This is because Flash uses a coordinate system that starts at the top left of the screen and has horizontal (x) coordinates increasing as you move to the right while vertical (y) coordinates increasing as you move down. Positioning all these UI elements was mentally taxing. Most of the UI in the port is nearly identical, though there are a few places where an exact match could not be achieved. A lot of care went into trying to match the original look as closely as possible, down to using the same button and panel sizes, text colors, and font settings. Monster animations are fun, but the actual game is about 95% UI. Despite the number of files, this ended up being the easiest part of the porting process and took the least amount of time to do because of this tool. This made it possible to select literally every single monster file at once, drag-and-drop them into the exporter, and have Unity compatible sprite sheets in a matter of minutes. TPS file and executes a command to another program called Texture Packer to export the frames into a sprite sheet that Unity can use. Once all the animation frames are fully rendered, the application then creates a custom. This AIR application takes monster animations and renders each frame out as a separate image. Specifically, Adobe AIR, which allows Flash based programs to directly access a desktop’s file system and call other programs as needed. To make the process easier, a tool was created…using Flash. There are over 120 monsters that needed porting in Clicker Heroes, as well as some special animations, like level up effects, opening new gilded heroes, et cetera. So one of the first steps was exporting the monster animations from Flash to a format compatible with Unity. The upside to this conversion is that rasterized art renders faster than vector art. All of the lovely, crisp vector art had to be rendered out to images, which makes them lose some of their flexibility. Unfortunately, that experience has considerably more friction when it comes to Unity. Creating rollover effects and playing detailed animations was an almost frictionless experience on the developer side. Part of the reason why Flash games were easy to make is because the art and code could effortlessly interact with each other. Converting this portion of the AS3 codebase to C# was fairly straight forward, but still extremely tedious since there were thousands of lines of text to pour over in many, many files. Thankfully, the base game code–the logic that dictates things like leveling heroes, buying upgrades, dealing damage–was organized rather well and mostly separate from the code controlling the visuals. Unity, however, uses C# as its programming language, which is much stricter and requires more code to match all of our use cases, but also executes a lot faster and makes debugging easier.Īll of Clicker Heroes’ code had to be manually analyzed and ported from AS3 to C#. Such flexibility means you don’t have to write as much code, though it also makes it slightly more difficult to manage. AS3 is very dynamic and allows programmers to create data structures on the fly. The original Clicker Heroes was programmed in ActionScript 3, a language similar to JavaScript but exclusive to Flash. In the mean time, let’s take a little look at what went into making this port. However, while a lot of progress has been made, it needs a bit more time before it’s ready to show off. We’re quite anxious to get this port out as soon as we can. With this port, players will once again be able to play the game in the browser. So, yeah…it’s probably about time to pull back the curtain on what we’ve been working on.Ĭlicker Heroes is currently being recreated in Unity. And so–for the sake of internet sanity and security–Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple banded together to slowly push the Flash player plugin off a steep cliff, with Adobe giving the last little nudge from behind in October of 2020 to send it over the edge.Īnd with that came the end of playing Flash games–and Clicker Heroes–in the browser. Sadly, that same ease of use and distribution also allowed for ridiculously invasive and poorly created ads and scam applications to flourish, causing major performance strain on some websites. Clicker Heroes was, of course, one such Flash game that found an audience and really took off in popularity. It was easy to bundle all the assets and code into a single SWF file and send it out into the world for hundreds, thousands, even millions of people to immediately enjoy. As many internet content creators from the early 2000s will tell you, making games with Flash was quite an enjoyable experience.
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