Free Foundation Game Design with ActionScript 3.0, Second Edition by Rex van der Spuy Page B
Authors: Rex van der Spuy
about debugging sessions running till 4 a.m. where the culprit, when eventually smoked out, was revealed to be a single misspelled or incorrectly capitalized word. The author of this book refuses comment!
Summary
Well done! You've written and published your first AS3.0 program! It wasn't so hard, was it? In fact, congratulate yourself for getting through one of the most difficult chapters in the book. I've laid the programming foundations for all the games and projects to come, and you'll find that you'll use this same format for setting up your programs over and over again in your career as a game designer.
This chapter has covered a lot of theory, and if you are new to programming, you might have found some of it a bit heavy. I sympathize with you! But you don't necessarily need to completely understand all the theory to create games. The most important thing is that you know what programming code you need to use to get the results you want. A deeper understanding will come with time, a lot of trial and error, and doing as much experimenting with your own projects as you can.
A deep dark secret that most programmers often don't like to share with the rest of the world is that a great deal of the world's software is built with a little bit of understanding and an awful lot of copy/paste. That's all part of the learning process. Of course, you need to know exactly what bits of code you need to copy and paste, and how to change them to get the results you want, which is something only experience (and this book!) can teach you. But as time goes on, you'll soon recognize the usual suspects and be copying and pasting along with the best of them.
I encourage you to go back to parts of this chapter that might have been little fuzzy the first time through to try to get a solid understanding of them before continuing much further. If you don't get it all just yet, don't worry! If you managed to get the little Hello World program running and you generally understand what made it work, you're in the game!
In the next chapter, you'll take a bit of break from programming and learn how to use Photoshop to make graphics for your games. In Chapter 3 , you'll see how you can use those graphics with the skills you learned in this chapter to start programming your first interactive game world.
Chapter 2
Making Game Graphics
Over the next two chapters you're going to learn the two most essential skills of video game design: how to make game graphics, and then how to program them. All of the most important core techniques of game design are in these two chapters. It's these techniques that you're going to build on to make the rest of the game projects in this book.
Flash Builder is just for writing programming code, not for making the graphics that your games will use. So you need to use some graphics software to make those graphics. This chapter is about making game graphics using Photoshop. In the next chapter I'll show you how to program these graphics using AS3.0 programming code so that they become completely interactive.
This chapter assumes you've had no or very little experience using Photoshop or any other graphic design software. It starts right from the beginning and covers all the basics. If you have a lot of experience making computer graphics, flip through this chapter just to see what kind of graphics to make, the file names they should have, and where and how they should be saved. Although this chapter focuses on the use of Photoshop, which is the most widely used graphic design software, you can use any software you like that produces PNG files: Fireworks, GIMP, Illustrator, or any other software you're comfortable using.
By the end of the chapter, you will have created the background game world shown in Figure 2-1 .
Figure 2-1. A background game world
You will also have created a game character made out of basic shapes, shown in Figure 2-2 .
Figure 2-2. A game character
And you'll have made some button graphics
Summary
Well done! You've written and published your first AS3.0 program! It wasn't so hard, was it? In fact, congratulate yourself for getting through one of the most difficult chapters in the book. I've laid the programming foundations for all the games and projects to come, and you'll find that you'll use this same format for setting up your programs over and over again in your career as a game designer.
This chapter has covered a lot of theory, and if you are new to programming, you might have found some of it a bit heavy. I sympathize with you! But you don't necessarily need to completely understand all the theory to create games. The most important thing is that you know what programming code you need to use to get the results you want. A deeper understanding will come with time, a lot of trial and error, and doing as much experimenting with your own projects as you can.
A deep dark secret that most programmers often don't like to share with the rest of the world is that a great deal of the world's software is built with a little bit of understanding and an awful lot of copy/paste. That's all part of the learning process. Of course, you need to know exactly what bits of code you need to copy and paste, and how to change them to get the results you want, which is something only experience (and this book!) can teach you. But as time goes on, you'll soon recognize the usual suspects and be copying and pasting along with the best of them.
I encourage you to go back to parts of this chapter that might have been little fuzzy the first time through to try to get a solid understanding of them before continuing much further. If you don't get it all just yet, don't worry! If you managed to get the little Hello World program running and you generally understand what made it work, you're in the game!
In the next chapter, you'll take a bit of break from programming and learn how to use Photoshop to make graphics for your games. In Chapter 3 , you'll see how you can use those graphics with the skills you learned in this chapter to start programming your first interactive game world.
Chapter 2
Making Game Graphics
Over the next two chapters you're going to learn the two most essential skills of video game design: how to make game graphics, and then how to program them. All of the most important core techniques of game design are in these two chapters. It's these techniques that you're going to build on to make the rest of the game projects in this book.
Flash Builder is just for writing programming code, not for making the graphics that your games will use. So you need to use some graphics software to make those graphics. This chapter is about making game graphics using Photoshop. In the next chapter I'll show you how to program these graphics using AS3.0 programming code so that they become completely interactive.
This chapter assumes you've had no or very little experience using Photoshop or any other graphic design software. It starts right from the beginning and covers all the basics. If you have a lot of experience making computer graphics, flip through this chapter just to see what kind of graphics to make, the file names they should have, and where and how they should be saved. Although this chapter focuses on the use of Photoshop, which is the most widely used graphic design software, you can use any software you like that produces PNG files: Fireworks, GIMP, Illustrator, or any other software you're comfortable using.
By the end of the chapter, you will have created the background game world shown in Figure 2-1 .
Figure 2-1. A background game world
You will also have created a game character made out of basic shapes, shown in Figure 2-2 .
Figure 2-2. A game character
And you'll have made some button graphics
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