Alright so what’s this tutorial about? Well let’s say your game has enemies that on death splat blood all over the place… sounds wonderful. So maybe these enemies are aliens with green blood, but a couple of them need to have blue blood, and well, maybe, another one should have yellow. What do you do? Copy the same movieclip over and over each time changing the color of the blood? No… there’s a much easier solution for handling color changes in ActionScript. (If you don’t like the blood reference, imagine a cutesy dress up game where you want to change the colors of the outfits)

Today, the fine folks at Eltima Software have provided me with their cool new version of their product SWF & FLV Toolbox 4. At first when they came to me asking me to review it, I kindly turned them down. I mean, what’s this product going to do for a game developer. I couldn’t see it. How in the world am I going to use this? They quickly responded telling me some of the features in more detail. And at that point I was sold.

A few months ago I wrote a series on character movement. As a part of that series we discussed developing the movement for a spaceship shooter like Asteroids. Since then I’ve had multiple requests for how to make the ship fire bullets. No problem! This one is simple, super simple, you may smack yourself to the head repetitively with an iron stick for not thinking of it. But if you don’t have an iron stick, no problem, we’ll get this all squared away and you’ll be on your way to solving this sort of issue with ease from now on.

What good is smoke? Let’s think for a second. What produces smoke? Failing mechanical equipment, grenades, guns, volcanoes, factories, fires, vehicles, and probably a million other things. So does your Flash game need smoke, well, that’s for your to decide. But the fact of the matter is we can produce some rather convincing smoke with [...]

So you just finished your first flash game, it’s excellent, at least you think so. I mean you put hours on top of hours into it. Your eyes have been bloodshot and you’ve pulled your hair out more than once. Needless to say, you’ve worked hard and you are incredibly proud of it (But your ego is in check, you’re not arrogant or anything ). So you send your game off to be spread virally around the internet and it’s doing amazing!!! You’re making all kinds of money on your advertising, then a week later some guy comes out with your game and new graphics… better graphics. But it’s the same game, seriously to the last detail it works almost the exact same way. You’re the victim of someone decompiling your game and stealing your source code! You’re game loses popularity and you just lost a lot of hard work and money!