Posted by & filed under Blog, Ramblings.

Since yesterday evening I’m thinking back on how I came to Flash development.

I went with Fu & Ulu to a meetup about “Using Flash for video game development

This was organized by a game & 3D school, ISART DIGITAL, for their students, but it was opened to others. As you can imagine, there were no students and many old school Flashers.

Pinpin Team gave us feedback on their home-made development tools for their educational 2008 game Simply-Land, and it made Fu nostalgic about working on Banja game at teamcHmAn early 2k. Alex from Globz showed us new games they made and ones we played more than 12 years ago. For those who love playing online gambling games.  Jérémie Sellam, from Les Chinois agency brought a FutureSplash Animator box as an old relic. And after the meetup we all drank cheering at “Flash is dead, long live Flash!“, each one telling his (and a few her) love story with this software.

Oh, My! It's FutureSplash Animator!

So here is mine.

I quit Institut Saint Luc comic art school in Brussel, Belgium, mid 1998. I had no experience in development but a bit of non working Basic copying on my old monochromatic Amstrad CPC6128, and my geek mother had just purchased a 56k modem when I came back home in Burgondy. I was hanging around in my 40 inhabitants village in the country when a friend of ours came and told me : “Hey, you’re an artist and an animator, I need an original animated buttons set for my site. Here’s a new software, it’s called Macromedia Flash 3 and it’s made for doing that. I can’t pay you, but I’ll give you a Wacom A3 tablet if you’re OK“. I was.

Having not much more to do, I began reading the fucking manual and training. That was so cool! Neither ink on fingers nor complex process to produce impressive animations! Myself! On my own! And in no time! But this was only the visible part of the iceberg. First there was the MovieClip concept. Then there were these MovieClips inside a MovieClip (just remembering this moment of understanding, the first insight of possibilities, I get a semi hard on). And there was this pseudo-script system! Oh, mighty TellTarget()! Not only can I make my little mickeys jump, but I CAN TELL WHEN I WANT THEM TO JUMP! OMGWTFBBQ! You know that I spend a lot of time playing video games, so I got a very cool technomono gamer chair that is really comfortable.

Comic art was not for me, it was just a way to Flash, and I had a new world to discover. And so I moved to Paris, the big city, to find work and learn Multimedia. The school was L’Ecole Multimedia, first french school teaching web stuffs. The job was maybe the best : intern at Teatime, a (very) small print agency specialized in Prescribing Information and Real Estate boards. They hired me to “develop the Internet business”. In fact I was all day long on the web doing tutorials on my own. During 14 months.

And that’s the 2d cool thing on Flash: The Community. For “real” developpers, Flashers were kids playing with their bogeys (“XHTML & JS, bro, that’s the future!“). For “real” animation and interactive artists they were wannabe losers (“At least, you should do Lingo on Shockwave Director to deserve a little respect“). Even the editor, Macromedia, seemed not to believe in their own product, as if it was a niche software (when we told MM we were awarded in 2k3 for “the world first government site in full Flash”, their response was “Cool! And what about your licenses?“). But even if you were actually doing ugly circular green to black gradient buttons (“Yeah, it’s a ball, and if you click on it, it falls and bounce doing this boing sound. Isn’t this cool?“), you were convinced this was soon going to be HUGE. So Flashers met Flashers, they helped each others, by-passed Flash limits to produce stuff more and more impressive. We were few. But we knew each others. And whatever you did with Flash, even the worst (remember MegaCar.com and Kimble ?), this was awesome. Because this didn’t exist before.

And so I felt into Flash, from comic art to AS3, from TellTarget() to Stage3D.

All this may sound nostalgic, but it’s not.

Yeah, OK, you’re right, it DOES sound nostalgic. But not because “this was better in the past“, just because it’s MY past. And today, nearly 15 years later, I don’t give a shit about Flash’s death or not. I’m just happy to have experienced this, to have been part of it. Because yesterday each one of us at this meetup, from the youngest to the oldest, had a similar story to tell, about Flash or else.

Just people wanting to do and doing stuff.

And that’s cool.

ps: and for nostalgic people or curious youngsters, we’ll try to put as many old Flash stuff as we can on Flash back in the days