New Book: ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University
Posted on May 13th, 2008 in General |
Say what you want about Flash and the web in regards to usability, accessibility, and anything else. It’s still pretty freakin’ cool when it’s used right.
After recently working on a Flash project for a customer, I started really thinking about getting back into it for games. That is probably one area where Flash will still win is in game development. I’ve always had ideas to build a game engine in Flash and use PHP to build dynamic XML files that would load levels and assets to use such as backgrounds, items, story, etc.
Well now that I’m using Rails a lot more, and it’s a lot easier to build XML with the Rails framework, I think I might start tinkering with the idea again.
I’ve checked out several books on ActionScript 3.0 but hadn’t really found anything yet. Most of the books were also on using Flex, which is definitely something I want to look into, but haven’t had the time and Flash is just what I’m familiar with right now.
I decided to check the local bookstore and ended up coming home with Gary Rosenzweig’s book. Scanning through the chapters, it looked fairly basic compared to previous Flash game books I have read, but trying to learn AS3, I decided to go ahead and check out out.
I was glad I did. This has been a great introduction to AS3 for me. In just the first chapter, the examples have you dynamically creating objects and placing them on the stage, and the second chapter had some very informative information on many of the basics. After that, most of the chapters walk through building complete games from scratch.
I’m very excited and inspired and hope to finish the book this week. Todd may live again!
2 Responses
“It’s still pretty freakin’ cool when it’s used right”
Damn straight! Flash is an amazingly powerful tool and like all tools, it can be used or abused.
I wholeheartedly support any book or tutorial that teaches ActionScript (especially the latest version) but one criticism I have or “tutorial” books is that they tend to provide examples rather than explaining what exactly is happening “under the hood”.
You seem to have a good grasp of the concepts so starting out by instantiating objects is probably not a terrible thing, but it really does help to understand the underlying concepts before embarking on major projects.
To this end, I’d welcome any of your readers to http://www.peabee.com/ for learning ActionScript 3…beginner-to-guru and with an indepth explanation of everything along the way (check out the Section 1.x series to see how detailed this is).
That said, good on you for getting enthused about ActionScript…that can never be a bad thing, even if you don’t get as detailed as you could
Thanks for the comment Patrick! I definitely see what you mean about tutorial books, at the same time I really enjoy the hands-on approach.
I’ve done OOP before in other languages, so it’s hard to objectively see that from a beginner’s point of view but it seemed like it was explained in detail fairly well.