How do I learn Flash Game Development?

Question

I\'m currently a PHP programmer and one of my childhood dreams is to create a game.

The problem is I don\'t know Flash. I\'m not great at drawing stuff or even artistic.

Answer 1

Two and half years ago I was exactly where you were. I've since learned Flash and released a couple of popular games. Here's what I found out along the way:

• Flash CS is not a good tool for programmers to write Flash games. Use either Flash Develop (free) or Flash Builder (Adobe's IDE with better integration and debugging, but not free).
• I found Colin Moock's "Essential Actionscript 3.0" to be an excellent introduction and overview of AS3.
• AS3 is quite a different language from PHP. It's much more Object-Oriented, very similar to Java. Also, its event system may seem quite confusing at first.
• I found Tony Pa's tile based game tutorials quite useful, even if not creating a tile-based game.
• Read every post in this thread of AS3 tips.
• Start small, with the simplest possible game you'll actually finish and release.