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Making a MNOG Without Flash: Would it be Possible?


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This is an out-of-nowhere random question, so bear with me. I just had a thought while I was out last month.

MNOG games are, of course, a staple of Bionicle, and have been ever since the beginning. It's been a long time since we've seen a new one, for obvious reasons; and now, with Flash having become mostly obsolete, it seems even more unlikely that we ever will see a new game in that exact style, even in fan-made circles. After all, how can you create a new Flash game without Flash?

Which... is actually my question here, really. In this day and age, where Flash is no longer a seriously viable option, how might one go about building a MNOG-style game? That click-through, explorey, adventurey, interactive kind of thing... Would it even be possible? I'd like to think that Flash wasn't the only means available to construct such a game, just the most suitable for its time, but I quite honestly don't know; are there other programs around at present that could aid in producing a similar kind of experience to the one that so many of us treasure from Bionicle's early days?

I dunno that I'm actually committing to anything; I have some vague ideas for experimenting with, but nothing more. But it's one of those things that you just start idly wondering about, and then can't stop, you know?

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You could probably do it in Unity. Point and click adventures predate Flash. 

#makeBionicleG1andHeroFactorysharethesameuniverse and #giveBionicleansHeroFactorytheirownliveactioncinematicuniverse 
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I don't know the full details beneath the hood, but obviously the preserved BioMediaProject versions of MNOG run without a Flash extension on browser. I don't know if there is a Flash emulator built into the downloadable MNOG or something like that.

If you wanted a full non-Flash version, it would maybe be easier to rip the assets and reprogram the game in a newer engine. Of course that could lead to another project of upscaling and restoration... since so much of the audio and texture files are very compressed by modern standards. 

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Yeah, the downloadable files of the old MNOG-style games on BMP kind of smoosh a Flash runtime into an executable file. So it's still running the same source files, just in a way that doesn't rely on a browser-based Flash runtime.

Unity would be a fine option if that's what one as a developer is used to, but it's a bit heavy (slow downloads, relatively high CPU usage). These MNOG games have some similar features: 2D, relatively low-res, low-performance, and want a low bar to just start playing. Yeah, Unity has a browser player, but if it were me, I'd start with an HTML5/Javascript based game engine. Maybe something like Phaser. It works great for 2D, will "just work" in a browser, and doesn't require as much computing resources as a bigger game engine would. There are other Javascript-based 2D game engines out there, though.

You'd do the vector art in a separate application (heck, maybe still Flash Professional if one has an old copy), which is what would give the game that classic MNOG look.

Edited by -Takua-
Posted before I was done typing!
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