Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified [With CDROM]

by Jobe Makar

A guide to creating games using Flash MX 2004. It explains the process of creating a game in Flash MX 2004. It introduces general processes for creating games, and looks at some concepts for creating... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0735713987
• ISBN13: 9780735713987
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Macromedia Press
• Length: 506 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Worth reading but it's NOT for a beginner!

This book is worth reading if you are trying to develop flash games but don't read it as your first book on the topic ;) It gets into pretty advanced stuff that if you no nothing about Flash or ActionScript you will get a headache. I bought 6 Flash game dev. books and I think I tried to read this one second or something....I quit it and had to read the other books and then I read this last instead :D Still, I'd recommend it if you are trying to make a flash game beyond 'click the monkey'... ^_^'

Technically good, except for one flaw.

Very informative as far as what it teaches, but I noticed it's written for the experienced user...so why does it come with a demo of the software you're being taught? If you're experienced, you already own it, I think.

Decent book with a mixed approach

This book does not use the typical approach where various games of increasing complexity and size are used to explain concepts throughout the chapters. Instead, part of the book is dedicated to small games pieces or recipes and another to full games. In any case, there are many areas of Flash game programming that are covered. Some of the topics include game math, level editors, artificial intelligence (AI) and even multiplayer games. Of course not ever topic is covered with as much detail as others. But, plenty of references to both web links and books are provided throughout the chapters and in the appendix for more information on certain topics. The book includes a CD with demo software, game files, PDFs and other various files. The first chapters (Part I) start with an introduction to gaming, including terminology and genres. Then is a description of Flash's capabilities and limitations. Surprisingly, there is no basic introduction to Flash or ActionScript that is frequently seen in other books. The rest of this section is dedicated to general development issues including game design and planning. The core material of this book was cover in Part II (Chapter 3-14). Here many of the fundamentals of game programming were explained through small example scripts and incomplete games. Game math is one of the first topics introduced, followed by physics and then collisions (detections and reactions). Following the math and physics related scripts did get a bit difficult at times. However, full understanding is not necessarily required since the many scripts provided can be easily implemented into other games. Also, the PDF files on the CD consisted of some of the equations used in the scripts with the math worked out in pencil. Aside from the math intensive chapters, there was still a lot of useful material in the remaining chapters. The chapters on tile and isometric based games provided good information on how to handle them more easily and efficiently. In addition, the chapter on AI was original, since it covered maze creation and path finding as well as the usual enemy attack/pursuit scripts that many books focus on. There was even a decent, although single and short, chapter on sound, including using it in Flash and creating your own. All the material in these chapters were explained in detail and included numerous images. The final part of the book concludes with discussion on several full functioning games. There is one game for each of the remaining chapters (15-18). Not all of the code from each game could be discussed, as the chapters from Part II took up the bulk of the book. Nonetheless, the key areas of each game were described in detail and the .fla source files on the CD did include comments. The CD also provided additional source files for a handful of full and incomplete games. Still, the games in these chapters were each complex and large enough to have warranted more coverage. The multiplayer chess game, which used a socket se

Good for Actionscript developers

Flash is one of the easiest tools to make games nowadays. With that book on hand, this task becomes child's play. Jobe Makar has a fantastic didacticism and he still manage to write a pleasant text. It is not necessary to be an advanced programmer to understand the codes, by the way, with the visual examples, even designers pursuing the basics of Actionscript can learn the hints. After reading the book, the reader besides being qualified to project you own game, he will be much sharper in Actionscript 2.The book begins with a short introduction on how to plan the concept of games: choosing a theme, a gender (action, adventures, cassino and so on), defining the technology, the number of players, to know the audience and calculating the hardware requirements. That part of the book is weak and the author admits that this is an annoying subject for him.However, from the moment that he begins to speak about programming, his enthusiasm multiplies by one thousand. The guy was graduated in physics, then he knows how to explain comprehensive all those formulas that we learn at the high school without knowing why.If the book only had this part, it would not lose a lot. In fact, it would be even more interesting, since the title of the book could be "Flash MX 2004 Game Development Desmystified". Concept and design of games are subjects that would deserve a exclusive book to them.Holding on, the author approaches the necessary math and physics to create dynamic games that simulates real world characteristics. He teaches tricks to simplify some formulas, reducing the workload of the processor. That is descisive for Flash games, since Flash Player is much slower than other platforms (Shockwave, for instance).The code that he prints in the book is highly visualizable, in other words, it is not necessary to be in front of the computer when reading the book. He explains in long paragraphs what each code line is doing, but without being annoying. Measuring the reader advances through the pages, he doesn't waste time repeating what it was already several times repeated.The code is all object oriented Actioncript 2. But don't worry, you only need to have a basic notion of variables, operators and the concept of functions, only. The rest he will teach little by little, showing the advantages of the technics.By the way, it is very important to program games with object oriented programming. As we progess improving code to get it more efficient, we only need to change the value of one variable in one place and the whole code of the game is in the first frame. It is not necessary to open movieclips, seeking for that damned code that do some undesired thing. And I'm not talking about the size of the code that decreases and the legibility that increases.Ok, now we're going to say the practical things. The book will train teach you how to: * detect collisions among objects (it is not simply as using hittest() function) * project reactions for the collisions (billiard