Danny Burbol’s How to make a falling blocks style Flash Game Tutorials

Lesson 2: Drawing Blocks & Keyboard Input

A Link To: All Lessons’ Table Of Contents
A Link To: The Original Flash Game that started all this

So here’s where we left off at the end of lesson 1. We have a couple self-contained screens that we can navigate between by clicking buttons.

You’ll notice that I changed my title text, scaled up the title screen buttons with the free transform tool (Tool bar, the black cursor with the box, under the white cursor and above the Lasso) and I’ve added an extra screen with links to these tutorials. You should be able to make changes like this if you went through lesson 1. The only thing you’ll needs is the function to call to open a web link in a new window. Here it is:

Note the: import flash.net.*;

In this lesson we are going to:

• Learn how to draw a sprite with a rectangle using ActionScript .
• Learn how to create our main loop callback event (timer events).
• Learn how to use Sprites for containers.
• Learn how to use 2 dimensional arrays as an adjacency matrix (the game’s board).
• Learn how to detect simple keyboard keys presses.
• Learn how to rotate our game’s pieces using some simple vector math trick.

I’m also not going to be going in to as much depth as I did in Lesson 1. Lesson 1 was a “starting from nothing” introduction to flash, but here in Lesson 2, we’re going to build on what we’ve learned rather than reiterate all of it. So don’t be afraid to pop open Lesson 1 and review a couple steps when you feel the need. I know it’s annoying, but realizing you don’t quite know how to do something and having to go dig up the info is actually a great way to train yourself to remember.

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Danny Burbol’s How to make a falling blocks style Flash Game Tutorials

Lesson 1: Intro to Flash/ActionScript 3 and App Screens

A Link To: All Lessons’ Table Of Contents
A Link To: The Original Flash Game that started all this

This is a Flash tutorial for introducing some of the basics parts of ActionScript 3 that you’ll need to make any Flash Game. It’s presented with a goal in mind. We will be using these building blocks to set up a basic framework for making some simple games screen that we’ll be able to switch between by click on buttons on the various screens.

Here’s a link to my falling blocks game, it’s the reason I started making this tutorial.

I’ve been programming console games in c/c++ for years, but Actionscript 3 is pretty new to me. So rather than gloss over everything, I plan on making a more in-depth “how to” for people who have some programming knowledge, but are new to Flash and AS3.

A work of caution to artist and non-programmers: Making game with Flash using AS3 doesn’t *involve* programming, it *is* programming. This tutorial can’t teach you how to program, I’m sorry, it’s just a topic all to itself, and it’s a huge topic at that. So use your best judgment as-to whether or not you want to go through with this tutorial, I don’t want to waste your time or make you frustrated. Also, if anyone reading this had some good links for helping others learn some the the basics of programming and programming practices, please leave a comment so others can benefit. (Thanks!)

By the end of this tutorial we will have a flash application that shows a few screen and lets you click buttons to go between them. For example: a “someone presents” screen, a title screen, a credits screen, and a game screen that we can click buttons to go between.

So by the of this tutorial, you will have a framework, something like this:

Elements I’ll be explaingin in this tutorial:

• Make a .fla file
• Make a few movie clips (one per screen)
• Make a few buttons (for switching screen)
• Make a .as file
• Make a class
• Hook flash to automatically run ActionScript
• Hooking up movieclips to work like classes in ActionScript
• Hooking up buttons to work like member variables of classes in ActionScript
• Catch Generic Flash Events
• Make and Catch Your own Events

Elements I won’t be explaining:

• I won’t be explaining “how to program”, but I will be volunteering as much insight as I can about the Actionscript I’ll be showing. Regardless, if you don’t know what a “class” or “event” is and you’ve never heard of “public”, “private”, “extends”, or “override”, please stop now. You will be disappoint about halfway through this tutorial. Instead, go check out some programming tutorials and come back to this one later.

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