Who Needs Flash?
I have a bumpy relationship with Flash technology. I love to hate it, and hate to love it. It’s an essential element of the online experience, allowing some amazing functionality (when it’s used correctly) like video, interactive graphs and charts, and the interactive extension of capabilities that you simply can’t do with HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
I’ve never been a “Flash guy.” I don’t know much about ActionScript, and I’m not the first person you’d ask to create a Flash application. I’ve done my dirty-work in Flash when necessary, but by and large, I think I’ve always avoided it. I have always preferred to do things sans-plugin; no download or extensions required. You can actually do a lot more with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript than most people can imagine. Even without the amazing new features that are rapidly approaching in HTML5 and CSS3, the HTML and CSS of today allow you to do some pretty impressive stuff using traditional methods of web design.
An Experiment: “Faded”
To prove this point (perhaps to myself), I started working on a game. No Flash, no fancy plugins, just HTML, CSS, and a little bit of jQuery programming. As it turns out, this was a challenging and tedious task, but it wasn’t as difficult as I had expected it to be. I started to build out a few interactive puzzles and tied them together in a fictional story, and I really started to have fun with it.
If you’re interested, you can check out the game here (I still have some testing to do in Internet Explorer, but any other browser should work fine):
https://kyleschaeffer.com/faded/
Let me know if you have any issues…HTML is definitely not meant to be an interactive game engine, so I might have some kinks to work out along the way. There are only a few puzzles to solve, but you can sign up for updates when you complete the game and I’ll let you know as I add more. If it’s something that people seem to like, it will be one of my many ongoing projects.