Hi people who know things about code and programming!

I'm a Flash Animator, and the version I use out of preference is Flash MX.

In the not too distant future, I definitely want to make a simple game of some kind when I catch up on all of the projects I've promised to make.

Which leads me to a question...

Is Flash MX something that current programmers know how to work with?

My coding knowledge is pretty close to zero, so aside from knowing how to manipulate and export finished animations into .Swfs and otherwise, I don't know how a Flash Animator would collab with a programmer.

I guess what I'm asking is, if I try to dip my toes into the water with a goofy game, will my .Sfws work in the typical programmer's programs?

Any knowledge any of y'all has is greatly appreciated, but this isn't dire as I'm not even close to being done my other projects. haha

Thanks in advance!

Probably not. Flash is dead, and furthermore Flash MX is like 15 years old so nobody uses it and, anyway, it's unlikely a developer would want to use any of the Flash suites for development (such as Flash MX or the newer Adobe Flash versions, or the most recent Adobe Animate) as those are intended for animations, not games or development.

Depends on what you're making and what skillsets the developer has, but generally you'd be making assets and exporting them into a format that can easily be read by code (unlikely to by SWF format.) If it's a 2D game a common approach is to just create spritesheets (you can also use tools such as TexturePacker to generate them for you from individual images.)

I doubt it. SWF files would be a pain in the ass to read from for the purpose of importing assets into a game engine.

You can continue using Flash MX to create assets if you want (or look into something more modern) but I'd recommend looking into how to export your art assets into formats that can easily be read (PNGs are very common.) You can take a look at GameDev Market's 2D asset store to see how they are formatted. There's lots of free assets, so you can grab those and look at how those artists exported their assets.

Well I mean, to be literal Flash ain't 'dead', it's still usable by anyone...just might not be industry standard. haha

As well, Flash games are still a thing, just once again...less common.

But your knowledge of using .png files was helpful, as I just explored the export settings and found out that I can export an animation as a .png sequence. I'm guessing that if I found a way to make the background transparent or a chroma-key-able colour than I could pretty easily create some assets?

This is some good knowledge, so I'll say thanks mate. :P

You're wrong. It's dead.

Well with Newgrounds working behind the scenes to make an Offline Flash Player to help keep the history of Flash Games alive, and that there are still peeps making Flash games...and I'm even working on a Flash cartoon right now...

Wouldn't that mean that Flash is alive? Or maybe...

Does that mean Flash is UN-Dead? :P

Well with regards to NG making a player, that sounds like a tool to help keep legacy(dead by any reasonable measure) content alive so that old content is still playable. It doesn't affect me since I already made my own standalone flash player and bundled in every flash game worth remembering (about 500) but I can't distribute it legally.

And the people making flash games and you are just making things with a dead language.

Maybe you guys are kind of like... necrolinguists sort of. Just because Flash is dead doesn't mean it can't still be used. Remember Leo using the dead horse as a warm shelter for the night in Revenant?

Haha, viewing Flash as a dead horse that gets used as shelter made me lose it for some reason. Thanks for that. :P

I can totally see why people might not view Flash as modern or want to encourage people to learn how to code with it, I just view all the games and movies as things worth preserving.

If not for Flash I might not've been able to get into Animation School with practicing, or have a ton of cool stuff to still look at. People have been saying Flash has been dead for up to 7 years now, but some of the greatest Flashes have come out these past couple months AND years.

If I need to be classified as a Necrolinguist or an Animation Archaeologist by continuing to use Flash, so be it. :)

Definitely. There is an unbelievable amount of great content out there. That said, it is all fully preserved. Short of a worldwide annihilation of all server data, it will all persist and be viewable and playable.

I'm glad you found your way to what you are currently enjoying one way or another. I don't agree about some of the greatest Flash games or movies having come out in the past months and years. But I could be wrong. Some have but not many.

Adobe mismanaged Flash. Badly. It needed to be far more open. It needed far better performance. Far better security. And for the love of christ it needed to NOT be a damn applet you embedded in a page. Looking at how things are done now, that archaic setup (which I even hated back when it was top dog) is horrifying.

I hope you find your way to more modern and supported and growing tools in the near future. Don't get too invested in this platform. Just use it for what it is (for you) a stepping stone into the next phase of your hobby.

Yes, you can still make games with Flash MX, just don't get your hopes up about publishing it online.

So of Flash is "dead" (although clearly it isn't), what tool are creators using to author interactive animations these days?

I use Flash Animate at a studio i'm in an animation contract with, and some of my friends also do animation commission work with Flash as well! I use Flash MX to this day on my own animated commissions too.

The thing that isn't being supported anymore is the Flash Player, the thing that also runs the Flash Scripts and Games.

So either with outside emulation support like what Newgrounds and others are working on to preserve the flash game/movie library, there are ways to export as other types of video files, or to just convert the .swf file into something else.

Even the higher ups at my studio joke about Flash not being 'dead'. Google Chrome and other browsers are just trying to cut down on something they supply with the download package I imagine.