Chapter 9: Game Components

Overview

When Macromedia Flash began to include programming, developers naturally started to use Flash for web games. With Flash, developers could deliver games with better animation and faster download times then Flash's cousin, Macromedia Director's Shockwave.

However, the nature of programming in Flash can make it difficult to customize games. ActionScript is often appended to a series of Flash objects such as movie clips and buttons, making it difficult to keep track of variables and other resources used in the game. Fortunately, components can greatly simplify the process of customizing Flash games.

In this chapter, we will look at two games and see how the components were used to organize the games and make them easy to customize.

• Editing a quiz component

• Working with external text files

• Customizing the images

• Editing a concentration component

• Replacing the images