Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to AvoiderGame.com. This site’s goal is to help you learn how to make Flash games.

These days there are a lot of options available for creating games in Flash, and a lot of people find this very overwhelming. It’s not surprising; you go on a forum to find out where to start and there are a million keywords you have to specify before getting a simple answer: AS2, AS3, haXe, FD, Flex, Eclipse, CS3/CS4/MX — the list goes on. Then, of course, you have to choose how to learn. A book seems like a good idea, but so many are about abstract theory and application development. You find one that seems to be exactly what you need, but the Amazon reviews say it doesn’t teach concepts “in the right way”, whatever that means, and dammit all you want to do is make a game why is that so hard?

Let’s make things simple. If you have never used Flash before, all you need to do is this:

Download the trial of the latest version of the official Flash software, Adobe Flash CS4, by clicking here. (You have to create an Adobe Account, but that’s not a hassle.) It works for 30 days, which is easily more than long enough to learn the basics and even finish your first game.
Follow our simple ActionScript 3 tutorial at this site. It’ll probably take a few days, but that’s fine, because by the time you finish, you’ll understand important game development concepts that you can put into use immediately.
By this point, you’ll be in a much better decision to decide what to do next. This site has other tutorials based on the last part of the one you’ll have just finished; you can pick and choose from those, or even write one of your own. Or maybe you’ll check out those books and keywords from before. When your 30 days are over, you’ll have learnt enough to know whether you want to buy Flash itself, or go for one of the cheaper (or free) alternatives.

If you’re completely new to coding, then you might want to consider following our tutorial for Actionscript 2.0 before leaping into the world of AS3. With strict syntax, AS3 can be rather daunting to newcomers and starting off slowly with AS2 can teach you valuable programming techniques and ideas, that may be harder to pick up otherwise.

You may not have a free choice of what to learn. Do you own an older version of Flash, a version from when it was made by Macromedia and not Adobe? You won’t be able to use the new ActionScript 3 programming language. Likewise, your school or work may require you to use the older ActionScript 2.

Don’t worry; we can help you with that, too. The above ActionScript 3 tutorial is actually based on an older ActionScript 2 tutorial: follow the original at this site and, again, by the end of it you’ll be ready to make your own.

Enjoy! And, please, if you have any questions, don’t hesistate to post them in the comments.

Pigeon and Pigeonette: Flying Time [AS3 Game]

Click to visit Pigeon and Pigeonette

Dirk Derom and Sarah Verroken have written a children’s book called Pigeon and Pigeonette. It’s for 3-6 year olds, and it’s about two pigeons: one who is very large and blind, and another who is small, with wings that can’t carry her.

To promote the book, Dirk and Sarah put together an avoider game based on the AS3 base tutorial, but using their characters and Sarah’s wonderful style of illustration.

You can check it out at the book’s website (head to the Games section) — bear in mind that it’s designed for kids, so those of you with millions of badges on Kongregate are unlikely to find it much of a challenge!

Robot Saga: Escape [AS3 Game]

Click to play Robot Saga: Escape

Matthew Ammann — who wrote the previously-mentioned SoundObject class — has written a game called Robot Saga: Escape.

It’s based on the AS3 version of the Flash avoider game tutorial, and is the first AS3 game Matthew’s made. He’s uploaded some development notes on his blog, which I found pretty interesting

Upon release it was also the tenth most popular game on all of Big Fish Games — congratulations!

Click here to play Robot Saga: Escape.

AS3: SoundObject, a Class for Managing Sounds

When Matthew Ammann was following the base AS3 tutorial, he wrote a new class, SoundObject, to manage all the sounds inside his game.

He’s posted this class on his blog so that everyone can use it — and on top of that, he’s written a great tutorial to explain how it all works!

This makes it easy to mute songs, and switch between different tracks from different screens.

Check it out here. Thanks, Matthew!

Wesley: A Game Based on the AS3 Tutorial

Click to play Wesley

Bram Van Damme has written a game about a man, a pizza and a whole bunch of rhinos.

He made it for a Belgian magazine called Humo, which runs (or used to run) a comic strip about this guy Wesley. Now, I don’t spreak Dutch, but Bram translated one of the strips for me. It seems Wesley ordered a pizza, but was delivered a rhino instead. He phones the pizza guy, who apologises, and sends along another pizza. Except when it arrives — uh oh, it’s another rhino! And the situation escalates, of course. Eventually the rhinos drink some cola, which solves the problem in a sense, because naturally cola causes rhinos to explode (a fact I did not know previously).

The game pits Wesley against a whole horde of rhinos, trying to stop them stealing all his pizza by throwing cola bottles. It sounds a little silly (it IS a little silly) but it’s actually great fun.

I got to see this game develop from the start, which was really cool. Bram added in the walk-cycles and cola-throwing before I’d even written the animation and shoot-’em-up tutorials!

Play the game here, and leave a comment to let Bram know what you think

Small Additions: Win the game based on score

By rescue86k

The Counter class: If you completed the 12 part base series, then you know what .as this is. I use the Counter class to show my hero’s health and ammo.

I found the class lacking a few basic functions so I added them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Performance of Nested Loops in Bigger Games

By rescue86k

So my game is getting bigger, and keeping on top of lag is a high priority. Saying that I run the fps at 50, I never want it to go bellow a certain amount (such as 30, for a full blown battle, or 45 if only 2-3 objects/NPCs moving around).

Considering a big game, such as your own, you found arrays to be quite helpful. In my game, I have an enemy array (enemies) that checks hitTest() for each wall in the second array (walls) using a nested loop, presented in the base Avoider Game Tutorial. I assume you have completed that series, and you know what a nested loop is so I wont go into explaining it if you don’t mind.

I’m about to add a third array (allies) which will include the avatar in it. Problem with performance is this:

if currently you have enemies with nested walls, then you have that code being checked X times like so:

enemies[# of arguments] * walls[# of arguments] = amount of hitTest checks.

Follow me?

Read the rest of this entry »

Avoider game tutorial – Moving with mouse and using speed

In a previous tutorial from Michael James Williams (MJW), you could move the skull with the mouse and aim with the keyboard. In this tutorial we will make the mouse movement a bit complex, but you will not be able to shoot.

Read the rest of this entry »

AS3: Keyboard Movement, Mouse Shooting

This tutorial builds on Mouse Movement, Keyboard Shooting — only this time, you’ll learn how to do the opposite!

Click here to read on…

DinoScape: A Game Based on the AS3 Tutorial

Fabio from Animassauro has put together this awesome game based on the AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial.

It’s called DinoScape; you play as a little green dinosaur trying to fight off eyeless monsters so that you can build a spaceship. Also, your main weapon is a giant HB pencil.

Click here to play it. It’s really awesome! Not only are the graphics amazing (check out the Animassauro showreel for more of this), but the gameplay is very different to the basic avoider game.

Fabio comments that “it’s a little game, but for myself, it was a great experience to learn more about game programming and actionscript.”

Thanks Fabio

AS3: Basic Character Animation, the State MovieClips Approach

Learn how animate your game’s characters with the “divided timeline” approach. First part of a mini-series.

Click here to read on!

Avoider Game . com

Learn to make Flash games with these simple tutorials

Welcome!

Pigeon and Pigeonette: Flying Time [AS3 Game]

Robot Saga: Escape [AS3 Game]

AS3: SoundObject, a Class for Managing Sounds

Wesley: A Game Based on the AS3 Tutorial

Small Additions: Win the game based on score

Performance of Nested Loops in Bigger Games

Avoider game tutorial – Moving with mouse and using speed

AS3: Keyboard Movement, Mouse Shooting

DinoScape: A Game Based on the AS3 Tutorial

AS3: Basic Character Animation, the State MovieClips Approach

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