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

Welcome to the wonderful world of Flash game development!

There are some tips I'm going to give you for beginning:

• You come from a programming environment. That is good, as you will find the Flash CS* is a very hostile IDE when you want to do some serious coding, as you will do in your game. Recommended IDEs: Flash Builder (formerly known as Flex Builder) is a great IDE, based on Eclipse, but you'll have to pay something for it, it comes with everything you need to start developing in ActionScript 3. FlashDevelop, if you are in Windows, it's also a very good IDE, though you'll need to install the free Flex SDK along with it to begin.

• "Wait, ActionScript 3? WTF, I just wanted to make games in Flash!". Well, yes, you can make games in Flash, but it's a difficult place to code, so you just keep ActionScript 3, which is the underlying programming language, and use a better IDE to keep you code together. Having said that, you still have a use for Flash: to make the illustrations. You can do the illustrations in Flash and insert them into your code.

• You might want to learn the ropes with AS3 first. It's very different to PHP, but you will do OK, it's very similar to Javascript!, as they come from the same ECMA standard.

• Once you know your way with basic AS3, you will want to know how to dispatch and listen for events. Events in AS3 are the main way to communicate between classes. Events allow you to give an instruction to load a file, and then process the file only after it has been downloaded. They are also crucial to use Flex, the graphical library.

• "But it's Flex the SDK?" Yes, it's a combination of things: it's the SDK, the whole package you download, it's the AS3 compiler, which takes your code and outputs it in a SWF file, and it's the graphical library, which you could use to build UIs quickly. But you probably don't want to use that yet for your game project.

• Once you know AS3 and events, you'll probably want to download a AS3 game library like Flixel (http://flixel.org/) or FlashPunk (http://flashpunk.net/), which have some classes that will ease you the way you'll think about your games.

• Make a Pong, and make a Tetris. Both games have all the necessary things games have, like a game loop, collision detection, sounds, etc. These are relatively simple games.

• After you know how to make A game, you should start beginning to make YOUR game. You will also want to share your goals with other game developers. I recommend you to go to the The Independent Gaming Source, http://www.tigsource.com, which has some of the best forums for game developers, and you will find a lot of games, wacky, weird and good ones.

• It's important that you release your games, no matter how unfinished or bad they seem to be to you. It's a common issue that game developers are a little bit too perfectionist, and that is a problem when you go around 2 years and you're still making a game. Cactus (http://cactusquid.com/) is a Swedish game developer that has easily developed like 40 games in two years, though he mainly uses Game Maker for programming. You will like him.

• I have run out of tips, so it's time to get going and start learning ;-) Good luck!