Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development (Charles River Media Game Development) at Dominant Systems Book Store

Written by a professional game developer, this book details the actual science of game development, including design, story character development, the physics and motion of a game, and audio issues. In this new edition, all of the latest features of Flash Professional 8 are covered, including the new sound channels, bitmap caching, texture pages, and more. The book also focuses on the incredible power of the new BitmapData class, and how it can be used to take the performance of Flash games to a whole new level. Through the book a variety of games are created using the power of Flash and the most recent advancements in ActionScript. Beginning with the basics of design, the book progresses through the entire process to teach programmers and Web developers how to create professional quality games quickly. With a basic knowledge of Flash and the techniques provided here, developers will be able to enhance their productivity and produce high quality games that make a real impact.

Customer Reviews & Comments
With Flash 8 Game Development by Glen Rhodes I expected to get a step by step process on how to develop games in Flash in the form of Actionscript examples and tutorials. I didn't expect much in terms of the other processes of game design, but was pleasantly surprised when Glen related the importance of all game components. While the book doesn't go into as much detail with other processes as it does the code (and as it is a game development book it shouldn't), it describes the importance of each part, and gives several extra items beyond what I expected. There is a section on sound, optimization, game physics, portable games and 3D simulation as well as a section by Chris Hildenbrand about game graphics. And you make some fun games as well as explore more complicated versions which are included on the CD that comes with the book. You should have at least an intermediate understanding of scripting. The basics of Actionscript are not described here - if you need an introduction to Actionscript read another book first. If you are confident with your ability to pick up Actionscript you will do fine, especially given the Actionscript for games primer at the end of the book. This book gives a lot of helpful information on how Flash works and how to make games with this software. If you're interested in Flash 8 in particular, it details the creation of a tile-based side-scrolling game using the new bitmap class. I learned several methods of number manipulation and Actionscript methodology that will help me save time and processing power on future games. I learned ways of creating games that I hadn't thought of before, and he broke the physics down very simply and made it easy to understand. The tutorials and examples were thorough and easy to follow, with explanations of what each part of the code was doing. The only qualms I had were a few typos in the code (which are easily fixed), the order of presentation of some topics (I would have liked to read about the physics first before some early examples), a few spots where "why the math works" was not completely explained (but can be found through experimentation) and the process of planning the code/outlining functionality wasn't as prevalent as I would have liked. Overall though, this book has been extremely helpful in understanding how to implement different types of games. I was making my own version of the popular "Breakout" by Atari in no time. If you are interested in making games with Flash, this book is loaded with ideas and information on how to go about creating them.

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