DEVELOPMENT

19

1,129

Porting Old Flash Games... For Real This Time!?! AFC, CBC, etc

2 years ago1,898 words

I've written about porting my old Flash games several times in the past, but nothing ever comes of it. Will the intention actually bear fruit this time?? I've just got a port of AFC working, so...!

It's embarrassing looking through my old blog posts and seeing how often I declare intentions then fail to deliver. They're never meant as lies, but I disappoint myself by failing to achieve what I'd like to, and would be capable of if not for mental illness. I suppose that's the story of my entire life though.

I was probably talking about porting MARDEK for months or years without doing so, though, and then I did, and it's on Steam now! It continues to earn hundreds of pounds a month, too, to my continued surprise.

I've talked recently about doing a port of AFC, and I've actually spent the past two or three days working on that in earnest. Or at least working on some kind of wrapper app like I made for MARDEK; I've barely touched the game itself.

And I've made good progress with it! Got past the major barriers I thought were in the way of porting my old games! Like:



Apparently I ∞ wrote a post 8 months ago ∞ about porting these old games, but felt like I'd run into a wall when my new computer didn't have some 'COM Component' thing or whatever on it, and as such I couldn't include Flash games in Windows Forms like I thought I had with the MARDEK port. Looks like I was in a poor mood at the time (unusual, I know), and apparently interpreted that as a sign I should just give up and get back to plodding away at Atonal Dreams. I kept it at the back of my mind as the reason porting might not even be possible, or at least the effort to do so was greater than it was worth.

Now that I've looked into it again, though, that's not even how I went about it with the MARDEK port! Or at least I think I tried that at first, but eventually I just ended up using an exe published from the Flash development program (first Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash, now Adobe Animate). No need for the COM Component thing at all.

Another snag though was that I had to dig up old versions of Flash (CS3 and CS4, for example), but they wouldn't open the old projects for reasons unknown. They gave a 'filetype not recognised' error, as if the files had been edited in a later version and as such wouldn't work in earlier ones.

I knew I'd have to get Animate, the program that Flash has become, but frustratingly you have to give your payment details to sign up for a subscription before you can even download a free trial... So I was reluctant.

I bit the bullet this morning though and signed up for the damn subscription. Hopefully the ticking timer will encourage me to do what I need to with it quickly so then I can cancel before the first month or two are up.



So that was all good and fine... though I still had to bugger around with this Windows Forms thing. Basically it's a way of creating simple Windows apps which I imagine is mostly used in non-entertainment sectors, and I'm not even sure whether it's what I should be using at all.

I used it for MARDEK though because Flash games were made using fixed resolutions, and I was able to use it to load in the MARDEK exe and display a centred version at sizes that'd work with the pixel art without creating distortions.

Having a basic 'fullscreen' option wouldn't be feasible, and having a purely windowed version with a taskbar and everything felt very amateurish!

I tried just copying over the exact Windows Forms code I used for the MARDEK port... but it didn't work, for reasons I've already forgotten. I tried remaking it from scratch, but kept running into issues - one of which was the basic code I'd just written being interpreted as a virus, not just by my antivirus software but by Visual Studio (the code editor) itself - and I had to keep restarting from scratch, figuring everything out along the way since it's something I have next to no experience with. Very frustrating.

Fiiiinally, though, I got it all working, and now I have an exe which launches this:




So essentially the same as the MARDEK one, though I took the time to style the buttons and things this time so it doesn't look like a basic Windows popup (though I can imagine having to revert this due to functionality issues on different PCs or something).

It's not ideal, as for example you can either play the game in a tiny window that leaves a ton of empty space around it, or a 1088-pixel-tall one which is 8 pixels more than the usual 1080 resolution height, and I can't do anything about that because everything in the game is fixed to the 800 x 544 dimensions, ugh...

But it works, at least. It's been interesting playing around with the game with what feels like a more 'proper game experience' presentation! (As opposed to in a tiny Windows window or on some website surrounded by sleazy adverts.)



So what next? What I have here could potentially be released as-is, though I know there are some (minor?) things that I should fix or tweak. I'm interested in specific feedback about that from those of you who've played AFC; a list I can work through, ideally.

I also think that I can use this to port at least some of my games without too much difficulty. I probably could have done that when I ported MARDEK, actually, and it's annoying that I didn't just do it back then. Oh well; better late than never.

What I'm thinking is something like this:

Clarence's Big Chance

I talked about porting this a while ago, but... obviously didn't. But maybe I should, as a standalone thing? I did actually release it back in the day, so there's more of a chance that people other than the few who follow me might actually have heard of it.

It's quite different to anything else that I've made, and I worry that the humour in it is inappropriate, but I'll be Clarence's age myself in a couple of weeks so I like the idea of the port lining up roughly with that. Plus I replayed it not-too-long ago and I think the gameplay holds up as much as any old emulated platformer.

I'd also be curious to try 'promoting' it on Reddit, though not to the degree I'd want to for Atonal Dreams. Good practice, though, potentially, and maybe the less serious subject matter would mean it'd hurt less if it wasn't well-received than it would for something I'm more personally invested in.

Alora Fane: Creation

Unlike CBC, this one will require a bit more fiddling around with to get it to a releasable state, so it makes sense to delay it a bit, maybe. It also feels like it'd deserve a release by itself.



I'm not sure what to do with my other games, though.

None of them are finished, though some have a lot more gameplay made than others.

I personally divide them into two distinct phases: the pre-MARDEK Fig Hunter period, when I was still figuring things out and my output was fairly derivative, and post-MARDEK, where I came up with the Alora Fane world and started exploring more spiritual and idiosyncratic themes.

I suspect other people are far more interested in the former than the latter, though the reverse is true for me. The latter games were also made in AS3, which means fewer technical hurdles than the earlier ones which were made in AS2.

Two games from the post-MARDEK period stand out to me in particular as worthy of some kind of putting-out-there:


Taming Dreams,


and Miasmon.

Neither are worth their own release though because they're not finished, and I have no intention of finishing them. But what I did finish of them is relatively polished; there are probably a few hours of gameplay in each one.

I considered an 'Alora Fane Collection' which would include those together with:


Yden,


and Chamaeleon,

but I know that nobody cares about those. Even I usually forget they exist! They're probably the sorts of things I'm very content to just leave in the past.


Other games that I could potentially port are:


Fig Hunter, my earliest and most amateurish game which inspired later efforts like MARDEK;


Deliverance, which I suppose was a successor to Fig Hunter and predecessor to MARDEK;


Beast Signer, a Pokemon clone;


Fig Hunter Online, a not-actually-online tactical thing with some inspirations from D&D, with little content;


Raider, a sci-fi Metroidvania (hmm, from before every indie was doing those) which I mostly finished, but not quite;


a pixelated remake of Raider which I usually forget I ever made, but which I actually released two levels of (there's also a third level fully made except for its cutscenes and boss);


Super Mega Extreme Cyber Ortek Flier 2005 X, an absurdly-named... whatever this genre is called (side-scrolling on-rails shooter or something?) which I regard as barely even a game but which a couple of people have expressed interest in recently for some baffling reason.


I could see all of those being released as something like a 'Fig Hunter Games Collection', maybe? Though I wonder whether people would actually want to pay for things that were unfinished.

I know some other Flash devs released collections of their old games like this, but I never played any; did they include finished games only, or unfinished projects like these?

I don't know if there's any precedent for anything like this. It feels wrong to me putting out unfinished work with no intention of completing it. But I'd hope the whole point would be to spark nostalgia, and even these unfinished essentially-demos would be enough.

(Hmm, recently I looked into some old DOS games I played as a child, which had a free first episode and two paid ones, though I'd never played the paid ones as a child so just experiencing the free one was enough of a nostalgia fix even if I wasn't able to see the entire work as intended by the creators.)



All this is something I'll need to sort out over the following days/weeks/blog posts/whatever, but any thoughts at this point about how you'd want to see these? What you'd be willing to pay for, etc, and how much you'd be willing to pay, too.

I hate the thought of trying to milk money out of things, but I'm earning so little right now that the thought of releasing them for free absolutely wouldn't be worth the effort I'll need to put in to port them.