My first project to hit 100 GitHub stars

After not writing anything on this blog for a few years, passing a coding-related personal milestone feels like a good enough excuse to get writing again.

My port and revival of Cartoon Network's defunct Shockwave game 'Cartoon Cartoon Summer Resort' has just received its 100th star:

This is the first time any of my software projects have ever achieved this. While I'm proud of this accomplishment, I'm more proud of why it has gained 100 stars, and what each star represents to me.

Most of the projects I host on GitHub are just one-off programs. Things that have been written by hundreds of people before me. They consist of chess engines, emulators, my own programming languages, small utilities, etc., sometimes for learning, sometimes just for fun.

This project however, is a unique project. I remade an old game which, at the time, was no longer able to be played.

The original game was a simple 2D RPG where the player collects items and trades with other cartoon characters to complete some final grand objective. The gameplay was simple, and the characters were all based on characters from early 2000s Cartoon Network shows. Many children at the time, myself included, spent hours immersed in it, creating what would become nostalgic memories.

With the death of Shockwave and Flash in the browser, it meant that many of these old Shockwave and Flash games were now dead, leaving the average user without a way to play these old nostalgic games. To fight this, an open source project called Flashpoint was started. Flashpoint is an archival and preservation project that allows these old browser games to be emulated and played again, after all major browsers removed native support for Shockwave and Flash. Thanks to this effort, people are able to play the old CCSR games (among thousands of others) through Flashpoint.

When I randomly remembered this game one day around 6 years(!) ago, I had to play it again. After playing it, I grew curious about how it worked after finding some strange bugs. I poked around in the game files, was able to actually fix a mysterious bug, and I wrote an article about the journey.

To my surprise, this article was posted on HackerNews and Reddit and actually received a large positive response. Some of the actual developers of the game were commenting in the threads, and many were reminiscing over the antiquated technology and a simpler time.

Some years later, I learned about an amazing open source project, ProjectorRays. This program allows us to decompile and open up what were once proprietary and protected Shockwave files. This was pretty huge. Using this software, I could now fully break open the cryptic game I had looked at just a few years before.

After looking over the old code and map files, I had an idea: Why not remake it?

So that's what I did.

Before, to play this game you needed to download Flashpoint, gigabytes of files, go through a lengthy installation process, search for the games, and play them on a fixed size, tiny resolution window.

Now, people can simply open a browser tab and immediately begin to play. My ported version also has many visual and quality of life improvements, and translations. No downloads, no installation, just click and play in the browser. Just like it was when the games came out originally.

People's feedback has been what made this endeavour truly worth it for me. I get a new message almost monthly from someone who has stumbled across my remake and is grateful that they were able to play it again.

I don't usually care about GitHub stars, but for this project, I care deeply. Each star, to me, represents a moment when someone was taken back to a simpler time—when they got to relive a cherished nostalgic memory, forget their current worries, even if just for a fleeting moment.

That is what makes this project one of the most impactful pieces of software I have written.