The Flash Connection Make mine Actionscript 3.0!

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Are you a beginner with Flash and Actionscript 3.0? Would you like to know how to make games? Then have I got a book for you! Right behind Flash CS3 Professional Advanced, this is the one book I most heartily recommend to beginning programmers!

"Foundation Game Design with Flash" is well written and well organized. The author patiently describes the process of learning how to code games, even assuming no prior programming experience whatsoever. Because it starts off at that most basic level, therefore, by the end of chapter 5 (which is not quite halfway through the book), you have progressed to just making a simple guessing game. Not that it isn't all explained well, but it's foundational stuff to what's ahead. However, in chapter 6 it starts to get to the good stuff, "Controlling a player character." Here you learn the proper way of coding your keyboard input routine. Soon you are making your character move around the screen, wrap the screen, move around on a scrolling map background, and more. The following chapters start getting into collison detection, how to strucure your game in an object oriented way, how to apply simple physics to your character (there is no really seriously heavy math stuff here, not that there's anything wrong with that). Soon you have all the simple physics and collison detection knowledge you need to know to make a basic platform game, which the author calls a "rite of passage." There is an excellent example of a platform game provided in the example files, which also gets into a little bit of simple enemy AI (artificial intelligence), which I found interesting.

The author writes in such a way that you can tell he is passionate and excited about his subject matter. He is also passionate about teaching it to others. And he starts you off on the right foot by getting you to code with classes right off the bat. This book really shines! I suppose if you are too far advanced a programmer, maybe you won't get much out of it (I did, though, as I love stuff like this, beginner level or not!). There is to be a follow up book to this one, out soon, called Advanced Game Design with Flash (same author). I will definitely be getting that one myself:

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Coming Soon: May 15, 2010