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 [...]

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.

Whatever you want to call it, a complete Flash game is going to need an user interface that kicks off the game. A place where the user can get more information about the game, see the credits, save the game, load the game, whatever needs to be done. The Menu the starts the game provides this functionality. So how are we going to do it? Well, you’re probably thinking this is a simple task, and it is. We’re going to make it a step simpler by creating a base menu class that we will extend in all our other menu classes. This base class will keep some of our core functionality so we don’t have to write transitions for each class uniquely.

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.

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.