The Essential Guide to Flash Games – recenzja Przemysława Kocznura

First i must admit that I’m huge fan of 8bitrocket.com (Jeff and Steve Fulton’s blog). It’s great place for flash game developers, full of valuable tutorials and articles.

Main goal of this book is to write reusable and professional ActionScript 3.0 game framework. To achieve this authors walk step by step through process of building 11 real-life games (ranging from arcade, puzzle to shooters). All source codes are avaliable for both platforms: Flash IDE and Flex (of course free to download through publisher website).

First chapter cover some basic features. Introduce to main game loop (with states) and some game framework foundations. Of course it’s based on some standard techniques (movie clips as actors, hitTestObject for collision detection, timeline for animations). Boring? Absolutely no! They develop two playable cool retro games just in 40 pages. Every next chapter brings more and more complex features to learn. To name a few:

• tricky implementation of finite state machine pattern (show how to manage flow of game with this states) – some free tools, that can extremely speeding up prototyping process,
• optimization by using tile sheets instead of individually bitmaps,
• sound management,
• deep description of “blitting” render method (explain when this method is important, and when is not – pages 233-238, is must read part). There is even a bit of history about blitting technique on 8-bit computers,
• xml based level designing,
• scrolling tile-based screens,
• pixel-level collision detection.

For those who want to monetize theirs games there is great example of MochiAds system integration.

In my opinion, it is the most valuable book about seriously flash games developing avalaible on the market. The most important thing: authors does not avoid complex techniques, they just explain problems on real-life game examples. Highly recomended!