Flash is Dead! Long Live Animate!

The first exposure I had to Flash was when I encountered some FutureSplash animations in the mid-nineties. This was interesting technology at the time as back then most people were using telephone lines and modems to get internet pages so having streaming animated video was simply mind boggling. Back in those days, streaming video was small thumbnails and generally didn’t work well.  In “The Road to Animate” we will look at this history as well as my personal history with the technology.

One of the biggest draws of using Flash, now Animate, was animation. Before you can animate something, however, you first need to draw it. “Drawing Things Out” covers the basics of the drawing functionality that comes with Animate. “Symbolizing things” explores Animates’ symbol and library which is vital to making objects move. “The Key to Animation” explores Animates’ keyframe animation system which really is the reason that you would want to use Animate over writing an HTML5 game purely in JavaScript, even when using a library such as Create.js.

We conclude this chapter with “Script Soup” which takes a look at how scripting is involved in the game making process. This is a rough exposure to ECMAScript, ActionScrpt, and JavaScript with a general overview of the Create.js library.

Personal notes

After finishing my Bachelor degree and looking back at my site I realized that there was a lot on my site worth saving. I was not sure what route to take but essentially knew that I had to at least attempt to salvage some of the games. Finding my old book on Flash and deciding to undertake this book project, which is now a two-book project and I suspect additional volumes may be added in the future (possibly for StageGL, Kotlin, and Web Assembly). The reason I decided to break the book into two separate books was simply that after playing around with Adobe Animate CC, I was disappointed with what the tool has to offer and found that most of my work was being done editing Create.js code. You do not need an expensive tool to do that which is why I broke this book in half. With that said, most of the material in this book is still applicable to people who want to go the pure Create.js route so if you have no plans on getting Adobe Animate CC, you can still benefit from reading this (especially now that it is being freely posted on my Blog).