September 21, 2007
++numActionScriptBooks
Today I’ve unexpectedly received the copy of Gary Rosenzweig’s ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University I had on order from Amazon. I wasn’t expecting to receive this for another week or two. I’ve only had a chance to skim over the book this evening, but it looks like a very nice coverage of using both Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3.0 for games. It mainly teaches through example, so I’m going to shift from my original plan of hacking my way through making a game or two myself this weekend and work through the book.
So far my ActionScript learning has been mainly through reading the Adobe documents about the language, trying to a grasp of the fundamental concepts. I’m pretty impressed with the scope of ActionScript from what I’ve read. It does appear to be extremely object oriented, to the point where everything appears to be based on the object model - even functions, which can be given attributes and values just like class instances.
This weekend I’m hoping to have enough time to work my way through the first few games explained by Gary Rosenzweig. I’m debating whether I should download the graphic sets he’s got on his website or whether it will be a better exercise to make my own.
2 Comments on ++numActionScriptBooks
September 22, 2007
John Hattan @ 4:26 am:
Cool. I taught myself on Rosenzweig’s Flash 5 games book. Actually it was a trial-by-fire, as I had agreed to port Olive Wars for kidstation.de in three weeks before I’d even bought my copy of Flash.
Turns out one of the later chapters of the book was a pop-the-balloons game that was close enough to Olive Wars that I was able to get the thing done a little early.
The game’s still around here.
David "Trapper Zoid" @ 8:23 am:
Nice game! I’ve been playing some of the games at The Code Zone as inspiration for what can be done in Flash (I’m a bit fond of Countdown Dice).
I’m also wanting to get up to speed very quickly as I’d like to see if Flash is useful as a front-end for some geometric experiments I’m doing as part of my computer vision research. The vector based drawing commands would be really convenient as a method for displaying the data as an overlay.