Introduction - back up!

Computer games are obviously lots of fun – but how often have you wanted to improve on one, or create an entirely new one? Have you tried? It’s bloody difficult…

This series of tutorials is intended for people with at least an inkling of how to program, but initially I’ll try to explain in great detail what’s going on – this is not so much a programming tutorial as an explanation of how to think about structuring a complex game in flash (or any object orientated language). There’ll be lots of code on display, though, which hopefully should help you discover the syntax of ActionScript 3 as well...

The internet is rife with information on AS3, so if ever you find yourself confused by something I’m doing, don’t panic – there’s the documentation within Flash, and a huge resource of information at your finger tips. Also, feel free to leave comments if you want something explained in greater detail.

“So why are you making these tutorials?” I hear you ask. Well, I’ve been thinking of sharing the fruits of my slow and painful journey of discovery for a while now, and recent events have forced my hand…

For a while I’ve been trying to make a sort of 2D space shooter game, but with a relatively flexible engine and therefore several different game-play variations. So with this as my template, I set out a year ago to figure out the complexities of flash. Bit by bit, my knowledge grew, and so did the game, until recently I found it excitingly close to completion. Then the tragedy occurred.

Firstly, here’s some context, so as to allow you to fully appreciate the extent of my idiocy. I have in my possession three 1 GB USB sticks. I have an external hard drive. Also, the entire game project was only a couple of megabytes big – enough to send myself as an email attachment without breaking a sweat. Have you guessed the tragedy yet?

Fuelled by sheer spite, my hard disk died on me. I think it just wanted to teach me a lesson for my procrastination. You understand, I always planned to back up my game, but my laziness always got the better of me. Some things are best learned the hard way. And this was hard!

So please, please, please back up. Programming is a lot of work, and the work you produce is so small it really isn’t difficult to back up your work. Then again, if you’re the sort of person who only really learns things the hard way, I definitely recommend you work on something for a year then pour water onto your hard drive or something. That’ll learn ya.

Also, I’m not a professional programmer – I’m a keen amateur, who received some training at university (I studied 3D animation) but I’m far from an expert. I will surely make mistakes, and I can only hope some people reading this can point them out, or inform me of a better way of doing things. These tutorials won’t teach you the perfect way of programming a game, but they should certainly help you get started on making a decent game – my target audience is me a year ago, basically.

Anyway, time to move on to actually writing a game. Time for tutorial number 1.