Flashpoint-Game-Scouter

A Tool for Scouting game sites full of Flash Games for Bluemaxima's Flashpoint Project

Adobe is killing ending the life of Flash at the end of this year.

and people are understandably not too happy about this decision. There are several projects out there dedicated to preserving flash media post-2020. One in particular is Bluemaxima's Flashpoint dedicated to preserving games and animations.

As of my writing this, Flashpoint supports a whopping 60,000 games. But there is still more to be found. So in hopes of making the hunting process easier the FlashPoint Scouter (FPS) is a tool designed to scout game sites, to see if there are any games currently not included in Flashpoint. This is done by comparing game titles on the website, to those in the Flashpoint database; to determine how much of this website's content is unrecognized.

How it works

1. First a local copy of the Flashpoint Master list is made/updated to get a list of all currently curated games.
2. The current scope of this project is to target game sites which have ID-based URLs, either as a field:

• Ex. a game on http://www.oyunlar1.com is located at http://www.oyunlar1.com/games.php?flash=11637 or game sites which have an ID sorting system even if URLs are unpredictable:
• Ex. a game on http://www.flash-game.net is located at http://www.flash-game.net/game/7519/quadrato.html and while quadrato in the URL might not be predictable, there is a page which allows for all games to be sorted (and thus crawled) by ID.

3. Next, a CSS-selector is specified to tell FPS where to look for the game's title on the page.
4. And finally, to ensure correct localization (ensuring the page is in English) or layout (ensuring a game's title is in its usual location) additional cookies might be specified.
5. Once all of this information has been provided, the Scouter will crawl through the given game site and build a list of available games.
6. The game site's titles are queried against the local Flashpoint Master list, while accounting for typos, name differences etc., to search for likely matches.
7. After comparing the lists, the Scouter reports what percentage of games from this game site are:

• In the Flashpoint Master list
• Very similar to games in the Flashpoint Master list
• Kind of similar to games in the Flashpoint Master list
• Unrecognized

This gives game hunters and curators a quick-look to determine if it's worth gathering games from one game site or another.