Customer Reviews

Real-World Flash Game Development: How to Follow Best Practices AND Keep Your Sanity

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

You should have some Actionscript 3.0 experience before you dig into this book. The user level on the back of the book says intermediate to advanced and they mean it! You will also need CS4 to be able to open the downloadable files. I could not open them on my CS3 machine.

This book covers a lot of topics I have not found in other AS books. Some examples are event propagation, dispatching events, E4X, getter/setter methods and protected variables. The chapters are very intense and delve more deeply into the workings of AS 3.0. If you want to know how and why Actionscript does what it does this is the book for you.

Real World also directs you to adopt best practices. This should keep you from developing bad habits and allow you to author modular code that could be easily modified.

The final game in the book is a platform game. You can learn how to load external SWFs containing the game's assets at runtime. This concept is very different from other game tutorials I have worked with.

I would recommend Actionscipt 3.0 Game Programming University if you haven't done any game programming. It has a much gentler approach to game programming.

Real World Flash Game Development should be an important addition to every game developer's bookshelf.

This book is part of the Focal Press series on game design.

The book is well organized. Author Christopher Griffith begins by talking about computer game design in general and then hones in on Flash game development. The sections build on each other. He starts with simple concepts and program segments that you will probably use in every game you design and then works to more complex topics.

Christopher Griffith includes code snippets through the book and there is a generous collection of examples and a faux tutorial on the associated WWW site.

One note of caution! This is not a book for an absolute beginner in either Flash programming or game design.

The author adds some caveats. I found myself re-reading sections of the book several times for understanding.

Also, to get the most out of the book, you need the most recent version of Macromedia Flash.

If you have been working with Flash and Action Script and you are looking to expand and try your hand at game design then this book would be an excellent first step in that direction.

In service,

Rich
[...].

I've been working with flash since 1998, and have read several flash game development (fgd) books over the last 6 or so years. This is not to say that I know everything there is to know about Flash -- how could that be possible? Flash is horribly documented and has changed significantly with AS3. I'm looking for a well reasoned, scalable, and (somewhat) reusable approach to fgd. I'd like to know where the logical boundaries are, but enough about me and what I want. This is exactly what this book presents. It's an excellent cross section. The author presents areas where Flash excels at gd and areas you have to watch out for. He presents, and steps through, working code examples to tackle logical issues/scenarios, ie best practices for: hit testing, sound, in game graphics use, xml/dynamic content loading, player control, and at the end of the book, an over all game engine. So a programmer could easily take away any of these items and use them. On many occasions after he's presented a few different scenarios on a topic, he'll talk about the short comings or gotchas of using that particular technique.

I am in the process of digging into AS game development and this book has been very helpful in explaining the fundamentals and also steering me in the right direction for best practices, etc. I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to know more about flash game development.

I read through the book, and it was quite imformative, gave pratical advice on how, why, what, where, and links to external tools, that I found very helpful. The point of the book is that pre-planning is key, and that this book provides the necesssary tools to start and finish a flash game. That's all I ask, I can take it from where this book leaves off, excellent read.

The self-reported target audience for this book is listed as Intermediate-Advanced, and that is true for the most part. Chapters aren't wasted on the basics of Flash programming, though there is a short review of basic OOP programming concepts and how they're syntaxed in the Flash language.

The content covers most aspects of game development from a breadth perspective rather than depth. You are shown all the basics of topics such as sprite animation, physics, shooter projectiles and targeting, dungeon mapping, multiplayer capabilities, cut-scenes, and video and sound looping. In most cases you are given one concrete example of code, and it is usually the most straightforward approach. In my experience, once you get to writing code, what you want to do is never solvable with the most straightforward approach given in books so you end up scouring the web for help; I think that will probably be the case with this book.

The subtitle of the book is How to Follow Best Practices and Keep Your Sanity, and in these regards, the book has good value. Griffith provides examples of plenty of common roadblocks hit by Flash game developers and offers tricks and tips on how to deal with them. Topics in this area include graphics performance and sizing, timing/threading issues, initial load vs deferred data and separate files, data protection, and other various performance concerns.

The games used in the book are: a tunnel shooter, crossword puzzle, driving game with drift, overhead dungeon, and a tile (moving) puzzle.
There is an online resource available that has all the code for downloading.

"Real-World Flash Game Development" is written for the reader who has already done programming, preferably object-oriented programming, and is serious about developing on the Flash platform. The author covers graphics, sound, video clips, data in/out via XML, simulating physics, and detection of object collision. Several chapters consist of the coding examples that demonstrate the concepts; for instance, a crossword puzzle game and a game that has the player shift tiles to reassemble a picture. In addition to these examples, there are plenty of other example code snippets sprinkled throughout. The author also does a good job of briefly and clearly explaining concepts such as Flash's orientation around frames instead of continuous motion. Although I personally don't have time to write any games, I appreciate knowing how to do it.

I starting reading this book with prior experience in creating Flash movies and utilizing basic Actionscript. The purpose of this book for me was to satisfy my curiosity of how these games are developed and how much time it takes. After reading through half of the book, I found that the scripting became too advanced and syntax too unfamiliar for me. But I decided to read on to get a general concept. I was very impressed by the amount of detailed placed by the author. I would recommend this book to anyone that has an intermediate understanding of Flash, vector art, and Object Oriented programming, that would like to get into Flash gaming.

If you are an actionscript programmer with a moderate grasp of code, this is a good book that covers some of the problems that game design in Flash presents, and how they can be resolved. Between clearly written passages that ground in overarching concepts are code fragments that can be put to use immediately.

I like how the author balances the emphasis on code with discussions on how some approaches will work better than others, depending on context. He builds a progression of concepts towards a finished game. This is a key concept of instructional design.

As others have said, this is not a beginner's book. It assumes that you are already writing code, but want to apply these skills to game programming. There are other companion books such as "A Theory of Fun" that can help with conceptual issues of good game design.

Flash has had a love-hate relationship with its user base since coming out, from the early spate of obnoxiously useless Flash websites to the wide use of Flash as an animation package for cartoons like Neurotically Yours, Homestar Runner, and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, to the creation of hundreds of games (some of which, like N+, have been successful enough to find their way to non-Flash platforms) that bring back the best of the 8-bit era using modern technology. (The current flap over the Apple iPad's lack of Flash support is clear evidence of how things have changed in that regard.) It's this last point, the gaming part, that makes this book a useful guide for your typical game programmer.

The book introduces the basics of the Flash development environment, including ActionScript and, perhaps most importantly, Flash's event model, which is an unusual frame-based model rather than a loop or callback model that most GUIs use. Among other things, the book also covers the basics of game development, including collision detection, math and physics, and content (both text and video) management, as well as programming issues that a casual user might not be immediately familiar with, from IDE management to computer science basics, combining the whole thing together in a crossword game and a platformer.

I'm a little concerned about the price -- Flash in and of itself is a fairly expensive investment, and although computer books have always been somewhat expensive, a fifty dollar book with all the program content available only as a download (rather than on a CD, or, given the bloat typical of current software, a DVD) is rather a lot for a would-be casual hacker. Some coverage of how to use open source Flash tools would be nice, but that's likely another book in and of itself. Overall, though, it's a decent enough introduction from someone who is coming from a position of minimal programming knowledge, as well as someone who is coming from a very different programming system.