Complete Actionscript to HTML5 - Flash Game Development Tutorial From Scratch

[AnAmateurDev]

Are you a Flash or ActionScript developer wondering how to bring your games to modern platforms like HTML5? This full step-by-step tutorial shows you exactly how.

We’ll start by building a complete 2D racing game using Adobe AIR, Starling Framework, Feathers UI, and Stardust Particle Engine. Then, we’ll level it up with leaderboards, settings, sounds, and localization. Finally, we’ll take the biggest leap: converting the entire project into Haxe using AS3HX, generating a smooth HTML5 build with OpenFL, and publishing it on itch.io. 🌍🎮

✨ What you’ll learn in this full tutorial:

Building a racing game with Starling Framework & Feathers UI

Using Starling Builder editor for quick UI setup

Working with TexturePacker & Bitmap Fonts for optimized assets

Managing cars, collisions, game states, and particle effects with Stardust

Adding polish with leaderboards, sounds, and localization

Publishing as an Adobe AIR desktop app

Converting Actionscript projects into Haxe with AS3HX

Exporting a release-ready HTML5 build using OpenFL :

Publishing your game to itch.io : https://theamateurdeveloper.itch.io/turbo-shift

👨‍💻 Who is this for?
If you’ve worked with Flash/Actionscript and thought your projects were stuck in the past — this tutorial shows you how to revive them for the web. Code in familiar Actionscript syntax, convert seamlessly, and deploy to modern browsers with HTML5.

⚡ Watch the full video to see how you can still create games in ActionScript and output them in HTML5!

https://youtu.be/koHnQbUrz58

[httpwebmedia]

I have a few games that I’d like to port to HTML5. The code is written in AS3, and the animations were created in Adobe Animate, with some code embedded in the timeline. Could you tell me if there’s a method to port these games to HTML5, similar to what you explained in your video?

Thank you very much for your help.

[AnAmateurDev]

Yes — it’s possible, but it won’t be a one-click conversion. You have two options:

1. AS3 → Starling path: Convert your assets into sprites/spritesheets, rewrite the code in AS3 with Starling, and then use as3hx to convert it to Haxe-OpenFL(as shown in the tutorial).
2. Direct Haxe/OpenFL path: Rewrite the code in Haxe-OpenFL and use your SWF assets directly.

In both cases, you’ll need to remove all timeline code and rewrite your game logic in a clean, class-based structure.

[httpwebmedia]

okay thank you for your help :)

[PrimaryFeather]

My dear "definitely-not-an-amateur-dev",

I've posted my comment on this amazing tutorial already in the Starling forum, but I didn't want to let this stand without my feedback in this channel – so I pasted my reply below, as well. 😉

Thanks a ton for putting together that video tutorial! Honestly, I didn’t see this coming – especially since my own contributions to Starling have been rather sparse for quite a while.

There’s very little video content available for Starling, and these days many developers really expect that kind of resource. The few tutorials that did exist were, unfortunately, pretty outdated. 😬

Your course really changes that!

I can only imagine the amount of work you put in – over 5 hours of material (🤯) covering such a wide range of topics. That’s huge.

It’s incredibly valuable, and I’m sure it’s going to help a lot of developers. I’ve already added a link to the course on the Starling Wiki so people can easily find it.

Cheers,
Daniel

[marchbold]

This is amazing! Reminds me of how the flash community used to have such amazing devs producing tutorials and having such fun with the platform! Great work!

[ajwfrost]

These videos look really useful, thanks @AnAmateurDev - definitely something we should also provide links to from the https://airsdk.dev website.

A couple of thoughts, based on the above posts (and these are not targeted at anyone in particular, just some of my thoughts about this area!)

• It would be great if we had a route for generating code-based assets from FLA files, which would then help with the migration to Haxe etc. We'd looked at this a while ago which was for a game-based migration, it's actually surprisingly complex with a lot of weird scaling and matrix transformations that are included in object definitions inside the SWFs..
• Most of our migration work for Flash-to-HTML has been on Flex projects i.e. business applications rather than games, and we have recreated a lot of the Flex UI components using Angular rather than trying to convert the whole Flex framework to JavaScript/HTML (for rendering performance reasons). But I'd be interested to know if people are using Haxe/OpenFL for this kind of application too...
• We're still looking at the idea of having AIR applications that run directly within the browser, which is likely to be within a WebAssembly virtualisation layer. We're yet to see how the Stage3D acceleration would work there but I'm hopeful the performance would be reasonable; I'm assuming the migration to Haxe and use of Starling this way would mean it uses WebGL properly!
• Going back to Animate .. for designing shapes/graphics and doing some animations, have people looked at the newer Adobe Express tool at all? It's not got quite the same timeline concept, but it's extensible and we had wondered about putting together an add-on that could allow 'pages' in Express to be used as sprites in a SWF...

Anyway - thank you for the tutorials and contributions, it's all very helpful!

 Andrew

[joshtynjala]

Just adding a few random thoughts...

definitely something we should also provide links to from the https://airsdk.dev/ website.

If you add a section for videos, I recently rediscovered this old official Adobe channel on YouTube that has a ton of short videos teaching how to use AS3. These might be a good addition to your videos section.

https://www.youtube.com/user/AdobeActionScript

It would be great if we had a route for generating code-based assets from FLA files, which would then help with the migration to Haxe etc.

For Haxe/OpenFL, people typically use our swf library for a similar purpose. Folks can design assets in Animate, export a SWF, and then convert that SWF into a format that OpenFL can use.

I could also see value in a library or tool that converts XFL/FLA content directly into drawing commands, or into the same format library bundles that the Haxe swf library generates.

I'd be interested to know if people are using Haxe/OpenFL for this kind of application too...

I would guess that most people who decide use OpenFL for old business apps convert to Feathers UI or Haxe UI. It's probably not a ton of people doing that, though.

A while back, I created a proof of concept where I used Apache Royale tp compile a couple of Flex components to JS, and have it run on top of OpenFL compiled to JS: https://github.com/joshtynjala/openfl-adobe-flex-poc

It would be possible to get more of Flex working on the combination of OpenFL/Royale, but it would be a very big job that would probably require someone willing to fund such an effort.

We're yet to see how the Stage3D acceleration would work there but I'm hopeful the performance would be reasonable

I know that people have used WASM together with WebGL before. It should be possible, but I've never worked much with WASM, so I don't know how difficult that integration is.

[raresn]

* We're still looking at the idea of having AIR applications that run directly within the browser, which is likely to be within a WebAssembly virtualisation layer. We're yet to see how the Stage3D acceleration would work there but I'm hopeful the performance would be reasonable; I'm assuming the migration to Haxe and use of Starling this way would mean it uses WebGL properly!

Having the option to export our apps to the browser again is simply mindblowing!
If you can share any progress there, would be awesome :)

[AnAmateurDev]

• It would be great if we had a route for generating code-based assets from FLA files, which would then help with the migration to Haxe etc. We'd looked at this a while ago which was for a game-based migration, it's actually surprisingly complex with a lot of weird scaling and matrix transformations that are included in object definitions inside the SWFs..

You're absolutely right that this is a complex challenge for Flash developers migrating their projects.
For the tutorial, I deliberately kept art assets separate as they require specialized treatment that would have made the tutorial much longer and more complex. I also noticed that most modern game engine tutorials (GameMaker, Unity, Defold, Godot, etc.) focus on the development workflow rather than asset creation pipelines, so I followed that approach.
However, for Flash developers facing this specific migration challenge, here are some solutions worth exploring:

Current Tools Available:

1. DMT - to rasterize vector images to bitmaps and generate the atlases.
2. Flump- Specifically designed for converting Flash keyframe animations to texture atlases and JSON
3. Starling Extension for Adobe Animate - Direct integration for Starling projects

There's no single perfect solution yet. The matrix transformation complexity you mentioned is real, and each tool handles different aspects of the conversion process. It often requires a combination approach depending on your specific asset types and animation complexity.

• But I'd be interested to know if people are using Haxe/OpenFL for this kind of application too...

Regarding Haxe/OpenFL for apps - we haven't seen anyone using it so far. The ecosystem is mostly game-focused currently.
However, after the tutorial, few Haxe developers showed interest in Starling Builder as a potential UI editor for web apps, and suggested Starling-FeathersUI-OpenFL could be a good alternative to other Haxe UI libraries.
So there might be untapped potential there, but it would need more community development and real-world case studies.

• Going back to Animate .. for designing shapes/graphics and doing some animations, have people looked at the newer Adobe Express tool at all? It's not got quite the same timeline concept, but it's extensible and we had wondered about putting together an add-on that could allow 'pages' in Express to be used as sprites in a SWF...

Haven't seen Adobe Express gain much popularity in the game development community yet.
However, Rive has definitely gained significant traction as a modern alternative for creating interactive animations and graphics. It's becoming quite popular for web and mobile projects, and might be worth exploring for asset creation workflows.