Resource Exploration: Game Programming

by Miles McQuerter

As our course stresses the ability to design with analytically driven code, I dived into the Internet to look for sites geared towards self tutorials for designing games with ActionScript in Flash.

Two sites I came across offered a number of free and purchasable tutorials including CD's with a wide variety of game types. Price ranges vary but I'd consider them reasonable if your really into game development.

The first site I checked out was dezinerfolio.com which offered 20 free tutorials to Create Your Own Flash Game including: a Racing Game, Balloon, Space and Sniper Shooting games, Guessing game, Word games, Survival, Dodge ball,  and one of my favorites Pool game with high scores, and one that really fits today's cell phone environment, a Flash game for Mobile Devices.

The games range from very simple to more advanced programming and player ability. Overall, the site offers a number of tutorials for anyone interested in developing an online game.

The second site I found was Cartoon Smart.com which offered a great array of tutorial Flash topics including: Drawing, Animat

ion,, Wed Design, Gaming, AS 2 & 3, as well as other Aldus programs. The site also offers a variety of Templates, however, you'll need to pay for these.

The Courses in Gaming allows you to choose between AS2 and AS3 for programming. I found the quality of the game tutorials to be very easy to understand. In fact each one describes the various code options you will learn, approximate time it will take to learn, and the difficulty level of programming. I tried one called Tank Game which is an Overhead-View game. Each tutorials gives you enough to understand how to create the game and to  later stylize the game to fit your own desires and/or create tons of variations of the game.

Each site allows you to play the games so you tell if your really interested and/or what capabilities the game may have that you want to learn. Have fun, I certainly did.