Beginning Flash Game Programming For Dummies

Andy Harris earned a degree in Special Education from Indiana University/Purdue University–Indianapolis (IUPUI). He taught young adults with severe disabilities for several years. He also taught himself enough computer programming to support his teaching habit with freelance programming. Those were the exciting days when computers started to have hard drives, and some computers connected to each other with arcane protocols. He taught programming in those days because it was fun. Eventually, Andy decided to teach computer science full time, and he still teaches at IUPUI. He lectures in the applied computing program and runs the streaming media lab. He also teaches classes in whatever programming language is in demand at the time. He has developed a large number of online video-based courses and international distance education projects. Andy has written several books on various computing topics and languages including Java, C#, mobile computing, JavaScript, and PHP/MySQL. Andy welcomes comments and suggestions about his books. He can be reached at aharris@cs.iupui.edu.

Introduction 1

Part I: Basic Flash 7

Chapter 1: Why You Want to Write Games in Flash 9

Chapter 2: Cruising and Using the Flash Environment 19

Part II: The Next Steps 43

Chapter 3: Altered States 45

Chapter 4: Getting with the Program 61

Chapter 5: Making an Interactive Game 85

Part III: Sprites, or Movie Clips 111

Chapter 6: Introducing Sprites and Movie Clips 113

Chapter 7: Won’t Be Long ’Til You Write Pong 141

Part IV: Getting Control of the Situation 173

Chapter 8: Keyboard Input and Audio Output 175

Chapter 9: It’s Alive! Animating Your Sprites 193

Chapter 10: Building the Monster Traffic Game 219

Part V: Phun with Phuzzy Physics 245

Chapter 11: Vectors and Gravity 247

Chapter 12: Vehicle Motion 279

Chapter 13: The Life and Death of Sprites 317

Part VI: The Part of Tens 341

Chapter 14: Ten Math Concepts for Game Programmers 343

Chapter 15: Ten Game Starters 351

Index 377