ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University [Paperback]

Although I have years of game programming experience, I had absolutely no AS3 experience at all - so I figured this book would be a good way to show me game techniques in AS3.

It starts off with a nice and easy introduction to AS3, covering the basics such as classes, packages, imports and splitting your scripts up. It then goes through a variety of "Game Elements" such as timers, keyboard and mouse interaction, collision and external data. This all makes sense and is well written, if a little sparse on the details in places. For example the first few chapters explain how the book is going to pretty much place the entire games into a single class, yet the "Game Element" scripts are written as pure functions meant to be dropped onto the timeline - I'd have preferred to see them as classes you could run stand-alone, but it's a minor detail.

Chapter 3 starts with the games proper, kicking off with a 'Matching Pairs of Cards' game. Gary quickly gets the basic game up and running, but it is nice that he didn't leave it here - instead he enhances the game with a timer, card reveal animation, scoring and sound effects. This is a good technique and one I appreciated.

Chapter 4 moved onto Memory games (think Simple Simon, Master Mind, etc) which seemed to serve more as a vessel for explaining how arrays work than a fully fledged game.

Chapter 5 is really about Time Based animation (vs. event/frame based). This is demonstrated via a simple shoot-em-up and a Breakout game. Both are extremely basic, which doesn't matter so much as they serve their purpose, but it would have been nice to see the Breakout game enhanced especially.

Chapter 6 is about bitmaps and manipulating them (demonstrated via a Sliding Puzzle and Jigsaw games). The Jigsaw game was disappointing in that it didn't cover how to make the pieces look like jigsaw pieces. But the bare essentials are there.

Chapter 7 introduces rotation and the math involved. It takes the Air Raid game from earlier and enhances it slightly, and also creates a basic Asteroids clone. Everything is done via pretty basic trig (sin/cos).

Chapter 8 shows off a "re-usable class" that creates a point burst effect. This is a good idea and to be honest should have been used more through-out the book (the idea, not the point-burst). This chapter also covers making a Bejewled style game - which I was pleased to see, because although simple on the surface there are a lot of logic steps involved, which are all covered. A few game modifications are suggested at the end, but not gone into.

Chapter 9 covers Word Games, which is pretty much a tutorial on using Strings and Text Fields. The resulting Hangman and Word Search games are somewhat lacking in the 'fun' factor, but useful primers all the same.

Chapter 10 is the 'Quiz Game' part - and it covers multiple choice quizes, extending them out to include pictures and a 'deluxe quiz' mode. The quiz data is all sucked in from an XML file, so a large portion of the chapter goes towards covering this.

Chapter 11 is a Platform Game. You control a character, you run and jump, collect a couple of items, land on a few baddies heads and try to find the exit. It's a very simple game and this is a tiny chapter overall in the book - which I found surprising given that platform games are generally extremely complex when done properly. This isn't really done properly and reads like filler to me. The levels are built entirely within the Flash IDE, block by block. Each block is then 'read' by the AS so a rudimentary collision system can be constructed. The hero and baddies are inserted and that's pretty much it. The jumping of the hero is particularly bad, the collision is also a little suspect. I imagine a younger wannabe Flash game developer would love to create a Flash Mario affair, but sadly this goes about it in entirely the wrong way. You get a platform game at the end of the chapter, sure, but it isn't a very good one.

The final Chapter covers two racing games. Both are overhead, one similar to Super Sprint, the other like the original GTA, but with a trash collector. The end result is quite fun, but I do still worry about the scalability of the approaches used in building each game.

Overall if you are either brand new to game development, or AS3 (or both!) then this book is a good starting place. It certainly won't answer all of your questions, and some of the techniques offered are definitely lacking in scalability - but you will have fun following the steps and making the games.

The downside is that if you have any game dev experience (even on just a casual basis) then the majority of the 'core game logic' offered here will have been relatively obvious to you anyway, and only the AS3 and Flash specific oddities will be relevant. You won't learn any advanced game making tricks - none of the games in the book ever have more than a handful of sprites moving at once. So if you wanted to re-create Geometry Wars for example you will probably run into serious CPU issues *fast* because you haven't been taught how to optimise Flash based games at all. This is most evident in the platform game chapter.

The Math offered is very rudimentary and you'll get only the most basic of results from it. I strongly recommend the Keith Peters book "Foundation AS3 Animation" - that deals with animation in much more detail, covering everything from decent collision to re-bound effects, gravity, rotation, intersection and real-world physics.

However AS3 Game Programming University is a good book. It's enjoyable to read, the source code is available online and Gary runs an interesting blog worth adding to your feed reader. I still can't help but feeling that the book serves more as a "Learn basic AS3 via some simple games", than a real game development book in its own right.

I ordered this book when entering my third year of university and it helped me complete all the flash games I needed ass the assignment, highly recommended for anyone doing flash, even more so for student who is learning flash. This book taught me more than any Lecturer could.

I have read G.R.'s old Director book and it helped me a lot then, so with no thought I put up a pre-order on this book. I knew if I was going to have a chance to learn AS3 as an old Lingo-dude, this was the time.
It arrived and I could see it was written in the exact same way as the old Lingo book. Though its about AS3.

If you are a designer or no top programmer, then this book is great, it will get you into AS3 fast!, and then you can always buy one of the other university books like "Advanced Actionscript 3 with Design Patterns".

But start with this. Its written in a great language and show the stuff that gets you there. Its not just about games, but a way of making AS3, which you will take with you into the other projects you make.

Thumbs up for Gary, also visit his book related website: http://www.flashgameu.com/

He writes tutorials and answer questions there.