By 2014, it was clear the Flash was no longer a viable solution to make high quality games, and the industry as a whole was starting to look for new solutions to be able to deliver games to web and mobile devices without needing to rely on Flash or ActionScript 3.
I was one of the early trail blazers for this work, and as such I was eager to try some “creative solutions” in order to succeed.
Since I was working with a backlog of existing Flash games, and artwork, my approach was to change as little as possible while delivering a very similar gaming experience using just JavaScript and HTML5. This was the very early days of HTML5 and the Flash to Javascript transition, so there were no solutions available yet, but there were a couple of experimental projects that I found could work together.
For the graphical rendering in Canvas, I used the CreateJS JavaScript library which used a philosophy of trying to be as close to working with Flash and AS3 as possible in order to make the transition easier.
For the code conversion, I used the Jangaroo transpiler, which could use AS3 source code and produce a JavaScript build output from it.
Using these two, powerful, tools I was able to use not only the existing Artwork and Flash files, but I was able to reuse the majority of the game code as well.
We delivered two slot games using this framework; “Diamond Tower” and “Lost Temple”.