The scripting language Lingo was a little bit gumby but perfectly serviceable. The main engine limitation was IIRC you could only have 256 sprite channels. I was always disappointed that Flash took hold instead of the more powerful Shockwave platform.
To this day when programming Ruby I always mistype "puts" as "put" thanks to Lingo still burned into my fingers.
I played around with Flash years ago, back when Flash was still “in vogue” — made a couple of animations and wrote a rudimentary graphics editor that I didn’t finish.
I have fond memories of playing Flash and Shockwave games in elementary and middle school. One Shockwave game in particular that I remember was a 3d car game where other cars were chasing you through a city. The gameplay was rather simple and the 3d was quite low poly but it was an impressive game nonetheless.
I also installed Director at some point I think but it was a bit too complicated for me to understand at the time.
I recently picked up a few books on Director and Lingo that the library at my university had decided to get rid of. Flash and Shockwave are dead but the editors had something to them that I think is worthy of investigation, thought and revival. Perhaps some day we can have a Flash/Director like tool for developing interactive Canvas and Canvas3d (WebGL) content.
I wonder if WebAssembly can bring back this classic art aesthetic. The key is a great IDE with strong graphics asset management.
On The Run. It too was a staple of my many hours spent playing flash and shockwave games.
on mouseup me
go to the frame
endNowadays it can be a bit more challenging - at least for high budget productions as the games can be a lot more complicated, and there are anti piracy measurements in some which means it requires a bit more effort into seeing the information - for example all strings would be encrypted. Modifying anything at all could mean the game will not start or it will crash on purpose. Similarly for multi player games, with anti cheat protection. Nothing is impossible though ;)
Indie games should have relatively low barriers to entry, however :)
Absolutely. I played a lot of games and often prolonged their attraction by simply digging into their data files and fiddling with them. I remember writing a terrain editor[1] for "4D Stunts" after looking at the data format in the 3 existing terrain files. Or discovering a dragon in the original "Quake Test" release after reverse engineering the MDL file format and writing one of the first viewers for it. It was certainly a huge motivation seeing the visual result of your work in action. The relative simplicity of the games really helped with that, just like you said.
[1] Here's a screenshot I just took after running it again in DOSBox for the first time in probably 20 years: https://i.imgur.com/z7ZSM0J.png.
The host would generate a 2D array of objects and locations and then transmit to the client. I felt so smart back then.
The 3D engine was pretty easy to work with. I hand-coded and hard-coded every single animation, since it was faster than learning how to animate.
I miss working with Shockwave, it provided a wonderful combination of power and accessibility. I've found Unity to be the closest in features, but don't get the same thrill from it.
Ah college.
I really enjoyed your writing style and it's definitely inspired me to have a poke around some other games too!
Thanks :)
Wonderful write up for a strong piece of nostalgia.
