We’re going to talk about the first thing you see in every good flash game you’ve played, the preloader. Without the preloader your audience will likely leave your game after staring at a blank screen for too long. So the feedback given from a preloader that tells the user, “Hey, the game is loading. Be cool wait a second and we’ll be ready to go” is vital. And since this is the largest single page tutorial on As Gamer to date, you’ll definitely get the information you need.

So what is 9-Slice Scaling? Well, it’s a way of dividing a MovieClip up into 9 seperate pieces in order to maintain the shape of the corners and repeat the sides. This will be a quick tutorial that will explain to you exactly how it works. I may refer to it from time to time as a scale9 grid. I’ve heard it called each so just remember that a 9-slice scaling MovieClip is the same a scale9 grid MovieClip.

By popular demand, AsGamer is ready to start a new series dedicated to developing a flash game from the ground up. We’re talking everything: the preloader, the menus, the game, game over, highscore, all that. Now of course, we may take advantage of some already developed systems. For example, we’ll probably use MochiAds LeaderBoard to setup our highscores. However, by the time this series is complete you’ll be able to go through all the steps to create and spread your flash game around the web.

In the last tutorial we created a custom cursor, in this tutorial we’ll address some issues that will make our cursor a lot more useful! Today we’ll learn to make the cursor disappear when the mouse leaves the flash window area and reappear on the return. At the same time we’ll set it up to react correctly during a right click and most importantly maintain it’s position at the top of the stage. This way newly added MovieClips will not be able to appear on top of our cursor.

If you have been around flash for any time whatsoever you’ve probably made a custom cursor. If not this tutorial is definitely for you. However, if you have made a custom cursor then the great thing about this tutorial is that we are going to learn to make an object oriented mouse cursor. What’s the benefits? Well we are going to create a class called cursor that we can use in all our future projects, you’ll never have to write a mouse cursor script again. Well, as long as you don’t want to get crazy and add cool effects that is. This tutorial will work great for your games when you want a new mouse that fits the style of gameplay you are developing. So let’s start the tutorial.