I dunno, the tools are kind of there. Browsers have canvases and JavaScript and SVGs and sound. The communities are around; they're just kind of dispersed. There's no one website that is THE place for fun stuff. Instead, there are dozens, and most of them suck.
There's still fun stuff, though. I stumbled upon this bit of insanity just yesterday: https://tykenn.itch.io/trees-hate-you. It would have fit in fabulously with the old Flash sites.
Edit: looks like you linkes something created with Unity?
Not sure, I'm not versed in game dev. So maybe my point about creation tools is moot.
However, 3D content always seems very samey to me, in a way that cartoons and regular animation don't. So the rest of my comment should still express what I mean.
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Flash had a WYSIWYG editor aimed at media creators who treat programming at best as an afterthought.
Flash was mostly about ease of tweening and extremely flexible vector graphics engine combined with an intuitive creation tool.
So the "Flash vs HTML/JS/SVG/CSS..." debate is not just about technical capabilities of the medium.
Of course there are many fun web apps in the browser, or as native apps, too. But Flash attracted all kinds of slightly nerdy people with cultural things to say, not just web devs with a lot of free time.
What "HTML5"/browser web technology doesn't offer is this intuitive, visual creation pipeline, and this kind of speaks for itself!
Also, I think the Flash "creator's" age is not separable from its time: using Flash wasn't trivial either.
There were just more people with interesting ideas, free time, and a wholistic talent for expressing their humor and ideas, combined with the curiosity and skill to learn using Flash (of course only as a licensed copy purchased from Macromedia).
People like this today are probably more often hyper-optimizing social media creators, and/or not terminally online.
In other words: I don't think the typical Newgrounds creator would have taken the time and effort to translate a stickman collage, meme, or other idea into a web app / animation.
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And to add even more preaching: I think that "creating" things using AI produces exactly the opposite effect: feed it an original idea, and the result will be a regression to the mean.
It's not quite the same but it seems the people who used to be publishing flash games are now making indie games on Steam. With modern dev tools and engines it's possible for one person to make what used to be a team effort before.
The whole "friendslop" genre is what replaced flash games.
I dunno, the tools are kind of there. Browsers have canvases and JavaScript and SVGs and sound. The communities are around; they're just kind of dispersed. There's no one website that is THE place for fun stuff. Instead, there are dozens, and most of them suck.
There's still fun stuff, though. I stumbled upon this bit of insanity just yesterday: https://tykenn.itch.io/trees-hate-you. It would have fit in fabulously with the old Flash sites.
Edit: looks like you linkes something created with Unity?
Not sure, I'm not versed in game dev. So maybe my point about creation tools is moot.
However, 3D content always seems very samey to me, in a way that cartoons and regular animation don't. So the rest of my comment should still express what I mean.
---
Flash had a WYSIWYG editor aimed at media creators who treat programming at best as an afterthought.
Flash was mostly about ease of tweening and extremely flexible vector graphics engine combined with an intuitive creation tool.
So the "Flash vs HTML/JS/SVG/CSS..." debate is not just about technical capabilities of the medium.
Of course there are many fun web apps in the browser, or as native apps, too. But Flash attracted all kinds of slightly nerdy people with cultural things to say, not just web devs with a lot of free time.
What "HTML5"/browser web technology doesn't offer is this intuitive, visual creation pipeline, and this kind of speaks for itself!
Also, I think the Flash "creator's" age is not separable from its time: using Flash wasn't trivial either.
There were just more people with interesting ideas, free time, and a wholistic talent for expressing their humor and ideas, combined with the curiosity and skill to learn using Flash (of course only as a licensed copy purchased from Macromedia).
People like this today are probably more often hyper-optimizing social media creators, and/or not terminally online.
In other words: I don't think the typical Newgrounds creator would have taken the time and effort to translate a stickman collage, meme, or other idea into a web app / animation.
---
And to add even more preaching: I think that "creating" things using AI produces exactly the opposite effect: feed it an original idea, and the result will be a regression to the mean.
It's not quite the same but it seems the people who used to be publishing flash games are now making indie games on Steam. With modern dev tools and engines it's possible for one person to make what used to be a team effort before.
The whole "friendslop" genre is what replaced flash games.
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