Introduction

It can be assumed by the fact that you're reading this Introduction that you have some interest in developing video games. If that is the case, you're in luck; making games is exactly what this book is designed to teach. The primary purpose of the text is to teach video game programming, but in the process, you will learn about one of the most popular Web development tools on the Internet: Macromedia Flash. Flash is a powerful vector animation tool that Web designers have been using for years to create stunning Web-based animation. More recently, Macromedia has increased Flash's power by introducing a versatile and easy-to-use scripting language. This new and improved Flash can be used not only to create high-quality Web animation, but also to generate an environment that is interactive with the user . An interactive environment is the canvas upon which video games are created.

What This Book Teaches

Specifically, this book teaches video game programming using Macromedia Flash MX 2004 software technology. This is done through a series of sample video games that are given to you with complete source code. The games are explained in depth, and each one gets slightly more complex as the book progresses. Many important areas of game development are covered, including physics, artificial intelligence, collision detection, and collision resolution. Several related areas are also addressed, including performance benchmarking, debugging, and server-side Web scripting. This book contains a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) primer and concludes with a robust reference section on Flash's scripting language.

Here's what this book doesn't teach. This book is not intended as a comprehensive tutorial on Flash. If every aspect of Flash were to be described and explained in one book, it would undoubtedly be several thousand pages long and you would probably need a wheelbarrow to move it around. Because this book is about video game programming, only the aspects of Flash that are immediately useful to that end are described. For example, Flash contains a healthy set of tools that allow an artist to create and manipulate vector graphics. The use of these tools is generally the topic of entire books; for the most part, it's absent from this one.