There should be more game engines/frameworks that support SVGs (or any other vector graphics) natively/out-of-the-box. I think indie developers should make games in the style of flash games you saw on Newgrounds. It has much more personality than pixel art and probably is much easier to do compared to hand-drawn art.

Apparently, SDL has native support for SVGs, but I haven't tried it yet.

@xianc78 being able to use vector graphics for a 2d game is hella powerful. I think that's what game maker's toolkit did with his game, but I can't remember what engine it was. Maybe unity?

@beardalaxy Are they actual SVGs or just SVGs converted to raster graphics?

I think Adobe Flash supported vector graphics out of the box. That's what gives many flash games that iconic artstyle. I honestly prefer that over pixel art. If the engine supports SVGs, you can scale and zoom in them infinitely without a loss in quality.

@xianc78 @beardalaxy flash was 100% vector i used to mess with zooming in back in the day

@PurpCat @beardalaxy And that's probably prevented the flash scene from being flooded with pixel-shit. I wish the current indie scene was more like that.

@xianc78 @beardalaxy Well also the artists were not cut from the same cloth as pixelshit devs. These were animators influenced by old games as opposed to trying to make a carbon copy.

So with Alien Hominid, they were influenced by run and gun games but had the style of vector drawings. I'm sure both platform limitations, but also bandwidth helped. A flash animation with audio is just a few megabytes at most, a video of it is going to be 40-100mb at the very least.

Even pixel animations on the PC-98 or X68000 were done with anime as the style instead of pixelshit because it was the 90s and the mindset was "I want my home computer to display something like the Sailor Moon clips I saw on TV".

Oh and flash as a game platform is dead. As an animation platform? Well when Adobe tried to kill off animator the backlash was so severe they had to backpedal because they probably got many pissed off calls from industry professionals asking "HEY MAN WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING THIS IS MY ENTIRE BUSINESS I WORK IN TV I NEED TO MAKE THIS SHOW".

@PurpCat @beardalaxy
>flash as a game platform is dead

There has to be some dedicated following though. Ruffle exists and Flash is way to unique as a gaming platform for some people to give up. I'd imagine it being like all those Apple II devs who stuck with the platform even after the 8-bit computing era ended.

And even then, I think there are a lot of people who are at least still nostalgic for the artstyle. FNF is largely influenced by it though the devs were active on NewGrounds so there's that.