Flash MX 2004 Games Most Wanted

Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Games Most Wanted is a book especially written for people who want to develop games in Macromedia Flash, this full-colour book consists of 266 pages of knowledge by known Flash developers around the world. If you are a beginner you may want to read some other books (for example the Foundation series of friends of ed) before tackling the complexities in this one. This is one of those books I really like full colour, easy-to-read and it has a nice page design. It's time to analyze this book in depth.

Title: Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Games Most Wanted
Authors: Kristian Besley, Sham Bhangal, Anthony Eden, Brad Ferguson, Brian Monnone, Keith Peters, Glen Rhodes, Steve Young
Publisher: Friends of ed (A!Press)
ISBN: 1-59059-236-0
Click here to order

The book starts with the common basics of game development in Flash, after this introduction in game development it's time to write your first three flash games. In second chapter called: "Character Animation and Personality" starts with the other side of game development meaning: the artwork. This chapter will explain how to draw your own game characters, and the basic principles of animation.It will also teach how to keep the file sizes at an absolute minimum.

The third chapter of the book is "Friction and Collision detection" covers everything of collision detection, in this chapter you will build your own billiard game which will teach you the principles of the variaty of collision detections, and friction in an easy-to-understand manner. For example it covers how to react to a collision between two moving objects.

In the next chapter covers a topic I always liked when I was in college and that is: Physics. This chapter is all about gravity and physics, throught a simple flash game you will learn about how to use natural physics and random effects (i.e the Brownian motion) in your games.

Because game without controls is no fun, the next chapter is all about "Control" how to control the game characters in your flash game, this is explained through a example game called "Dance to the Music", it will learn you how to move your character in his environment and how to interact with sound. In the next chapter: Sounds fro Games, the interaction with sound will be explained in detail. In this chapter you will learn how to control the volume of sound, start/stop sound through ActionScript. Because sound is one of those parts of a Flash Game which will expand the file size very easily, there is some time spend on how to optimize export settings of sound.

The next chapter written by Sham Bhangal known of this Foundation Flash series, covers the topic of retro-gaming, it will you give tips and some history lesson about these old games. Did you know these old games were only able to use eight colors?

The last chapter covers the topic of steps you will need to create your own race game, everything you learned in the previous chapters are used in this chapter to make a nice fully functional game.

Conclusion
This book covers all the aspects of game development within Macromedia Flash, the book is easy-to-read which makes it easier to understand the theory expressed in the book. The mixture of this theory and the nice examples makes this book a good choice for the starting game developer. The only disappointment I have about this book is the title mentions "Flash MX 2004", but nearly doesn't use ActionScript 2.0 which was introduced in this version of Flash. After you read this book and you want to learn more about character animation, you might want to consider the buy the "bible" on character animation called: "The Animator's Survival Kit". The book compared to "Flash Mx 2004 Game Design Demysitied" is more a introduction to game development in Flash, the Game Design Demystified get more indepth it for example covers topics such multiplayer and Artificial Intelligence.

All sourcecode and graphics used in the book are available for download from friendsofed.com. On the publishers web-site you will also find a bonus chapter about online gaming

(This book is also reviewed by John Dalziel earlier on Flashmagazine.com)

 

 

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