Teach me the basics of webgame design!
September 15, 2010 6:30 PM   Subscribe

I feel like learning how to make some simple Flash games, moving up to more complicated ideas later on. I've downloaded/installed ActonScript and Fixel's stuff for programing. Where's a good source for tutorials/guides for learning to do the basics?

The only problem is that the tutorial website linked from fixel's page doesn't seem to have much in the way of tutorials between "Hello World" and stuff like "how to make a mouse-controlled turret." It does have the information, AFAICT, but not in a clear tutorial format that I'd prefer.

Or if fixel is too new for there to be good guides for it, what other programing languages might be good? I'd really like to do flash, as it's so common, but I'm open to trying things like Game Maker. I'm mostly interested in 2D games, as I frankly am terrible at 3D modeling, dread thinking in three dimensions, and I think the pixelated nature of Fixel games would do well to manage the ugliness of my art.

As far as programing experience goes, I've taken a course on Java recently, and a Visual Basic course way back in high school. I wasn't a great student, but I got the basics of how a program works down.

Also, just to be clear, right now I don't want to make a super-responsive platformer or anything like that. I'd like to make a simple, menu-based RPG as my first "real" game, although if there's something simpler to help me bridge the gap from "Hello World" and pick up basic game mechanics, I'm plenty interested.
posted by mccarty.tim to Computers & Internet (9 answers total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
Response by poster: Typo: I meant to say Flixel. I learned the hard way when the compiler was giving me weird errors until I figured out that I wasn't loading the right classes!
posted by mccarty.tim at 8:12 PM on September 15, 2010


Flashkit used to be pretty good. Lots of source code for games you can download and play with.
posted by banished at 9:28 PM on September 15, 2010


If you're going to develop in Flash though, you're really going to want to use the Adobe Flash program and learn Actionscript.
posted by banished at 9:29 PM on September 15, 2010


banished: Flex is perfectly good for game programming, and free. The full Flash dev program is expensive.

kirupa.com has a lot of nice tutorials, if I remember right. Also, books can be worth it. I like this one which I own and gives lots of building blocks for animation. Flashkit is... well, it's hard to separate good from bad. There was a lot of bad. And having the code for a game doesn't always help (though it certainly can be useful).
posted by BungaDunga at 10:34 PM on September 15, 2010


gotoAndPlay() is probably the definitive Flash games development site.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 2:35 AM on September 16, 2010


Response by poster: I also found out that the Flixel forums and Tigsource's forums are a good resource. And this tutorial helped me greatly.
posted by mccarty.tim at 5:16 AM on September 16, 2010


Response by poster: And I found that Flash Game Dojo is actually fairly useful, just not organized into traditional tutorials but instead many articles written in plain English, with links to the source documentation.

I'm not bothering with the full flash program, as I've heard that it's not really essential for making games, and I'm interested in making games with pixelly sprites as opposed to vectors. Flixel or FlashPunk seem to be the best options for that.
posted by mccarty.tim at 5:19 AM on September 16, 2010


Response by poster: Oh, and I can't emphasize enough how helpful Flixel's forums are. What a great framework and community!
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:17 AM on September 17, 2010


Response by poster: BTW, the people at TigSource's forum told me that Shmups and Puzzlers are the easiest games to make for people starting out. Good to know.
posted by mccarty.tim at 11:35 AM on September 17, 2010


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