Avoider Game . com

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.