So every once in awhile I have a pang to write a simple flash game. I ended up starting to build the exact same game I made back when Macromedia was its own company. That game was riddled with bugs and I wanted to make something stable. I assumed this would involve loading up vmware and installing the latest version of flash that my school provides, but this time I learned that there was a free alpha linux version of the adobe flex builder! These instructions worked well for installing the flex builder(you need eclipse 3.3).

Once I got everything installed I got to dig into some actionscript 3.0. What an improvement over the previous version of actionscript I used! Everything is object oriented and flex builder allows easy for all of the objects that you might want to use. Type checking is there if you choose to assign types to your variables. Some of the cooler things that I came across were the iterators and the event handling. The only hiccup was trying to import Kongregate’s library(Kongregate is a great way to get feedback and to implement High Scores easily). I had to add this to the “additional compiler arguments” under in the project properties:

-include-libraries “/path/to/KongregateAPI.swc”

Anyway check out the magnetized avoider game I made.

Some things that were helpful in making this really simple game were the moving circle AS3 class, obfuscating high scores to prevent cheaters, and realizing that Event.MOUSE_LEAVE is not infallible and you should check the x and y coordinates of the mouse.

posted by kbrower at 9:01 pm & filed under flash, games |