Alright! The 2nd episode of this tutorial is up – Creating a Balloon Shooter game using FlashPunk – Ep2: Creating game objects.
In this episode, we will create game objects – Hero, Bullets and Balloons. We will also animate the Hero based on mouse movement, shoot bullets upon mouse click and generate random balloons and animate them upwards.
I just published a new basic video tutorial on Creating a Balloon Shooter game using FlashPunk engine. This tutorial is a series of 4 videos/episodes. Please go ahead and view the first episode from the link below. The rest of the 3 are coming up later this week and early next week.
This tutorial is targeted towards developers who have knowledge in basic programming and OOP concepts. If you have been an app developer and want to get into game development with basic examples to start with, this is the right place for you. I hope you enjoy learning!
I just received a copy of this recent book – Flash Facebook Cookbook by James Ford and happened to go through and read much of it. In the process, I found it appropriate to also write a review introducing the book to Flash ActionScript developers. The process of integrating social aspects to our apps and games has become so critical that I was sure this was a very informative and practical resource for all the Flash developers out there.
The book demands nothing more than knowledge in ActionScript 3 & a little bit of Flex. Having the knowledge of advanced Flex development & Flash Builder would make it much easier to follow the examples. I really like the structure of the book that takes the readers from the basics of setting the environment up to the publishing of your apps with the social features that you desire. I tried some of the examples in the book and I should say it was pretty easy to follow. I think an absolute beginner should be able to figure out the process of logging in/authenticating, reading profile data and posting something to wall in about 2 hours approximately.
In about an hour of going through this book, I could build a simple app that printed out the percentage of male/female friends the user had. Here is a screenshot of this test application I built. Though the percentage doesn’t add up to 100 in the screenshot, I am pretty sure it is the privacy settings of some of my friends that has ignored the last 2% in the results 
or may be I need to investigate a little more.
That apart, building the Test Console was particularly very useful in understanding the results and writing code. I also happened to try this with Flash Professional CS5.5 and obviously seemed not much different from how it is instructed for Flash Builder. I just needed to do a couple of minor tweaks for this.
You will need to download and use the Facebook ActionScript 3 SDK from GitHub to start with the development.
I would say it is a pretty good resource for people wanting to make their games social. So, I think you should grab a copy of this book right away and start socializing.
Finally, my love towards gaming has brought me closer to developing more of it! I am moving into a new role “Gaming Evangelist” and from now on, I hope to post content, tutorials, tips, etc. on game development using Flash AS3 & a little bit of HTML 5.
With the new awesome features in the current and future Flash Player just right for gaming, it will be challenging, yet a huge learning curve for me. Through me, I plan to make it equally easy & better for you.
I have had experiences building games in Flash before. Though I have not published most of my work, that’s exactly what I also plan to do going forward. I am super excited about this new role and I am hoping for a good deal of support from you.
Happy gaming!
© Hemanth Sharma
