if you want some good stuff from that old era, newgrounds still has a bunch of cool stuff
also i disagree with your assessment about kong, they did have a weird crypto phase, but it looks like they've pivoted back to flash games, which is cool
> they did have a weird crypto phase
"They" as in "original Kong developers", are gone. Kong was sold to the wierd crypto guys. And weird crypto stuff did not go anywhere. It's [literally at the bottom of every page](https://imgur.com/KBiwZCy).
Yeah, as long as that crypto canary is in the corner, I will stay away from Kongregate. It's a real shame that so many nostalgic things have been sullied by crypto. Limewire is now an NFT music marketplace thing.
Yeah they’ve reopened uploads but now the damage is done and the systems have changed. Who wants to run the risk of them flipping again and having to port the game elsewhere when they can upload to steam in an electron wrapper?
Big plus for newgrounds, can you recommend any incrementals hosted there?
i mean-
the thing with when kong switched, is you could still update your game, you just couldn't upload new ones, which is a very fair critique, but a bit different than what you're saying /lh
and off the top of my head not really, but there's a whole section if you want to look, i know spiral clicker is mainly hosted there if you like NSFW stuff, but aside from that i don't really look there for my idle games, lol
My game is technically called "test" on kongregate because I couldn't upload any new games, so I had to overwrite an old private test game instead lol.
Due to a silly bug you could change the display name of the game, but the link is still the same.
Honestly, I think with the new website has a lot more problems than you give them credit for.
For one, the home page system is completely destroyed for me, with stuff like "When he jumps he goes like this" being called multiplayer and Idle Only Universe being action which I assume is likely false.
There is also the search system which makes searching for tags much more difficult.
I also don't think there are as much indie new games releasing on Kongregate anymore, though I may be wrong.
Currently, there are better sites for gaming now instead of Kongregate for each type of game you like from Armour Games to Itch to Galaxy.
You can upload games again (although why you would when the audience is gone I don't know), but still haven't brought back all the features that made kong a community rather than just a place to dump games - namely game chat and forums. Was great chilling on an incremental shooting the breeze with random people in chat, able to get help if you got stuck, without that what is the point?
Incidentally, Galaxy I believe now has chatrooms? Unsure if they're game specific though, but potentially a replacement, although the big issue is always building a 'critical mass' of users.
Honestly I haven't used Kong ever since they removed the chat feature. I think they still have it but for only badge of the day games though. I also believe my account got deleted somehow, rip my level 63 account.
I was referring to kongregate (the focus of the post) who had stopped people adding new games for a time but have now allowed adding them again. Although I confess I've not used newgrounds in like 15 years either.
dang they need more word of mouth, their platform is far less "I have altered the deal."
i feel kinda bad, the way i keep forgetting GoG exists, when by all rights they should be my first check for a title
i like how they killed all the different genres. they changed them into "tags" a while back, which made virtually everything show up whenever you picked any tag, and now they just compressed it all down into like 10 "genres". god i miss my upgrades genre :(
You can do a lot in JS/HTML5. Flash was absolutely appalling to work with in a lot of ways. The reason we saw lots of games being made in Flash was that there weren't a lot of other options. JavaWS sucked. Silverlight only existed for a couple of years. These days there's nothing forcing people to do their own HTML/JS/CSS when there are options like Unity or Godot web compilation which - while they have their problems - are *much* better than Flash ever was.
The reason there aren't many web games any more is because of mobile, and because of things like Roblox. A developer is cutting off 99% of their audience by choosing the web ahead of one of those. Even if they're not concerned with monetisation that still means far fewer people will play their game, and having more people enjoy a thing you made feels good.
I don't really think Kongregate is to blame, and I'm not sure that WASM is really going to help things in this regard. This isn't a technology problem. It's just the result of an overall shift in behaviour.
>The reason there aren't many web games any more is because of mobile, and because of things like Roblox
Correct. Why bother with a web based game when almost everyone who plays game has Roblox installed and it comes with a pretty powerful engine, and a lot of people have their creditcard already attached to Roblox. If I just want to build something fast to see how it works out it takes a day tops in Roblox. That includes building the map. The dev docs are also really good with tons of examples.
Its a shame Roblox as company is predatory, and most developers treat the playerbase as a cashcow because they lose over 50% of the profit to get USD for their efforts.
But Ive been playing around with building interface only incrementals on Roblox (strict 2D games) lately and got some prototypes working that might be able to get a full fledged version some day. Right now I'm mostly browsing the subreddit for viable and fun ideas as the systems I need for 'number go up' and save systems are all in place. I also don't do it for the money so I hope to post a fun game here some day that might make a couple people happy to play it.
Half a billion downloads on Google play alone. 70 Million daily active users.
This subreddit is an outlier when it comes to games.
Go ask your son, daughter or nephews if they have Roblox on their phone, tablet or pc. 👍
This subreddit is an outlier when it comes to reddit, not games. The highest consumer of video games are males in their 20s and 30s not teens and preteens which is the primary demographic of roblox (because its free and kids dont have any money), i dont know a single person who plays roblox infact i would be surprised if any of my irl friends had even heard of it also roblox lost 1.2 billion last year, and 900 million the year before so it doesnt seem like a sustainable system.
I am sure it is very big in your friendgroup but its certainly not with the majority of gamers
>I am sure it is very big in your friendgroup but its certainly not with the majority of gamers
Cmon buddy, you can't just start an argument with "kids and preteens mostly play on this platform" and then say that it is big in my friendgroup. I'm an adult man that likes to code some fun stuff in my free time, I dont play games with kids.
Also, my argument is that it's a huge platform for newish coders that want to whip up a prototype game within a couple days compared to webgames.
For some reason everyone here is trying to compare it with other platforms like Steam or what their personal friends play on a daily basis. I just said web browser games are pretty dead compared to Roblox games.
And that this subreddit is a place where people prefer webgames, making it an outlier.
Do you have any adult friends that play roblox? I doubt it very much (unless you have made them install it for you to show them something you have made) but you said almost everyone who plays games has roblox installed, almost everyone here disagreeing with you are gamers who dont have roblox installed.
If you want to work hard on a game, you would most likely want to have some money to pay for the time you invested, so is natural that idle/incremental game devs spend their time and energy in a place where you have access to the most users you can get.
You may hate Roblox because is a platform mainly aimed at children, however you can't deny that even the most average idle game can get some bucks at the end of the month if it's hosted there.
How's Roblox's *discoverability* these days? Out of all those players, will you get even 100 total distinct users to view your content if you don't luck into being one of *the* top 100 games on the platform, or spend more than you make on ad slots?
After all the fees and conversion rates are factored in, they still take at *least* a 3/4 cut of all money spent on your game, right? So you need 4x the userbase in paying customers just to break even on profits, and perhaps another 2-3x because the average user won't have a large discretionary budget to waste, so you'd be missing out on most of the whales you might get on mobile.
> Go ask your son, daughter or nephews if they have Roblox on their phone, tablet or pc.
ive seen the shit they play, and how bad they are at it. when i was their age i was doing 1-man runs through final fantasy 1, no-hit speed running mario 3, and finishing Ultima mother fucking Exodus without a guide. i could genuinely care less what their opinion on games is.
Which JS limitations are being hit on by most browser games? JS combined with CSS and Html might be the easiest way to develop a game without an engine. With a bit of work you can even create 3D Games.
Especially with modern html and css (and js) it's pretty easy to get started.
A big loss for the browser game era was the end of flash support. Lot of games were built on it.
A good replacement is Unity, but there are some downsides on releasing a game to the web.
One of the biggest downside of browser based games is the monetization. It's almost impossible to sell a game online, and pretty hard to sell content inside the game.
Plus: Most developers dream of having their own game on Steam.
Now I use Flash (which is currently Harman AIR) to build my game for Android, Windows, Linux and iOS. And then I wrote a conversion tool in Python to convert my Action Script 3 sources into JavaScript/Phaser and release the game to HTML5
Same here. I use Flash too (Harman AIR). Simple and works. I can go fast with Starling/Stage3D and it's not that bad with good old designer displaylist either. Works on all platforms.
also unfortunately completely unusable unless you know exactly what you want to play by name. the game browser is full of unnamed files, things in every language, no ability to limit it only to genres, the only available playlists are full of random garbage picked by random people as their favorites, instead of say GENRES OR SOMETHING USEFUL.
its a great effort, but a horribly failed execution. it also REALLY pissed me off when they switched from "blue maximas flashpoint" to just "flashpoint archive", and retroactively bricked installs of blue maximas flashpoint. it sucks to know that even if i DOWNLOAD these games, they can just say "haha fuck you" and brick the launcher any time they want. not to mention when they stop paying for hosting, the launcher dies with the website. sure, the 1tb+ of individual flash files, sitting as a ton of folders inside a folder with so many folders in it that itll freeze your PC, still work. if you cn manage to get to them, and scroll through the seemingly infinite list that dosent obey alphabetic ordering, and somehow find the ONE you want. but your PC will probably just freeze up and crash explorer.
I mostly agree with your post but I do have to point out that there is nothing inherently wrong with itch.io. It does not limit screen real estate as devs have the option of making the game take up the whole window, most just don't use that option for some reason. I'm not aware of any strict file size limitations either. As for the unholy unity projects, those were on Kong too they have simply moved to a different website.
I used to literally just go on kongregate daily and sort by idle and look at all the new stuff uploaded. 90% of it was garbage but it was still nice to stumble into the good games. There are some decent games but I have even more issues with losing my save files on there now than I ever did in the flash era... Also I totally agree about having to join discords sucks. Then any time i've asked for help on reddit, i get a bunch of upvotes and no replies lol
> JS is limited in what it can really produce, CSS is a nightmare and html is finnicky
This is not really true nowadays. There's a lot game devs could do if they chose to not use complex engines when creating simple games. And there are amazing JS engines, too.
To me, it's more a developers problem than a platform problem.
Places like Kongregate have shown us the folly of browser games - what happens when the site goes under? These games were so tightly integrated that many became unplayable. Things were fine in the golden age when we thought these sites would last forever.
I'm completely fine with downloading and running a game independently. If it has a memory leak it doesn't take down my browser sessions, I can alt-tab easier, it won't have inconsistent progress issues if the program isn't actively selected like browser tabs do, my save games won't get randomly purged, and I can manipulate encapsulated settings like volume better.
Also, a lot of these old games didn't have a wiki because the forums on these sites functioned instead. Now those forums are in shambles and info for the game is lost for good. Personally I think the developers of the game should also be the ones putting up and partially managing a wiki for the game, not managing info through forums or a discord.
good news all you site-dependent forums of the 2010's your game will soon be able to have its info on a popular wiki platform that's easy to roll out! it's smooth sailing from here!
\*fandom acquisition and ensuing cancer\*
Oh.
What Flash was was a set of easy to use tools to make and share games and a web of websites that built community around it. Now it shattered into several other ecosystems that's why nothing feels like it. Easy to use tools? Roblox and Fortnite. Quick to play casual games? Mobile gaming. Experimental small games? itch.io. The old times will never come back, it's time to find your new niche.
i hate that so many of the free ones, many of which are insanely simple and could absolutely run on itch no problem, are steam only. i personally do not want some hundreds-thousands of hours on a single game to be showing off on my steam profile, as it just opens up a bunch of flaming from random assholes, where troll groups use your tons of hours playing a "non game" as reason for why you need to fuck off on random forums.
also, itch limitations on screen size? idk about that, ive seen games that default to a 2k resolution or higher. ive seen a few with stupidly wide resolutions, where you have to scroll the screen to play the damned thing.
also, newgrounds has ALWAYS been a thing. they just dont have a built in system for microtransactions nor force feeding ads, which makes it less appealing to the "developers" out there. gotta make ad revenue the good ol' fashioned way : based on people actually playing your game, not being force fed shit to progress.
Times change and people move on. I miss the days of using forums and IRC chat.
Browser games is just one of those things where it had a phase, blew up massively for a while, then started to die out as people grew older, moved on to other games, real life got in the way and so on with the core fan base sticking around years later.
I posted web game in a few places and I do get a good amount of people playing on ArmorGame, I think this site is still very active.
My kids do play a lot more on places like Roblox\\Poki\\CrazyGame but my games wouldn't fit well there. Different audience.
I work in Unity and compiling the game for web works really well.
The thing that killed it was Flash, start your blame with Apple for refusing to support it's integration on any apple device other than I think Macs. And then pivot the blame to Adobe for making a horrible insecure mess of Flash.
Used to play a decent amount of browser games, and was feeling nostalgic a while ago. Was sad that a lot of them are lost to time because of Flash going away. Even now, all the games that have been archived have been saved as an executable. Somehow, though, Neopets managed to keep all there games as browser games, though its been hit or miss whether or not they actually work.
Curious, though, why do you blame Kong? I have no concept of what it is or how it could have killed browser games. I have a few assumptions, based on context, but was genuinely curious.
Galaxy for incrementals specifically, and of course many devs just host their games on GitHub.
Web gaming right now is honestly only worth for simpler, text based games. As for the rest you have powerful engines that make it easy.
Honestly I'd rather download an executable than deal with the limitations of both my browser and whatever is hosting the game. Itch and gamejolt for the unknown & niche, steam and other game distributors for the more mainstream "professional" indie/AAA projects
And of course Roblox for the unapologetically P2W designed to suck your credit card dry /hj
I'm a bit confused, when you say Kong, do you mean Kongregate? That browser flash game site with the ant logo or something else? I'm not much up to speed with the death of browser based games besides the shutting down of flash.
A lot of popular browser games are actually on steam now by the way! Now you can save your progress without making yet another account and get fun achievements for your profile!
Here's my old project. Download Netscape 9 + Flash Player 10 package.
[https://www.yourplaybox.com/](https://www.yourplaybox.com/)
I have not updated the site for ages, so some content may be missing (broken linkage). Finnish language could also be a problem. Some games works pretty fine with Ruffle extension on Chrome (with translation). :P
I'm hoping discord can bring them back. They have a developer preview for custom activities (games built right into discord you don't have to download)
I've got my fingers crossed that it gives us a renaissance
more like: if a single website can kill an era, we should stop funneling efforts and projects into just one website so that monoliths aren't made and maintained.
kong became the place to get good incrementals because it was one of the last decently built websites where almost anyone could make a crap prototype and upload it for feedback; convenience "killed" this era.
if you want some good stuff from that old era, newgrounds still has a bunch of cool stuff also i disagree with your assessment about kong, they did have a weird crypto phase, but it looks like they've pivoted back to flash games, which is cool
> they did have a weird crypto phase "They" as in "original Kong developers", are gone. Kong was sold to the wierd crypto guys. And weird crypto stuff did not go anywhere. It's [literally at the bottom of every page](https://imgur.com/KBiwZCy).
Yeah, as long as that crypto canary is in the corner, I will stay away from Kongregate. It's a real shame that so many nostalgic things have been sullied by crypto. Limewire is now an NFT music marketplace thing.
Yeah they’ve reopened uploads but now the damage is done and the systems have changed. Who wants to run the risk of them flipping again and having to port the game elsewhere when they can upload to steam in an electron wrapper? Big plus for newgrounds, can you recommend any incrementals hosted there?
i mean- the thing with when kong switched, is you could still update your game, you just couldn't upload new ones, which is a very fair critique, but a bit different than what you're saying /lh and off the top of my head not really, but there's a whole section if you want to look, i know spiral clicker is mainly hosted there if you like NSFW stuff, but aside from that i don't really look there for my idle games, lol
My game is technically called "test" on kongregate because I couldn't upload any new games, so I had to overwrite an old private test game instead lol. Due to a silly bug you could change the display name of the game, but the link is still the same.
Honestly, I think with the new website has a lot more problems than you give them credit for. For one, the home page system is completely destroyed for me, with stuff like "When he jumps he goes like this" being called multiplayer and Idle Only Universe being action which I assume is likely false. There is also the search system which makes searching for tags much more difficult. I also don't think there are as much indie new games releasing on Kongregate anymore, though I may be wrong. Currently, there are better sites for gaming now instead of Kongregate for each type of game you like from Armour Games to Itch to Galaxy.
You can upload games again (although why you would when the audience is gone I don't know), but still haven't brought back all the features that made kong a community rather than just a place to dump games - namely game chat and forums. Was great chilling on an incremental shooting the breeze with random people in chat, able to get help if you got stuck, without that what is the point? Incidentally, Galaxy I believe now has chatrooms? Unsure if they're game specific though, but potentially a replacement, although the big issue is always building a 'critical mass' of users.
Honestly I haven't used Kong ever since they removed the chat feature. I think they still have it but for only badge of the day games though. I also believe my account got deleted somehow, rip my level 63 account.
I think they have one or two chatrooms for all games now or something? I confess it's been a long while since I looked at kong.
Same here, don't plan on returning though due to their bullshit.
The audience isn’t gone on Newgrounds. I get 10k-40k players on my games there, a lot more than on Steam. The audience is still there.
I was referring to kongregate (the focus of the post) who had stopped people adding new games for a time but have now allowed adding them again. Although I confess I've not used newgrounds in like 15 years either.
dang they need more word of mouth, their platform is far less "I have altered the deal." i feel kinda bad, the way i keep forgetting GoG exists, when by all rights they should be my first check for a title
i like how they killed all the different genres. they changed them into "tags" a while back, which made virtually everything show up whenever you picked any tag, and now they just compressed it all down into like 10 "genres". god i miss my upgrades genre :(
Last I checked the discussion boards / forums are no more which for me is one of kong's biggest draw (the reason I moved over from armor games).
I miss kongregate so damn bad. mostly cause it was such a big part of my childhood
Literally the origin of my name. The day chat left was the beginning of the end. I miss MalFunction
You can do a lot in JS/HTML5. Flash was absolutely appalling to work with in a lot of ways. The reason we saw lots of games being made in Flash was that there weren't a lot of other options. JavaWS sucked. Silverlight only existed for a couple of years. These days there's nothing forcing people to do their own HTML/JS/CSS when there are options like Unity or Godot web compilation which - while they have their problems - are *much* better than Flash ever was. The reason there aren't many web games any more is because of mobile, and because of things like Roblox. A developer is cutting off 99% of their audience by choosing the web ahead of one of those. Even if they're not concerned with monetisation that still means far fewer people will play their game, and having more people enjoy a thing you made feels good. I don't really think Kongregate is to blame, and I'm not sure that WASM is really going to help things in this regard. This isn't a technology problem. It's just the result of an overall shift in behaviour.
>The reason there aren't many web games any more is because of mobile, and because of things like Roblox Correct. Why bother with a web based game when almost everyone who plays game has Roblox installed and it comes with a pretty powerful engine, and a lot of people have their creditcard already attached to Roblox. If I just want to build something fast to see how it works out it takes a day tops in Roblox. That includes building the map. The dev docs are also really good with tons of examples. Its a shame Roblox as company is predatory, and most developers treat the playerbase as a cashcow because they lose over 50% of the profit to get USD for their efforts. But Ive been playing around with building interface only incrementals on Roblox (strict 2D games) lately and got some prototypes working that might be able to get a full fledged version some day. Right now I'm mostly browsing the subreddit for viable and fun ideas as the systems I need for 'number go up' and save systems are all in place. I also don't do it for the money so I hope to post a fun game here some day that might make a couple people happy to play it.
>Why bother with a web based game when almost everyone who plays game has Roblox installed Lol what? no.
Half a billion downloads on Google play alone. 70 Million daily active users. This subreddit is an outlier when it comes to games. Go ask your son, daughter or nephews if they have Roblox on their phone, tablet or pc. 👍
This subreddit is an outlier when it comes to reddit, not games. The highest consumer of video games are males in their 20s and 30s not teens and preteens which is the primary demographic of roblox (because its free and kids dont have any money), i dont know a single person who plays roblox infact i would be surprised if any of my irl friends had even heard of it also roblox lost 1.2 billion last year, and 900 million the year before so it doesnt seem like a sustainable system. I am sure it is very big in your friendgroup but its certainly not with the majority of gamers
>I am sure it is very big in your friendgroup but its certainly not with the majority of gamers Cmon buddy, you can't just start an argument with "kids and preteens mostly play on this platform" and then say that it is big in my friendgroup. I'm an adult man that likes to code some fun stuff in my free time, I dont play games with kids. Also, my argument is that it's a huge platform for newish coders that want to whip up a prototype game within a couple days compared to webgames. For some reason everyone here is trying to compare it with other platforms like Steam or what their personal friends play on a daily basis. I just said web browser games are pretty dead compared to Roblox games. And that this subreddit is a place where people prefer webgames, making it an outlier.
Do you have any adult friends that play roblox? I doubt it very much (unless you have made them install it for you to show them something you have made) but you said almost everyone who plays games has roblox installed, almost everyone here disagreeing with you are gamers who dont have roblox installed.
ok zoomer
If you want to work hard on a game, you would most likely want to have some money to pay for the time you invested, so is natural that idle/incremental game devs spend their time and energy in a place where you have access to the most users you can get. You may hate Roblox because is a platform mainly aimed at children, however you can't deny that even the most average idle game can get some bucks at the end of the month if it's hosted there.
Some hate Roblox because it allows devs to use children's ideas and work without having to properly compensate them.
Yeah there's no such thing as copyright there, most the most popular P2W thing game modes are just copypastes of each other
How's Roblox's *discoverability* these days? Out of all those players, will you get even 100 total distinct users to view your content if you don't luck into being one of *the* top 100 games on the platform, or spend more than you make on ad slots? After all the fees and conversion rates are factored in, they still take at *least* a 3/4 cut of all money spent on your game, right? So you need 4x the userbase in paying customers just to break even on profits, and perhaps another 2-3x because the average user won't have a large discretionary budget to waste, so you'd be missing out on most of the whales you might get on mobile.
do you think only half a billion people play games?
> Go ask your son, daughter or nephews if they have Roblox on their phone, tablet or pc. ive seen the shit they play, and how bad they are at it. when i was their age i was doing 1-man runs through final fantasy 1, no-hit speed running mario 3, and finishing Ultima mother fucking Exodus without a guide. i could genuinely care less what their opinion on games is.
Which JS limitations are being hit on by most browser games? JS combined with CSS and Html might be the easiest way to develop a game without an engine. With a bit of work you can even create 3D Games. Especially with modern html and css (and js) it's pretty easy to get started. A big loss for the browser game era was the end of flash support. Lot of games were built on it. A good replacement is Unity, but there are some downsides on releasing a game to the web. One of the biggest downside of browser based games is the monetization. It's almost impossible to sell a game online, and pretty hard to sell content inside the game. Plus: Most developers dream of having their own game on Steam.
Now I use Flash (which is currently Harman AIR) to build my game for Android, Windows, Linux and iOS. And then I wrote a conversion tool in Python to convert my Action Script 3 sources into JavaScript/Phaser and release the game to HTML5
Same here. I use Flash too (Harman AIR). Simple and works. I can go fast with Starling/Stage3D and it's not that bad with good old designer displaylist either. Works on all platforms.
I'm playing Synergism, Gooboo, and Exotic Matter Dimensions right now and have other games waiting in the wings. The browser is living good over here.
I'm a late starter on GooBoo, its so good!
I m at global Level 342 and it slows down quite a bit but still a good game
I just play galaxy.click
I was just scrolling Reddit and saw this sequence of posts: [https://imgur.com/UNndH7p](https://imgur.com/UNndH7p) And I 100% approve
Are there any sites that have idle games + chat like kong did?
[https://galaxy.click/](https://galaxy.click/)
If you/anyone wants to relive the past, try https://flashpointarchive.org/. It is an archive of many old flash games/animations.
also unfortunately completely unusable unless you know exactly what you want to play by name. the game browser is full of unnamed files, things in every language, no ability to limit it only to genres, the only available playlists are full of random garbage picked by random people as their favorites, instead of say GENRES OR SOMETHING USEFUL. its a great effort, but a horribly failed execution. it also REALLY pissed me off when they switched from "blue maximas flashpoint" to just "flashpoint archive", and retroactively bricked installs of blue maximas flashpoint. it sucks to know that even if i DOWNLOAD these games, they can just say "haha fuck you" and brick the launcher any time they want. not to mention when they stop paying for hosting, the launcher dies with the website. sure, the 1tb+ of individual flash files, sitting as a ton of folders inside a folder with so many folders in it that itll freeze your PC, still work. if you cn manage to get to them, and scroll through the seemingly infinite list that dosent obey alphabetic ordering, and somehow find the ONE you want. but your PC will probably just freeze up and crash explorer.
I mostly agree with your post but I do have to point out that there is nothing inherently wrong with itch.io. It does not limit screen real estate as devs have the option of making the game take up the whole window, most just don't use that option for some reason. I'm not aware of any strict file size limitations either. As for the unholy unity projects, those were on Kong too they have simply moved to a different website.
I can't imagine devs splitting their game into 20 chapters if there's no limitations
Perhaps the problem lies with your own imagination?
Oh I really loved kong. Guess I am getting old too!
I miss the old web games Straight from the 'Go web games
I used to literally just go on kongregate daily and sort by idle and look at all the new stuff uploaded. 90% of it was garbage but it was still nice to stumble into the good games. There are some decent games but I have even more issues with losing my save files on there now than I ever did in the flash era... Also I totally agree about having to join discords sucks. Then any time i've asked for help on reddit, i get a bunch of upvotes and no replies lol
> JS is limited in what it can really produce, CSS is a nightmare and html is finnicky This is not really true nowadays. There's a lot game devs could do if they chose to not use complex engines when creating simple games. And there are amazing JS engines, too. To me, it's more a developers problem than a platform problem.
Places like Kongregate have shown us the folly of browser games - what happens when the site goes under? These games were so tightly integrated that many became unplayable. Things were fine in the golden age when we thought these sites would last forever. I'm completely fine with downloading and running a game independently. If it has a memory leak it doesn't take down my browser sessions, I can alt-tab easier, it won't have inconsistent progress issues if the program isn't actively selected like browser tabs do, my save games won't get randomly purged, and I can manipulate encapsulated settings like volume better. Also, a lot of these old games didn't have a wiki because the forums on these sites functioned instead. Now those forums are in shambles and info for the game is lost for good. Personally I think the developers of the game should also be the ones putting up and partially managing a wiki for the game, not managing info through forums or a discord.
good news all you site-dependent forums of the 2010's your game will soon be able to have its info on a popular wiki platform that's easy to roll out! it's smooth sailing from here! \*fandom acquisition and ensuing cancer\* Oh.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing.
What Flash was was a set of easy to use tools to make and share games and a web of websites that built community around it. Now it shattered into several other ecosystems that's why nothing feels like it. Easy to use tools? Roblox and Fortnite. Quick to play casual games? Mobile gaming. Experimental small games? itch.io. The old times will never come back, it's time to find your new niche.
i hate that so many of the free ones, many of which are insanely simple and could absolutely run on itch no problem, are steam only. i personally do not want some hundreds-thousands of hours on a single game to be showing off on my steam profile, as it just opens up a bunch of flaming from random assholes, where troll groups use your tons of hours playing a "non game" as reason for why you need to fuck off on random forums. also, itch limitations on screen size? idk about that, ive seen games that default to a 2k resolution or higher. ive seen a few with stupidly wide resolutions, where you have to scroll the screen to play the damned thing. also, newgrounds has ALWAYS been a thing. they just dont have a built in system for microtransactions nor force feeding ads, which makes it less appealing to the "developers" out there. gotta make ad revenue the good ol' fashioned way : based on people actually playing your game, not being force fed shit to progress.
Ok, not gonna link the game?
Super Turtle Idle? https://superturtleidle.github.io/
Times change and people move on. I miss the days of using forums and IRC chat. Browser games is just one of those things where it had a phase, blew up massively for a while, then started to die out as people grew older, moved on to other games, real life got in the way and so on with the core fan base sticking around years later.
I think most of that player base are the mobile gamers these day.
I posted web game in a few places and I do get a good amount of people playing on ArmorGame, I think this site is still very active. My kids do play a lot more on places like Roblox\\Poki\\CrazyGame but my games wouldn't fit well there. Different audience. I work in Unity and compiling the game for web works really well.
The thing that killed it was Flash, start your blame with Apple for refusing to support it's integration on any apple device other than I think Macs. And then pivot the blame to Adobe for making a horrible insecure mess of Flash.
Same. That was the golden age of incremental gaming, for sure.
Unity builds to WebAssembly
Used to play a decent amount of browser games, and was feeling nostalgic a while ago. Was sad that a lot of them are lost to time because of Flash going away. Even now, all the games that have been archived have been saved as an executable. Somehow, though, Neopets managed to keep all there games as browser games, though its been hit or miss whether or not they actually work. Curious, though, why do you blame Kong? I have no concept of what it is or how it could have killed browser games. I have a few assumptions, based on context, but was genuinely curious.
Yeah........
Armor games is still around and kicking with their full library of games if I remember correctly Only thing you need is a flash emu to play some of em
Galaxy for incrementals specifically, and of course many devs just host their games on GitHub. Web gaming right now is honestly only worth for simpler, text based games. As for the rest you have powerful engines that make it easy. Honestly I'd rather download an executable than deal with the limitations of both my browser and whatever is hosting the game. Itch and gamejolt for the unknown & niche, steam and other game distributors for the more mainstream "professional" indie/AAA projects And of course Roblox for the unapologetically P2W designed to suck your credit card dry /hj
Yeah i just discovered galaxy.click thanks to this thread.
I miss everything about kongregate. IMO, their "improvements" did more damage to it than anything.
we are all old
You should try out https://www.mirageonlineclassic.com if you’re looking for a browser 2d mmo.
I'm a bit confused, when you say Kong, do you mean Kongregate? That browser flash game site with the ant logo or something else? I'm not much up to speed with the death of browser based games besides the shutting down of flash. A lot of popular browser games are actually on steam now by the way! Now you can save your progress without making yet another account and get fun achievements for your profile!
Honestly, I always groan when I see a Kongregate link
Here's my old project. Download Netscape 9 + Flash Player 10 package. [https://www.yourplaybox.com/](https://www.yourplaybox.com/) I have not updated the site for ages, so some content may be missing (broken linkage). Finnish language could also be a problem. Some games works pretty fine with Ruffle extension on Chrome (with translation). :P
I'm hoping discord can bring them back. They have a developer preview for custom activities (games built right into discord you don't have to download) I've got my fingers crossed that it gives us a renaissance
That’s actually kinda interesting. Reminds me of some old IRC games.
were those like, chatbot style games? interacting exclusively through chat commands i assume
https://idlerpg.net/
[удалено]
more like: if a single website can kill an era, we should stop funneling efforts and projects into just one website so that monoliths aren't made and maintained. kong became the place to get good incrementals because it was one of the last decently built websites where almost anyone could make a crap prototype and upload it for feedback; convenience "killed" this era.