Product Description

Learn the professional skills you need to make the best use of Flash for creating interactive animation and producing exciting, dynamic Internet content. Nik Lever, writing as an artist for artists, takes you through the entire process from creating the art and animation for games in Flash, to adding the interactivity using Flash's ActionScripting language. He also provides valuable extra coverage of how Flash integrates with Director 8.5 Shockwave studio and C++. As a designer using Flash you will see how you can apply your creative skills to the many stages of game production and produce your own interactive games with this versatile package. As an animator you will be able to add interactive functionality to your own animation and produce a game. As a web developer you will see how to make the best use of the sophisticated development environment Flash offers for the production of both artwork and code to create low bandwidth, animated web content that sells! The free CD-Rom includes all the code and files you need to try out each tutorial from the book so you can see exactly how each game was created. Learn from the many different types of games provided as examples, from simple quizzes to platform-based games. High score tables and multi-player games using sockets, vital to higher level online games, are also covered in detail to ensure you have the complete skill set needed to succeed in this competitive arena.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #795258 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 438 pages

Review
"Superbly written throughout, this is the Flash MX book that all aspiring game designers have been waiting for. After a walkthrough of the Flash MX interface and some first steps with the ubiquitous bouncing ball, the author then effortlessly explains the intricate detail of the ActionScript language. Other Flash books have attempted to explain the ActionScript environment, but this has always been within the context of design for interactive Websites. This book's total focus is on game design. With chapters on quizzes, mazes, board games, platforms and sport sims, your chosen game genre should be adequately covered. Later chapters delve a little deeper into Flash MX, with good introductions on integrating it with C++ and Director for some amazing results. If you have ambitions to design your first Flash game, or need to push your existing skills to the next level, this book will show you how. With a CD packed with all the tutorial sample files, as well as example games for you to dissect, this is the perfect companion for all budding game designers. Computer Arts magazine, 5/5 If you are looking into how to create online games and getting a better understanding of the powerful language that Actionscript is, you could do a lot worse than this book. The examples and explanations are clear and thorough... Nik does a good job of keeping the pace upbeat and making the reader feel involved... for those people who are interested in how to make games and how to improve their coding, it is a worthwhile investment. Adam Tracksler, CreativeCow.net

Customer Reviews

Fairly detailed, but out of date and a bit patchy
I've been programming for 20 years or so, and I've even done a couple of simple games, but I've never done anything in Flash, so I bought this book to get me started. My first impression was that the book tries hard to please everybody. There are chapters explaining concepts such as variables and loops and a chapter on 3D modelling, as well as descriptions on how to use the Flash tools themselves. For me though (and I expect many others), there was not really enough on the Flash itself, which was what I really bought the book for. I suspect if you really had not programmed before, the introduction to programming would not be adequate either. Further on in the book, you get descriptions on various types of games, which are useful for picking up tips, techniques and algorithms (and the CD provides the source code). These chapters are pretty useful and well worth browsing. A big problem though is that the book seems to be for Flash MX and not Flash MX 2004, which is the latest version of Flash, as of now. The differences can throw you sometimes and make the examples difficult to follow. Furthermore, there are a lot of new language features in MX2004 that are not covered and some of the stuff you learn is out of date. In the end, I didn't really use this book a lot, but it is something I might come back to now and again. However, until it is updated I couldn't really recommend it.

Phills Phat Review
They don’t get the same attention as the latest multi-console broadband-enabled triple-A-licence shoo-ins, but more people play web games than any other type of interactive entertainment. They also make an ideal starting point for those interested in making games but without the time or the inclination to get to grips with the latest flashbang functionality of tools such as UnrealEd or Worldcraft. This is where Nik Lever's most recent 'How-To' guide comes into play.
Targeted at those without programming skills, it relies on Macromedia's increasingly feature-heavy Flash MX and its ActionScript language, to demonstrate the basics behind simple Web games. As Lever himself points out, explaining his opening Pong! example, starting with flash is broadly similar to the early days of BASIC bedroom programming, on which the UK development scene is based. Once the basics have been learned, its potential is much greater, however, not least because Flash MX supports 3D graphics - something covered in a chapter on building maze-based games.
Other areas explored include building quiz games that integrate into a SQL backend server, multiplayer games and high-score tables. But most users will probably be happiest playing around with 2D platformers, which despite their usual description of being 'simple' can be quite involved in terms of programming requirements. Even more advanced is the vector-based collision detection in the topdown football game example, but Lever's user-friendly tutorial style, which is backed up by accompanying CD and Website support should get most keen students through.

Phills Phat Review
They don’t get the same attention as the latest multi-console broadband-enabled triple-A-licence shoo-ins, but more people play web games than any other type of interactive entertainment. They also make an ideal starting point for those interested in making games but without the time or the inclination to get to grips with the latest flashbang functionality of tools such as UnrealEd or Worldcraft. This is where Nik Lever's most recent 'How-To' guide comes into play.
Targeted at those without programming skills, it relies on Macromedia's increasingly feature-heavy Flash MX and its ActionScript language, to demonstrate the basics behind simple Web games. As Lever himself points out, explaining his opening Pong! example, starting with flash is broadly similar to the early days of BASIC bedroom programming, on which the UK development scene is based. Once the basics have been learned, its potential is much greater, however, not least because Flash MX supports 3D graphics - something covered in a chapter on building maze-based games.
Other areas explored include building quiz games that integrate into a SQL backend server, multiplayer games and high-score tables. But most users will probably be happiest playing around with 2D platformers, which despite their usual description of being 'simple' can be quite involved in terms of programming requirements. Even more advanced is the vector-based collision detection in the topdown football game example, but Lever's user-friendly tutorial style, which is backed up by accompanying CD and Website support should get most keen students through.