The Essential Guide to Flash Games: Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript [Paperback]

Jeff Fulton (Author), Steve Fulton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2010

The Essential Guide to Flash Games is a unique tool for Flash game developers. Rather than focusing on a bunch of low-level how-to material, this book dives straight into building games. The book is divided into specific game genre projects, covering everything from old classics such as a Missile Command-style game, to hot new genres such as retro evolved. The chapters build in complexity through the book, and new tools are introduced along the way that can be reused for other games.

• The game projects covered start simple and increase in complexity as more and more tools are added to your tool chest.
• Ten full game projects are discussed in detail. Each solves a very different game development problem and builds on the knowledge gained from the previous project.
• Many advanced game development techniques are covered, including particle systems, advanced controls, artificial intelligence, blitting, scrolling, and more.

What you’ll learn

• Flash/Flex ActionScript 3 game development
• How to apply object-oriented game development techniques
• How to solve a wide variety specific Flash game programming problems
• How to develop a game engine and set of tools that can be reused
• How to implement ten different games (in styles ranging from retro to modern Flash games)
• How to optimize various games

Who this book is for

This book is for intermediate Flash developers, Flash game developers, game developers looking to move to the Flash platform, and experienced web developers who want to learn how to make games.

Table of Contents

1. The Second Game Theory
2. Creating an AS3 Game Framework
3. Creating Super Click
4. Laying the Groundwork for Flak Cannon
5. Building the Flak Cannon Game Loop
6. Laying the Groundwork for No Tanks!
7. Creating the Full No Tanks! Game
8. Creating the Color Drop Casual Puzzle Game
9. Creating the Dice Battle Puzzle Game
10. Blit Scrolling in a Tile-Based World
11. Creating an Optimized Post-Retro Game
12. Creating a Viral Game: Tunnel Panic

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steve Fulton and Jeff Fulton are twin brothers who have worked in the web game industry for the past ten years. Together they have designed, programmed, and developed over 200 Flash games of every imaginable genre for the corporate, indie, and viral Flash game markets. The brothers run the popular and influential Flash/retro game development site 8-Bit Rocket (http://8bitrocket.com) They update the site daily with news, tutorials, games, and musing about Flash and the viral Flash game world.

Steve Fulton and Jeff Fulton are twin brothers who have worked in the web game industry for the past ten years. Together they have designed, programmed, and developed over 200 Flash games of every imaginable genre for the corporate, indie, and viral Flash game markets. The brothers run the popular and influential Flash/retro game development site 8-Bit Rocket (http://8bitrocket.com) They update the site daily with news, tutorials, games, and musing about Flash and the viral Flash game world.

Product Details

• Paperback: 664 pages
• Publisher: friendsofED; 1 edition (March 29, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430226145
• ISBN-13: 978-1430226147
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 1.3 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #888,026 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book But VERY Poorly Edited August 28, 2010

By David Brady

Format:Paperback

This book has some excellent educational content. If you can get past a staggering amount of typographical errors (some of them in source code!), it is a fantastic resource. If you are familiar with programming and want to learn how to program Flash and Flex games, I highly recommend these authors.

Their editor, however, needs to be shot. There are words missing from sentences every few pages, typos in the source code, and function names that change each time they are referenced. There's even a paragraph (on page 125) explaining a snippet of source code from the previous section... but the previous section of code has been totally rewritten, so the paragraph is worse than meaningless, it's totally confusing. There is an Errata section on the authors' website, but it doesn't even begin to cover the errors in this book. It is painfully apparent that the code in the book was typed in as text and then tested and debugged later, as many examples are inconsistent or have obvious syntax errors.

If you are just starting out with programming I do NOT recommend this book UNLESS you download the accompanying source code. Otherwise you will spend too much time wondering why your program doesn't work when it's an error in the book itself.

I hate to give this a crappy review. I am learning a lot from this book and I *WANT* this book to be as great as its subject matter could be. If the authors release a Second Edition or even a corrected version, I'll be first in line to pick it up.

All that said, I still recommend this book. Their design principles are sound, and the code examples from their website actually work without any fussing or debugging. (There are some mispelled class names, but they are consistent, so the code DOES work.) If you are an experienced programmer who can spot typos in source code, and are patient with a debugger, the book will teach you exactly what you need to know to get your game off the ground.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars In serious need of better proofing. October 15, 2010

By Ben Fischer

Format:Paperback

On the positive: I am learning a lot from this book. The authors have an excellent approach to presenting the material, and at least for me, I feel the broad brush concepts they present, especially in organizing game code are very good. What is absolutely mind boggling is the number of typos in the constantly referenced source code. You are supposed to be building your code on previous exercises (good idea), however there are often changes to function and variable names, forcing you to debug code that is presented to you as an example. Perhaps it wouldn't be as glaring if they hadn't preceded every source sample in the book with the phrase 'we have highlighted the code that is different from that game.', when as it turns out there are often dozens of other subtle changes you'll need to catch yourself.

Inconsistent, or inaccurate information presented in source code presented as educational reference is a complete fail.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Fast delivery, good book but poor edition October 3, 2010

By Yohai

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The book itself is good and the delivery was fast but. It seems like the book I got is an early edition. there's many mistakes and typos.