Today, the fine folks at Eltima Software have provided me with their cool new version of their product SWF & FLV Toolbox 4. At first when they came to me asking me to review it, I kindly turned them down. I mean, what’s this product going to do for a game developer. I couldn’t see it. How in the world am I going to use this? They quickly responded telling me some of the features in more detail. And at that point I was sold.

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.

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.

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.