Foundation Game Design with Flash

by Rex van der Spuy

We've all sneaked the odd five minutes here or there playing the latest Flash game that someone sent round the office, but creating those games is trickier than it looks. The aim of Foundation Game Design with Flash is to take you, even if you've minimal multimedia or programming experience, through a series of step-by-step examples and detailed case studies to the point where you'll have the skills to independently design any conceivable 2D game using Flash and ActionScript. The book is a non-technical one-stop-shop for all the most important skills and techniques a beginner game designer needs to build games with Flash from scratch. Whether you're creating quick blasts of viral amusement, or more in-depth action or adventure titles, this book is for you.

Genres: Programming, Game Design

671 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very pleased with this book's introduction of developing games with ActionScript in Flash. I previously had experience developing animations (interactive and otherwise) in Flash, and had experience programming in Java, so it was not a stretch to learn. Nonetheless, the author did a good job with it. The lessons were progressive in their complexity on how to develop a top-down game.

As the "Foundation" portion of the title indicates, this book is mostly for the beginner. The book explains a range of different tools for game development. While they can take the reader a long way into game creation, it would take a great deal of work to make the jump from the 2-dimensional design explained in the book, to 3-dimensional design. Additionally concerning the title, I think that it may come as a surprise to some that this book deals wholely with Actionscript, with next to no use of Tweens or the timeline to complete projects.

[Shaun Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.