Here’s the Flash game I’ve been working on.

A simple little concentration game with Martin Luther looking on. Listen to some interesting sound bytes as you complete matches. You may even hear some words from Fr. Martin.

My first/last game was based on Torque Game Builder. While it did have some nice things for game development, it is a little heavyweight for the types of game I want to try to build, and having to package applications feels so 90’s. So, I’m going to be using Flash as my development platform, it doesn’t have some of the game specific functionality of TGB, but it’s lightweight and deploys just about anywhere. I may go back to TGB if I build a larger game, but for now, Flash is it.

Most of the tutorials and books on Flash development that I’ve gone through start with dragging and dropping stuff around in the Flash application. Inevitably, as things get more complex, most of the development is done in editor and very little is done using the UI constructor except for splash screens, buttons, and backgrounds. From my understanding, you can do all of this programatically which I’ve done similarly in the early days of Swing. The Flash editor is not my idea of a great text editor so I went looking for a way to do Flash development without the Flash application. I found this nice article on using TextMate and the Flex SDK to do development. I’ll go into a little detail on how this is working out in the next post.

So, I’m all set. I’m doing Flash development without Flash and I’ll be updating my progress as I go, so stay tuned…

This chapter went into programming more specific to ActionScript 3.0. It started off by showing how to add graphics and text to a Flash movie. Then showed how to add event listeners to handle user input. Next came how to animate objects and then being able to drag the objects around and detect collisions. The chapter ended with some basic examples of data reading and writing, and a catch-all section that included playing sounds, loading screens, and protecting your game.

I breezed through chapter 1 because I’ve done a little Flash before and the chapter was simple Flash stuff and some basic ActionScript flow of control which is just like any number of languages I already know.

One thing that surprised me was that when I saved one of the ActionScript classes in my a directory I specified, I got a class not found in classpath error. Classpaths in ActionScript was not something I was expecting to run into. It was easy to specify, but just a little surprising.

The other surprise was how responsive Flash CS3 was. My PowerBook is almost 3 years old and when I first got it, I was trying to do some stuff with a version of Flash that was not really snappy. I figured, new version, more stuff, slower. But it really is pretty fast. Maybe it’ll slow down as I do more complex stuff, but I don’t remember the old version feeling this responsive at any time.