Advanced Game Design with Flash

When a book on game design begins with a chapter on Verlet and Euler integration, it’s a pretty fair guess that it is not aimed at beginners. Advanced Game Design with Flash lives up to its title. It assumes that the reader will already have mastered the basics and is eager to move onto some of the more challenging areas of ActionScript games programming.

While there are all kinds of games that you could create using Flash - everything from a text-based adventure game to interactive logic puzzles - this book concentrates primarily on two types of game: space-shooters and platform games rendered in two-dimensional graphics.

The author takes a fairly strict approach to the conventions of program design. He recommends a modular approach which separates game logic from the data storage and visual display (using the Model, View Controller pattern) and he explains how to optimize the logic, algorithms and display techniques used in your games. For someone who’s making the transition from simple games programming to commercial-standard coding, this is all great stuff!

If you want advice on simulating gravity, dealing with collisions between circles or polygons, creating particle explosions, making good use of bit-block transfers for speedy graphics, creating tile-based games and calculating paths through the maps and mazes of your game worlds, this book will tell you pretty much everything you need to know.

Be warned, though. It’s not a book for the faint of heart. If you are a programming hobbyist who just enjoys spending the odd half hour here and there tinkering on your code, you might find this book heavy going. It’s more than 760 pages long and the author assumes that you are gong to have the dedication and the stamina to work your way through most of those pages in order. As he says, “This is not a book of quick fixes. It’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to skim through it and pick and choose snippets of code to help you meet a pressing deadline.”

If this sounds too heavyweight for your needs, bear in mind that the same author has also written a book called Foundation Game Design With Flash, which is pitched at a somewhat lower level. Another excellent book for Flash games programmers is Jeff and Steve Fulton’s Essential Guide To Flash Games (reviewed previously). As I said before, I really like the Fultons’ Flash Games and I’d recommend it as a good ‘way in’ to Flash game design for readers with a solid background in programming. Advanced Game Design with Flash is a good ‘next step’; while it covers some of the same topics as Flash Games, it also goes into more detail in a number of important areas.