ActionScript 3.0 Games Book Complete!
I’ve been busy writing a new book for the last few months. This one is called “ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University” and it is about — you guessed it — AS3 games. It will be from QUE/Pearson and available in a few months in stores and online.
So why did I come out of book writing retirement? My older two books, Flash 5 for Fun and Games and the MX upgrade to it, were out-of-date even for AS2. And I was really excited about AS3 and how much faster it is.
The book will also be supported by a huge Web site I am planning called Flash Game University at http://flashgameu.com. I plan to write a blog there, do a podcast, write more articles about games, and have forums and such. Right now, you can just go there and pre-order the book.
Basically, the book is like my other ones in that it features more than a dozen full games, with full source. I walk you through the code in the games. You can learn from it, or just customize the games yourself. I’ve challenged myself by doing a Match Three game as one of the chapters. Match Three isn’t all that hard to make by itself, but coming up with code that can be printed and explained in a single book chapter was hard. I had to re-think and simplify some of the processes in the game. I even did it without using recursion. There’s also a chapter on platform games, and one on racing games. The jigsaw puzzle game is a free-floating one, not the lock-into-a-board type found in other places. And there is a real word search game, with randomly placed words and the ability to drag and outline the letters like a player would expect. Also a pretty good trivia game engine.
Anyway, I’ll be posting more here about it over the next few weeks. I’ll see if I can get a table of contents up too.