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.

Have you ever wanted to use a string variable to call a function? Or combine two completely different strings together to form a function name then call it. Okay, that last bit probably not so much. But if you ever do decide to do it, this tutorial will show you how. It’s all about making strings call functions.

Maybe you’re entirely new to this Tweener thing. Wondering what it is or why in the world you would ever want to use it. Let me give you a list of things you can use Tweener for:

fading in and out any Display Object (MovieClip, TextField, Graphic)
scaling an object up and down or in and out over time.
moving an object across the screen with easing over time.
creating a timer.
rotating an object with easing over time.