Foundation Game Design with ActionScript 3.0

In response to the success of the first edition of Foundation Game Design with Flash, Rex van der Spuy has revised and updated all the code to meet current programming best practices, and the focus is now on accurate ActionScript 3.0, regardless of the IDE that you use.

We’ve all sneaked the odd five minutes here or there playing the latest Flash game that someone sent around the office, but creating those games is trickier than it looks. The aim of Foundation Game Design with ActionScript 3.0 is to take you, even if you’ve minimal multimedia or programming experience, through a series of step-by-step examples and detailed case studies—to the point where you'll have the skills to independently design any conceivable 2D game using Flash and ActionScript.

Foundation Game Design with ActionScript 3.0 is a non-technical one-stop shop for all the most important skills and techniques a beginning game designer needs to build games with Flash from scratch. Whether you're creating quick blasts of viral amusement, or more in-depth action or adventure titles, this is the bookfor you.

• Focused and friendly introduction to designing games with Flash and ActionScript
• Detailed case studies of Flash games
• Essential techniques for building games, with each chapter gently building on the skills of preceding chapters
• Modern best practices and new content on ActionScript 3.0
• Also covers asset creation in Photoshop and Illustrator

What you’ll learn

• How to build interactive movies and objects with Flash
• Athorough grounding in ActionScript 3.0 and good programming practices, with minimal prior programming experience required
• How to build interactive storybooks, space-shooter, adventure and drag-and-drop games
• To master collision detection, enemy AI systems, player control, managing game data, basic physics and trigonometry
• To make use of design patterns andobject-oriented programmingtechniques to build robust games
• Strategies for making games fun to play and easy to build

This book is for a non-technical, creative person who wants to learn the art of video game design, but has no idea where to start or where to look for help. It is a lucid, friendly and step-by-step guide though all the technical and creative issues involved in game design with Flash and ActionScript. The book treatsprogramming as a creative artistic tool, and will help anyone who may be afraid of programming cometo love the subject as much as the author does. The techniques in the book are comprehensive enough to form the basis of career as a game designer, and form a solid foundation for continued study of programming and ActionScript. This book is the missing link that will guide and inspire any curious and creative person turn a good game idea into a reality.

Table of Contents

1. Programming Foundations: How to Make a Video Game
2. Making Objects
3. Programming Objects
4. Controlling Movie Clip Objects
5. Decision Making
6. Controlling a Player Character
7. Bumping into Things
8. Object-Oriented Game Design
9. Platform Game: Physics and Data Management
10. Advanced Object and Character Control
11. Using Flash Professional

Rex van der Spuy is a video game designer and writer. He’s written Foundation Game Design with Flash, Advanced Game Design with Flash and Foundation Game Design with AS3.0. Rex has designed games and done interactive interface programming Agency Interactive (Dallas), Scottish Power (Edinburgh), DC Interact (London), Draught Associates (London), and the Bank of Montreal (Canada). He also builds game engines and interactive interfaces for museum installations for PixelProject (Cape Town). In addition, he created and taught advanced courses in game design for the Canadian School of India (Bangalore, India). When not writing about games, making them, or playing them, he amuses himself by building “experimental, autonomous, self-aware, multi-cellular parallel universes” out of “shoe boxes, scotch tape, spare milk bottle caps and bits of string”. He claims, that this is “a lot more entertaining than you might think,” but we’re skeptical.