History of Cloudflash

Cloudflash was born on August 18th, 2004. In the beginning, it was just another section to my "Danny7" website on Freewebs. But it soon became the center of attention, and then the main site. Cloudflash was originally a very simple website. There was the absolute original site, and a later version of the site; one might say that the original was version zero just to keep present things in order.

The original site had colours for backgrounds and text links saying what ages the submissions were suitable for; this was essentially a rip off of ESRB's video game ratings. There was E-Everyone, T-Caution, and M-Violence. There was also a section for Seasonal gifs (Halloween, Christmas, etc.). Once you went to these pages, you would find the animated gifs that made Cloudflash what it was. The only actual Flash on the original Cloudflash was an intro featuring some Crono sprites; you would have to click him before he disappeared to get to the actual site.

In the first version of Cloudflash, all index pages had plain yellow backgrounds, and all submission pages had plain black backgrounds. The movie/game index was a long list of text links to the Flash submissions. The submission pages had the Cloudflash logo at top, the movie, my comments on it, and a link back to the index. Most of the submissions were simple stick animations.

The name "Cloudflash" originally came from "Cloud" of Final Fantasy 7, and "Flash" for Macromedia Flash, the program used to make the content. At least, that's where one would think the name came from. I had barely played Final Fantasy 7 at the time, and I didn't even like the game too much due to the hard-to-play-with angles in the game. As for the 'Flash' part, Cloudflash actually had animated gifs, not Flash movies or games. Most of the gifs weren't even made using Flash. I had an animated gif series titled "Mr. Blond", which was made to make fun of the Nintendo 64 James Bond game, GoldenEye, and it was made using MS Paint. So the first Cloudflash didn't really have anything to do with Cloud or Flash. Eventually a Cloudflash logo was developed, using Cloud from Final Fantasy 7 and the Flash logo. I stopped using this at some point, because I didn't want to use characters from other games in my logo. Anyhow, the point is that the name "Cloudflash" may have come from thoughts of Cloud and Flash or it may have just been some sort of coincidence.

Why did I make Cloudflash? Well, here's a lot of info about the origins and stuff... Cloudflash didn't just randomly happen you know... Lots of history... I had first used a computer when I was around 6 years old, but I only knew about Minesweeper and Solitaire back then. That computer was at a gymnasium I used to go to; there was no computer in my household. Somewhere around when I was 10 years old, we finally got a computer and internet. I mostly just messed around in MS Paint, look up game cheats, play free games, and save images to my folder. I saw my brother making his own free website with www.homestead.com, then decided I wanted a website of my own. For about a month I was always working on making a WYSIWYG website with Homestead whenever I wasn't playing video games. The site was pretty ugly and pointless, but I enjoyed making it. One day I tried to log on but they told me my 30 day free trial has expired... I had no idea what that meant, then I found out it meant my site was no more. I was pretty upset... A couple years later my oldest brother took the computer to my dad's house, so I hardly got to go on the computer at all anymore... I was looking for a "game maker" or something whenever I was on the computer since I had an interest in creating games, but "Game Maker 4" was a crappy program and hard to use. I tried to read through all of their Help and How to files, but it was too much to read, so I gave up. I was also spending time looking for a free website maker since I was still interested in having a website, but it was hard to find one back then. They all had their free trials and other gimmicks, and I knew better by then. It all seemed hopeless, so I stuck to drawing in school and in free time... I always wanted to make cartoons, so I practised my drawing, even though I was terrible. I made little comics featuring violent little stick men... Pokemon was put on YTV when I was 10, so since then I had an interest in anime... I had watched Ranma 1/2, Sailormoon, and Dragon Ball a few years prior to Pokemon, and I enjoyed those, but Pokemon was the shit back then! It caused me to frequently try to draw anime. Eventually I stopped sucking so badly at drawing anime, but the drawings were still far from good. In late July of 2004, we finally got a computer again. We installed a free trial of AOL... I couldn't go on the internet much since my mom expected the phone calls often. During that summer I worked with my dad for a month painting houses and whatever. At his house I found a free trial of an easy-to-use gif animator; I wanted a gif animator for some time since it was the closest thing to making animations. Later, when I was back at home, I "went on my ship", "raised the flag with skull and cross bones", and "pillaged another ship", if you catch my drift. I was so happy that I could finally make movies... I was so excited, I would draw out 400+ frames in MS Paint and import them to this gif animator to make a movie; these movies were my "Mr. Blond" series. Around this time I found out about freewebs; lots of people were making crappy personal websites, word got around... This was an excellent opportunity to once more make a website! I created "Danny7" on freewebs, which was basically a pointless site featuring random stuff, including a gallery of pictures submitted by myself and others. It was fun and stuff... freewebs had a limit of 50 files per account, so I made a new account, Cloudflash, which was where I put my animated gifs. Basically the only ones who knew about it were myself, my sister, and Katie. I kept making gifs though... I kept the site running and all that sort. My childhood dreams of making animations and having a website were both fulfilled, and nicely combined too! I was seeing a few Flash sites around that time; www.ugoplayer.com (formerly known as www.flashplayer.com) in particular. I posted my Mr. Blond on the UgoPlayer forums to see what people thought. The members seemed to sort of like it. I "got on my ship" and all that sort in late August when somebody told me that the program used to make the real Flash was Macromedia Flash MX 2004. I didn't exactly understand it, so I stuck to MS Paint and my gif animator. Some time after school started, Skutieos showed up at Cloudflash, and submit the very first actual Flash game, which was a simple "shoot the stick man by clicking on him" button game. At that time I thought that was amazing! I was inspired to try using Flash again, but not that much... I was still on the virge of giving up on Flash entirely. I didn't sign up for the computer class known as CPT at school, but the teacher, Mrs. Watt, talked to me about how she thought I might sign up for it and stuff... So I dropped my art class and joined the CPT class since she mentioned Flash. We did some boring camera techniques and stuff, but then we finally got to the Flash part! I made my first Flash movie at home in early November, which was when Cloudflash moved into version one. I told the rest of the CPT class about Cloudflash, and quite a few of them checked it out fairly often during class and enjoyed it. That was Cloudflash's first real audience, aside from the oldest members, Katie, Skutieos, and my sister. In early November I also created my first "click to shoot" button game. At that point I had accomplished all of my childhood dreams to a degree.

The second version of Cloudflash had much change from the first version. Background images were added to index, movie, and game pages. A single Flash file was added at the top of the screen, with buttons that linked to the other pages. Flash submission pages gained tables, screenshots, artist's comments, description, rating, etc. The "Other" section began many of sections to modern Cloudflash, such as "Downloads", and even this "History" page. Also, the quality of the submissions improved quite a bit. There used to be dozens of simple stick animations listed in the first version of Cloudflash, but we moved on to having less quantity, and a lot more quality. I'm not saying the movies in the second Cloudflash were perfect, but I am saying it was a very good improvement.

• Background Images - You noticed. It's not just a crappy colour now.
• Button links - At the top, the navigation is buttons and not just crappy text.
• News - Check on the news for info on the top movie/game of the month.

The third version of Cloudflash was another large jump from the previous version. I can say that the layout had improved quite a lot, even if some people disagree with using frames on websites. Rather than having a Flash navigation at the top of the screen, a frame on the left side of the screen contained button links to the other pages. The right side of the page had a frame with all of Cloudflash's affiliates, and some links. There was another frame at the top with the Cloudflash logo. The center frame contained all the pages that you were directed to when buttons/links. were clicked. The forums contained the updates, and the home page of the website displayed the beginning of those updates, then provided a link to the forum post so that the reader could view it all. The Flash Artists section had links to all of the comics, animations, and games submitted by a particular user, as well as a small profile. Many of these changes stayed through to the fourth version of Cloudflash.

A new set of update avatars were used with this version. They were based off of "Kazushi", a character from a comic I was planning on making. I noticed the comic was unintentionally ripping too many things off at once, so I gave up on that, but I kept the main character, Kazushi. Kazushi has been seen once on an "Under Construction" image on Cloudflash and on this set of update avatars.

The background of this version of Cloudflash was a blue one. The center frame was two different shades of blue, striped and tiles. This made several horizontal blue lines in two different colours, each line one pixel thick. The outter frames had a checkered and darker blue colour, each checker tile one pixel in size. The third version of Cloudflash was considered to have ended when the backgrounds were changed from the blue to a red one.

April 09, 2006: Heya everyone! Cloudflash is finally back! The layout is completely different, and there are a lot of other changes, including a bunch of new sections. Some work still needs to be done on the forum, so you'll just have to wait for that. Also, none of the sections have content yet, so you'll have to wait on that too. [Read more]