Flash meets its maker

Converting Flash games to live on in the modern web would seem like a bit of a no-brainer. Unfortunately there’s never been a silver bullet to quickly and easily perform this task. Like so many things in life, the answer comes down to old fashioned hard work!

That said, we came up with a bunch of cool tricks to make that hard work just a little bit easier. Our ActionScript to TypeScript converter let us instantly convert the original source into a format that could at least function in the land of web.

We also ported the original Box2D physics engine over to TypeScript, right down to replicating its original bugs! This was far from lazy coding (as if we would!) however - it was essential to preserve all its quirks as they contributed to exactly how all the UGC levels specific behaviours and outcomes operated. If we ‘fixed’ the engine we’d actually have broken the game!

Other tricks included an API that would ‘translate’ Flash commands that didn’t exist in our Pixi library as well as a vector conversion pipeline to extract all the original art and turn it into bitmaps.

And whilst there were no silver bullets, the outcome was solid gold!