You may have noticed the site looks a bit different. You may also have noticed I’m no longer hosting the games embedded in webpages. That’s the big thing here, so I’ll explain that first.
Where are the games?
With the so-called Death of Flash, it’s become basically impossible to use the Flash plugin online. There are ways around this (which I’ll get into the details on later) but I ultimately decided to no longer host the games the way we used to. Rest assured, the games remain as they always were, on Newgrounds.
You may still download the games on this site. With the loss of embedded games, I’ve made that a more prominent feature. It was always sort of hidden before, under “Share our Games”, because my primary intention was for other sites to grab the games from here, and embed them in their own pages.
How do I play Flash games in 2021?
In order to play my games (at least all of them posted at the time of writing) you’ll need an alternative to the Flashplayer. Two players that work with virtually all Flash games are the Newgrounds Player, and Flashpoint. There are sometimes hiccups getting these to work, but they’re worth the effort.
Another option is Ruffle, a Flash emulator. As of the time of writing, Ruffle is incomplete. It only works with games programmed using ActionScript 2, but support for AS3 games in on the way. The big advantage of Ruffle is that it can be used to embed Flash games just like the good old days.
Then why aren’t you using it?
Okay, that’s a good question. The answer is complicated, and very much tied into the site changeover. This is going to get oddly personal, fyi.
- I didn’t plan on Ruffle existing when I first decided to move the games offsite. If I had known ahead of time, maybe the other reasons wouldn’t have been enough to stop me from making the change.
- The internet is becoming more an more centralised on big platforms like Instagram and YouTube. Having my own website to host my creations was always a dream of mine, and I achieved that dream for over a decade. But it’s time to let that dream go. The winds of the internet have changed, and to change with them I’m making this site primarily a jumping off point to find my content on other platforms.
- Maintaining my own site with embedded games, content showcases, and all manner of WordPress plugins was a huge pain in the ass. I spent so much time building and maintaining the old site that I’d much rather spend on making content, which is why this new site is secondarily a blog.
- The old site was unstable. I had bloated it with so many plugins, css additions, and theme modifications that the back end was a complete mess. Every day something needed updating. Which doesn’t sound like a big deal, you just click the little update button. but each update had the potential to break something I spent a lot of time building. I might need to spend a long time fixing things, and even if I didn’t, I’d need to spend time making sure nothing had broken. Updating anything became such a big risk that I just avoided it, causing things to break anyway from being outdated. (Also, I hate coding in html and css. It’s just not compatible with my way of thinking.)
- The ad revenue isn’t worth the effort. The amount of work and stress caused by the above points far outweighed the meager financial benefits from the traffic embedded games brought. If my AdSense from this site dropped to nothing, it would still be worth it.
Kudos to anyone reading that list. I mostly wrote it to justify the decisions I’ve made to myself.
Where are the comments?
A comment section would be a part of that bloat I was talking about earlier. And having yet another place to respond to comments takes away from time I should be spending making games and videos. Not to mention it’s redundant. If you want to comment on a blog post, you can tell me on Discord or Twitter, or on Newgrounds where I’ll mirror most of the posts. Commenting on games and videos can be done easily on the sites they’re hosted on.
In Conclusion
My goal is to have a streamlined site that requires as little maintenance as possible. So far I’m using only half a dozen active plugins, and have written just a few lines of css. I intend to keep it that way. A machine with fewer parts has fewer failure points.
Sorry if that was pretty negative. I just anticipated a lot of criticism.