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Foundation Game Design with Flash
Book Review29 May 2009
by Huw Collingbourne
Foundation Game Design with Flash - $39.99 /£31.49
By Rex van der Spuy
Friends of Ed: http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=9781430218210
Computer Manuals: http://www.compman.co.uk/
ISBN-10: 1-4302-1821-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-1821-0
So you want to design a game and you want to do it in Flash? This, then, is (or may be) the book you need.
First let’s clarify what this book is and what it isn’t. It is a book for people who want to both design and code a two-dimensional graphical game using Adobe’s Flash CS3 or CS4 IDE and the ActionScript 3.0 programming language. It is not a book for people who want to code 3D games, it only has basic advice on creating non-graphical games (e.g. text-based games such as adventures) and it has nothing to say about the Flash Platform’s application development framework, Flex, its standalone application runtime, AIR, or code-centric IDEs such as Flex Builder or Amethyst.
Its focus on the Flash IDE has benefits and disadvantages. On the plus side, it allows the author to provide keystroke-by-keystroke tutorials in the certain knowledge that the reader will be able to follow along using the chosen IDE. Moreover, since the Flash IDE combines graphic design, animation and coding features, you will be able to create a game from start to finish in a single environment. The downside is that the Flash IDE’s program development capabilities are pretty basic so if you are used to using a more powerful environment based on Eclipse, say, or Visual Studio, you may find it extremely frustrating.
This book covers a lot of ground since it aims to guide even the complete novice through all aspects of game design and development. “The book” (it says) “assumes that you haven’t had any experience of Flash - or any experience with computer programming.” This bold aim necessarily means that the author has to get through some topics at a cracking pace. Even the first ‘Hello world’ program requires that the reader get to grips with the fundamentals of object orientation including classes, objects and constructors as well as packages, keywords and various other bits of ActionScript syntax. That’s likely to be an uphill struggle for someone who’s never done any programming at all before!
More experienced coders can leap straight into a later chapter in the book (the author recommends starting at chapter 5). From here on in, the book goes into the nitty-gritty details of game development - explaining how to move objects, provide user interaction and deal with common game-type occurrences such as collision detection. In my view, this is where the book really springs into life.
In short, I think this book is mistaken in believing that it can not only teach the novice Flash developer to design and animate graphics using the Flash IDE but can also teach object oriented programming from the ground up. That’s just too much to deal with and the fundamentals of programming are dispensed with too rapidly and in too little detail. The book does, however, provide a good introduction to Flash game design for someone who already has grounding in ActionScript 3.0 or some other object oriented language such as C# or Java.
Summary of Contents
Programming Foundations: How to Make a Video Game