This week, my first tutorial turned four years old. Four years! Time flies.

Anyway, it’s getting a little long in the tooth now, unfortunately. It still works, but there are a few bugs when trying to get it to work with newer versions of Flash Pro – who still uses Flash Pro for coding, these days? – and a number of things I’d do differently if I were writing it today.

Of course, in all that time, Flash hasn’t stood still. It’s no longer the right tool for multimedia website development, but it’s still a fantastic tool for game development – maybe even better than it used to be.

So I’ve put together a guide to learning Flash, and its AS3 programming language, from square one, specifically for the purpose of developing games. It’s called How to Learn Flash and AS3 for Game Development, unsurprisingly, and it’s hosted at my new site Gamedevtuts+.

I hope you find it useful!

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2012. | Permalink | No comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Hi all!

As you may know, I’ve been working as an editor for the Tuts+ network of tutorial blogs for the past few years, and we just launched a brand new site that I’m very excited about: Gamedevtuts+!

As you can guess from the name, it’s a site dedicated to game development tutorials: that means posts about game design, level design, implementation (both coding and using tools), and the business being a game developer.

So far, we’ve got a tutorial for absolute beginners about making a Canabalt-style infinite runner game from scratch (using Multimedia Fusion 2), a tutorial for more experienced game developers about coding destructible pixel terrain, an article about designing worlds in games through the lens of player mobility, and a post mortem of a great Flash game: Tower of Greed.

I hope you enjoy the site

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Ömer Faruk Gündüz is translating my AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial (itself based on an AS2 tutorial by Frozen Haddock) into Turkish!

That makes it the sixth language that it’s available in (seventh if you include HTML5), after English, Spanish, Polish, and Italian. Awesome.

Here’s an introduction from Ömer:

Herkese Merhaba, benim adım Ömer ve 22 yaşındayım. Flash ya da programlama ile pek alakası olmasada malum Türkiye şartları dolayısıyla Harita Mühendisliği okuyorum . Uzunca bir süre Actionscript 2 kullandım(AS2 ile 9 adet oyun yaptım) ve 2-3 ay kadar önce ActionScript 3 öğrenmeye başladım.

Michael James Williams tarafından hazırlanan bu eğitim seti ActionScript 3′e geçerken benim çok işime yaradı. ActionScript 3 öğrenmek isteyen başkalarının da yararlanması için Türkçe’ye tercüme etmeye karar verdim.

Here is the first part: Avoider Oyunu-Bölüm 1

Thanks, Ömer!

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AS3, Avoider Game Extras, translation, turkish, Tutorial

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Hello everyone!

Can you believe it’s been three years since I wrote the first part of my AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial? Crazy!

As you’ve seen, I haven’t really been updating this blog that much recently. You might not know the reason: it’s because I’m now the full editor of Activetuts+, a tutorial site for developers of browser-based apps and games. It’s the same kind of stuff I used to write about here, only I’m not the only one writing, and it’s now my actual job.

Anyway, to mark three years, I’ve written a new tutorial based on the first one I ever wrote. If you enjoyed the AS3 Avoider Game tutorial, please check out Learn HTML5 With This Simple Avoider Game Tutorial. I’ve tried to take into account all the points of confusion that people have mentioned in the original tutorial’s comments, so with luck it’ll be easier to understand

I hope you like it!

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2011. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

[MJW: About two years ago, Kevin contacted me to ask a question about my Avoider Game tutorial. Since then we've been communicating frequently, and I've had the great pleasure of seeing his game develop, and of seeing Kevin himself develop as a game creator. The code, graphics, sound, and music in the game were all made by him, which is a truly impressive achievement. Now that the game has since been sponsored (by MaxGames , through FGL), Kevin and I thought it would be interesting for him to share the development process. I hope you enjoy it!]

To start off, this is story about somebody who knew nothing about ActionScript 3.0 or ever made a Flash game in his life. He spent two years on a game, from start to finish, which meant learning AS3, making graphics, composing music, and putting it all together 4-5 times, until it finally got sponsored and put online.

(...)
Read the rest of The Making of Advanced Combat

© kevinneal for Michael James Williams, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: completed games, flash, game development

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

For over a year, I’ve had a Skribit widget on the sidebar of the blog; this lets anyone suggest a new idea for a tutorial, and vote on those ideas that others have suggested. Unfortunately this only keeps track of the last fifteen suggestions submitted, but, because I get an email whenever someone suggests something, I know that the most popular suggestion topic has been physics.

“Add physics to the Avoider Game”, “Please teach us a little about physics in Flash”, “Physics would be an awesome thing to learn in ActionScript 3″.

So, I’ve started a new series on my favourite Flash physics engine, Box2DFlash. The first part, Introduction to Box2D for Flash and AS3, is already up, and will explain the basic concepts you’ll need.

I’ve got the outline for the second part planned, so that should be up soon After that, there are different directions this series could take, and I haven’t yet decided which one to choose.

Skribit has closed down, so I’ve set up a Google Moderator page to collect suggestions specifically for this Box2D series:

I’ve put a few suggestions in already, and you can vote on them to let me know which you’d prefer to see. You can also submit your own ideas so that other people can vote on them, because I’m sure there are more than four possible directions to take this in

Anyway, I hope you find the first part useful. Let me know if you have any questions!

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2011. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

In Civilization, you have a period of five minutes to input everything you want to do in the current turn, before the game “ticks” and runs the game loop again based on all your input. So if you say, in Turn 23, that you want your warriors to attack a deer, then in Turn 24 everyone’s getting venison for dinner.

It’s the same with Mario. If you press the Jump button during one tick, then in the next iteration of the game loop, Mario will start to jump.

From an article I wrote for Activetuts+: Understanding the Game Loop.

If you’ve followed my Avoider Game tutorial, or done any other sort of game development, you’re probably familiar with the idea of a game loop. In this article, I’ve tried to clarify what exactly it is, and provided some terminology that will come in handy when you need to discuss it or name your game’s functions.

I hope you find it useful. If you’ve any questions, you can comment on the article itself, or ask in the comments of this post

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2011. | Permalink | No comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: concepts, game design, gamedev

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

One of the simplest game mechanics is to let the player find a hidden object. Games based on this take many forms: Where’s Waldo, Peek-A-Boo, Spot the Difference, Hide and Seek, and of course Hidden Object. I’ve written a Premium tutorial for Activetuts+ in which I’ll show you two methods for obscuring a scene so that the player can uncover it later.

(...)
Read the rest of Obscuring and Revealing Scenes with AS3

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2011. | Permalink | No comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AS3, balloons, gamedev, hide, Premium, reveal

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

I wrote a book!

(...)
Read the rest of My New Book on Flash Facebook Development

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2011. | Permalink | 54 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Book

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Who cares if you can shave a few milliseconds off the time it takes you to write a line of code? How hard is it to add an import statement yourself? What’s wrong with writing an event handler function on your own?

This is missing the point. See, all of these tasks are tedious; they’re gruntwork, not programming. Automating and streamlining them frees you up to just code, without having to think about writing code. The FlashDevelop user interface helps out in the same way: it feels a lot easier and faster to use than Flash Professional’s.

From a tutorial I wrote for Activetuts+: Beginner’s Guide to FlashDevelop.

(...)
Read the rest of Introduction to FlashDevelop

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: FlashDevelop, IDE, Tutorial

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh