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)

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 [...]

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.

This is the first series on As Gamer that will take you through the basics of ActionScript 3.0 Development of a Flash Game. The goal is to give you a fundamental overview of using Flash CS3 or better to develop a game. If you are not a programmer follow along closely and I’ll try to make everything relatively simple. However, if understanding the reasoning behind conditional statements is not obvious, you may want to look into purchasing a programming book at your local bookstore. That said, this series will be very simple, but extremely effective at teaching you the principles behind the average flash game.