Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified [Paperback]

The book begins with a short introduction on how to plan the concept of games: choosing a theme, a gender (action, adventures, cassino and so on), defining the technology, the number of players, to know the audience and calculating the hardware requirements. That part of the book is weak and the author admits that this is an annoying subject for him.

However, from the moment that he begins to speak about programming, his enthusiasm multiplies by one thousand. The guy was graduated in physics, then he knows how to explain comprehensive all those formulas that we learn at the high school without knowing why.

If the book only had this part, it would not lose a lot. In fact, it would be even more interesting, since the title of the book could be "Flash MX 2004 Game Development Desmystified". Concept and design of games are subjects that would deserve a exclusive book to them.

Holding on, the author approaches the necessary math and physics to create dynamic games that simulates real world characteristics. He teaches tricks to simplify some formulas, reducing the workload of the processor. That is descisive for Flash games, since Flash Player is much slower than other platforms (Shockwave, for instance).

The code that he prints in the book is highly visualizable, in other words, it is not necessary to be in front of the computer when reading the book. He explains in long paragraphs what each code line is doing, but without being annoying. Measuring the reader advances through the pages, he doesn't waste time repeating what it was already several times repeated.

The code is all object oriented Actioncript 2. But don't worry, you only need to have a basic notion of variables, operators and the concept of functions, only. The rest he will teach little by little, showing the advantages of the technics.

By the way, it is very important to program games with object oriented programming. As we progess improving code to get it more efficient, we only need to change the value of one variable in one place and the whole code of the game is in the first frame. It is not necessary to open movieclips, seeking for that damned code that do some undesired thing. And I'm not talking about the size of the code that decreases and the legibility that increases.

Ok, now we're going to say the practical things. The book will train teach you how to:

* detect collisions among objects (it is not simply as using hittest() function)
* project reactions for the collisions (billiard balls colliding)
* control objects through the keyboard
* build an isometric world (that panoramic 3D vision)
* manipulate objects in that isometric world
* create artificial intelligence for enemies
* optimize sounds and images

The third part of the book describes step-by-step the building of four games:

* Word Search (high algorithms)
* Multiplayer chess online (through socket server)
* 501 Darts game
* Cone Crazy (drive a car in a 3D environment and hit cones like a lunatic driver)

The last one is the most interesting and the more complex. However, all the concepts applied to this project was extensively elucidated back in the book. Therefore, it is easy to understand and the results are impressive. For speaking the truth, it is the only game that meets the requirements of the advergames market, those games used for branding.

It's worth to remind that the source-codes of all the examples that the author uses in the book are contained by the accompanied CD-Rom. The code is well commented, allowing you to alter parameters and quickly see the results. There are still some bonus game in the CD, not too much special.

So I was very eager about the additional new concepts and applied game development in this Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified -- things like what performance tweaks for Flash Player <7 will now screw up for Flash Player 7. squeezing more game power out of Flash via Java or Director, actionscript performance profiling, more benchmarking normal AS2.0 script vs hand-rolled FLASM, more multi-player projects on other platforms besides Electrotank's multiplayer server, et al.

I didn't find it here.

This felt like it was a lateral move translating AS1.0 into AS2.0.

IMHO, if you _don't_ have the original Flash Game Design Demystified book _or_ you feel you would have a hard time converting AS1.0 code/concepts into AS2.0 code, then I'd recommend that you pick this book up.