Flash Games Studio

by Sham Bhangal, David Doull, Justin Everett-Church

These days people are looking to the Internet for its gaming possibilities. Whether it's real-time role-playing you're after with 30,000 of your closest friends, or just a solitary round of crazy golf, the most versatile piece of web animation software just made itself more approachable for designing games! This book takes us deep, deep down into the realms of game design, and hunts out the features that are really going to evolve your Flash skills into full-on game wizardry. We are going to discuss what makes a good game - and what makes a great game. We grapple with the concepts of 3D and how to get Flash to produce cutting-edge game environments, while keeping our sensible shoes on by reducing those file sizes and download times. We conduct a battle of wits with artificial intelligence, and have a good crash around with some collision detection in platform games. All in all we are pushing Flash to its breaking point to see what lies beyond. Assuming you have a reasonable knowledge of Flash 5, this book will increase your skill-set and fire your imagination by offering a collection of new approaches and advanced techniques. The only thing more entertaining than playing games is creating them. Now, the only limit is your imagination. Enter the Studio and start taking fun seriously. Friends of ED would like to apologise for the fact that the index, as printed in this book, is erroneous. The correct index can be downloaded as a pdf file from the friends of ED website (friendsofed.com).

800 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2001

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book seemed to cover quite a few of the general concepts of what goes into a game. It even covered how to use "the software" to develop Flash games. The problem is: it never told what that software is!

Nowhere in the book does it mention the development software used, nor does it mention where to find an integrated development environment (IDE) for writing Flash programs. (I can only assume they used DreamWeaver, but you'd never know without having some background in Flash in the first place.)

Aside from that, the writing seems okay, but I'm still reading it, without any idea of what program they are using to create these Flash games.

[Dress up games]

Flash designing is a very important step to create dress up games, which I am learning to. I must read this book right away.