Part Three: Intermediate Games

Chapter List

Chapter 7: Real-Time Programming: Shoot 'Em Up

Chapter 8: Advanced Timing and Trigonometry: Blow 'Em Up

Chapter 9: Object-Oriented Programming with as 2.0

Part Overview

With the completion of our chapter on objects, your exposure to the ActionScript language is almost finished. There are some advanced areas we haven't talked about, including timing and inheritance, but that will come soon enough.

Most of what lies ahead in this book deals more closely with the development of the games. We have all the basic skills required to get our games to do what we want; it's now a matter of putting all the pieces together at the same time to create more complex and enjoyable games. What is going to add complexity to the games going forward in the book will not be the ActionScript syntax; instead, it will be bringing in real-world concepts and reproducing them with code. In the upcoming chapters, we'll look at the math behind games and how to time games so that they work in a way that feels realistic to the user while not overtaxing the user 's computer.

The following is a list of the chapters in the section, with a description of each:

• Chapter 7 . "Real-Time Programming: Shoot 'Em Up " explains some of the issues we face with getting our games to react in time with the user. This chapter's game is based around shooting a chubby yellow hippo that runs around the stage.

• Chapter 8 . "Advanced Timing and Trigonometry: Blow 'Em Up " further delves into the concept of timing and allows us to free our game's behavior from the frame rate at which our movie plays. This chapter also tackles basic trigonometry in preparation to create an Asteroids -style game.

• Chapter 9 . "Object-Oriented Programming with AS 2.0" looks at how Flash MX 2004 handles Object-Oriented Programming. We'll explore properties like inheritance and polymorphism to make our code more organized and logical.

Without further ado, let's get into our first intermediate chapter and learn about basic timing in our games.