Thursday, September 29, 2011

How to Write Flash Games - A Support to Flash Game Development

By Barbara Thomas


Flash games have become a lot more and far more popular in recent years. While the demand for new games continues to increase, the variety of developers looks to remain comparatively static. The reason for that could be that developing Flash games requires this sort of a various quantity of skills.

Of course, to generate Flash games a competence in Flash is required, but that alone isn't enough. A good Flash games developer requirements programming skills, graphical skills, audio skills, not to mention a excellent analytical mind, a methodical way of working via problems, as well as the patience to determine a project via to completion. Right here is really a rough outline of how 1 developer may tackle the dilemma of writing a Flash game from scratch.

Planning and design

Games are complex pieces of software. Even a tiny puzzle game written in Flash is probably to include quite a few main screens or game states, numerous movieclips which can be nested (giving several timelines), a single or much more actionscipt files and likely actionscript on the timeline, graphical points either drawn in Flash or embedded in either bitmap or vector formats, and audio files.

With so many elements, sitting down at a pc with Flash open and commencing to code is incredibly unlikely to create a satisfactory result. Whenever I begin to write a new game I first start using a pen and paper, initially with a description of how I am going to go about writing the game, then with lists of game starts and principal functionality, then with list of assets required. Only then, as soon as I have a excellent concept of how the game are going to be written can I start to collate assets, and begin to write the game.

Mock-up

Once a type has been drafted, the next step is to write a mock-up game in Flash. The idea of this stage is to write the code in Flash to your game to be functional, without the need of worrying too significantly about that the game looks. I often use place holder graphics at this stage, that will later be swapped with graphics created by an artist, and unless it is integral towards game I leave the audio out entirely.

Graphics and audio

Once the mock-up has been written, and tested, the following stage is to integrate the graphics and audio. If the type phase was completed carefully with consideration towards the graphics and audio, the artists (if the developer is not doing the graphics themselves) is also producing the graphical assets though the mock-up is getting created. This allows the graphics and audio to be integrated pretty very easily and easily, and also the game is now fully tested again.

Final touches

Only right after the game is nearly complete do final touches including introduction and end of level screens, or preloaders get added. This allows diagnostic tests to become significantly quicker and easier as the tester doesn't need to repeatedly click through spurious intro screens.

As we now have seen, even a easy Flash game is a challenging project to eat on. However, with careful planning and by breaking the project down into sensibly sized modules a competent Flash developer can effortlessly tackle modest games projects alone, especially if they have the aid of an artist for your graphics and audio.

If you've not written a game from scratch just before then think about doing modifications to an existing game first. That will give you experience working on games, and the confidence to take on bigger projects from scratch within the future.




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