Comments on: About Flash Games

By: Richard Staats

Richard Staats — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:40:15 +0000

Review by Richard Staats for Real-World Flash Game Development: How to Follow Best Practices AND Keep Your Sanity Rating: 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
[...].

By: Timothy Layton

Timothy Layton — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:57:32 +0000

Review by Timothy Layton for Real-World Flash Game Development: How to Follow Best Practices AND Keep Your Sanity Rating: 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.

By: B. Schneider

B. Schneider — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:29:17 +0000

Review by B. Schneider for Real-World Flash Game Development: How to Follow Best Practices AND Keep Your Sanity Rating: 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.

By: N. Oliver

N. Oliver — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:19:45 +0000

Review by N. Oliver for Real-World Flash Game Development: How to Follow Best Practices AND Keep Your Sanity Rating: I create educational games for kids in Flash and have been doing so for 3 years in Actionscript 2. I am slowly making the transition to AS3. I received this book for Christmas yesterday and have proceeded to read through about a third of it so far! I am loving it! I pretty much taught myself to code, so some of the "best practices" listed in this book had been left out of my system. I think this will help me make the most out of my work and take my educational games to a new level. I own almost every book on coding and Flash games there is, and this one is the first that really seems to speak to me where I am. I am at an intermediate level and still learned something new on almost every page! Great Book!

By: Spud

Spud — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:16:44 +0000

Review by Spud for Real-World Flash Game Development: How to Follow Best Practices AND Keep Your Sanity Rating: 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.