If there’s one game that’s came out lately that I have really liked… it’s Death vs. Monstars. It’s an exciting simple little flash game with lots and LOTS of bullets. If you haven’t played it, you definitely should. The graphics are simple yet beautiful, and the gameplay is just fun. In this tutorial you are going to learn to make explosions like those in the game.

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.

I’m not going to say steal someone else’s ideas, but I will say using them for inspiration is genius. And that’s what we’re doing with these seven great flash game menu screens. From clean simplicity to excellent tertiary animation these games have something special in the way they first present themselves. When you’re trying to influence someone to look at (and hopefully play) your game, first impressions are important. So use these guys as inspiration for some great splash screens.

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.

So far on AS Gamer it’s been all about programming. That’s great and all, but game development isn’t all about programming. A lot of game development involves design and therefore, graphics. So this time I’m going to take you through the process of creating a laser. This should prove to be useful in a variety of flash games. Graphic design for games is more important than most programming sites give credit. While a great game can stand alone with bad graphics… a great game with great graphics is guaranteed to be on a whole new level. Good design is all in the details. Okay open up Photoshop and let’s dive in.