Flash | Tutorial Blog

Building a Better Bitmap Button in AS3

January 28, 2012 Tutorial Blog No comments

Building a button from a bitmap can be bothersome. If you’re using the Flash IDE, you can create a mask to determine which pixels are part of the button and which aren’t, but in any other workflow, the entire rectangle containing the bitmap – including any transparent pixels – will be clickable. In this Tutorial, you’ll learn how to automatically make all transparent pixels unclickable, with just a few lines of code.

Make a Tower Defense Game in AS3: Aim and Fire

January 26, 2012 Tutorial Blog No comments

Hey Flash developers! In this Tutorial series we are going to go through the process of developing a very basic Tower Defense game. In this first part of the series, we’ll learn how to deploy turrets on the game field, give them the ability to aim at an object (in this case, the mouse) and make them fire particles.

Easy, Fluid Keyboard Movement in AS3 With the Input Class

January 25, 2012 Tutorial Photoshop No comments

There are a lot of games out there with jerky, unrealistic movements and that can do only one thing to your product: make it unappealing to the audience. But smooth movement is not hard to achieve – let’s get to work!

Quick Tip: Collision Detection Between a Circle and a Line Segment

January 15, 2012 Tutorial Blog No comments

We covered collision detection between an infinite line and circle in our previous Quick Tip. However, the issue that arose was that the line extends further than the visible line segment; in fact, it extends into a hyperplane. In this Quick Tip, we shall limit our collision detection to that of a line segment only.

Use Vector Regions to Implement Field of View in a Flash Game

December 29, 2011 Tutorial Blog No comments

In this Tutorial, you will learn how to cast a field of view of a turret guarding a specific location. When an enemy is within the turret’s field of view, the turret will shoot at them. Vector math will be used to help in implementing this field of view.

Build a Dynamic Flash Game Menu: The Accordion

December 22, 2011 Tutorial Blog No comments

When a user first opens up a Flash game, their initial impression is based upon the menu that they see. Unfortunately, many games’ menus are dull, plain and static. This is terrible news! A lot of players will just close the game before even playing it, and move on to another. Don’t let this happen to you!

How to Add Mouse Gesture Control to Your Flash Projects: Multi-Stroke Gestures

December 20, 2011 Tutorial Blog No comments

In the first part of this series, I introduced a class to handle single mouse stroke detection: MGesture. This Tutorial takes it a step further, by detecting a sequence of strokes.

We’ll be using the class GManager for this, in tandem with MGesture. After briefing through GManager functionality, an application demonstrating its use will be developed.

Easily Create Souped-Up Flash Text Fields With TextArea

December 20, 2011 Tutorial Blog No comments

In this Tutorial I’ll walk you through the steps required to install and use the TextArea component as an alternative to Flash’s native TextField class, and show you how to detect mouse roll over/out events on hyperlinks. I’ll also talk about how you can call custom functions and pass different data types as arguments.

Build a Dynamic Flash Game Menu: Slides

December 10, 2011 Tutorial Blog No comments

Stop using static menus! Most players immediately base their initial impression of a Flash game on the menu that they see when they load it. Stand out from the crowd with a dynamic menu!