well just redo them all then! In 3D!! I might as well remaster all the music while I'm at it!!!"

And then I'm back at that mental position again, torn between the "desire" to do that and the sheer scope of it all...

But there's another issue anyway. From what I can tell, it's not that ActionScript 2 code just doesn't run in Animate. It strips it all out, meaning I can't even open the old file to extract the AS2 code from those MovieClip frames.

The only solution would be to get an older version of Flash which does support AS2, and if I did that, then it should also allow me to just export the old version directly, without any of the hassle of rewriting anything.

Now I need to somehow find an old version of Flash Professional CC 2014 (or whatever), though searching Google for that brings up so many dodgy results I'm reluctant to click, as I said earlier in this post.

I'll tackle that irritating issue soon. If in the meantime anyone knows of any way to get a working, safe version of Flash Professional CC 2014, that'd be useful!

I think I might just try to do stuff with the AS3 projects first, though I'm aware some aren't as appealing or interesting as the old stuff.

Annoying. This is why I never returned to these old projects in the first place, and resisted putting MARDEK on Steam, by the way. I thought I'd found a solution, but apparently it's not that simple.

EDIT 2
Since it's not as simple to convert and re-release all of these as I'd originally thought, and I don't want to spend ages on this when I could/should be working on newer projects like Belief, I want to gauge which ones people would actually play.

So ∞ here's a poll where you can vote on all the ones you'd be interested in ∞. I'll use the votes here to gauge which order to work on them in.

Obviously MARDEK will be at the top, but I'm curious to see how the others rank. Will past familiarity or curiosity about the previously unseen drive decisions??

I'm not expecting many votes.