Game Programming in Flash Saint Louis MO

In this article, I show you how to program games in Macromedia Flash. I like Flash because it simplifies the visual side of programming, works on almost every computer made, and has a powerful and reasonably easy programming language. Here I’ll elaborate on the reasons for programming with Flash.

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Reasons for programming with Flash

Flash offers robust multimedia support. Flash, which was designed to support animation on the Web, supports various kinds of images easily. (Think JPEG images and custom drawings.) Flash also has great support for various kinds of audio files, such as MP3 and WAV formats.

ActionScript is related to the influential C language. The ActionScript programming language built into Flash is closely related to JavaScript and ECMAScript, which are two extremely common programming languages. All these languages are based on the C programming language, so the coding conventions you’ll master are much like those in other languages.

Flash is designed for the Web. By working in Flash, you have a ready distribution network. Because Flash was designed for the Web, all your games can be easily published on the Web, and anybody with a Web browser and a Flash plug-in can enjoy your games. And you won’t have to worry about what operating system your users use. (All the programs in this book have been tested in Windows XP and Fedora Core Linux, but they should work in any OS with a Flash plug-in.)

ActionScript programming language

Maybe you’ve used Flash to build Web animations without ever going into its programming features. Many books on Flash (as opposed to ActionScript) focus on the powerful animation features of Flash. These books often mention ActionScript but don’t dwell on it heavily. Animation is primarily about creating moving images; user interaction in animations is minimal. When creating an animation, you generally create some sort of visual symbol onscreen and then use a tool called a motion tween to indicate where this object should be at a specified point in time. You can also use a tool called a shape tween to change the shape of an object over time. You can do this with many objects at the same time to make a complex animation. In order to track all these objects, Flash animators often arrange them into separate layers. Thus, a typical 30-second Flash animation might have hundreds of frames of animation in over a dozen layers.

Animation is cool because it allows you to build movies. However, to create games, you must discover how to program.

If you treat Flash as a programming environment (as I do in this book), you see things quite differently. You still use Flash to create objects, but instead of relying on the Flash environment to control what those objects do (via animation), you control the objects directly by writing programming code. The ActionScript programming language built into Flash lets you do anything that can be done with animation — and many things that cannot be done by using animation techniques alone.

In a nutshell, programming is what makes games interactive. You can

Control what’s onscreen, what size it is, where it is, and how it’s rotated

Detect whether two things touch each other

Accept input from the user

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