Flash Game University

Flash Game University http://flashgameu.com/podcastfeed.xml Podcast en The New Book Has Arrived! http://flashgameu.com/The_New_Book_Has_Arrived!_id20110119-090000.html about page with links to the latest edition. I just got my copies and they look great. Amazon shows Jan. 21 and Barnes and Nobile shows Jan. 27. But if you want to get one from their first shipments I would imagine it is important to preorder now. The new book has a blue cover and weighs in at just over 550 pages with the three new chapters and 9 new games. I've switched the pages on the site so they now show the source files for the second edition, though you can still get to the first edition's source too. I've also put up the games themselves, as I had before. You can play the second edition games to see what is in the book.]]> Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:00:00 -0500 The_New_Book_Has_Arrived!_id20110119-090000.html Second Edition In the Works! http://flashgameu.com/Second_Edition_In_the_Works!_id20101109-090000.html I'm finished the primary writing and the book is in the editing stage. I expect the book to be published in early 2011. Check back here, of course, for more details. Or, subscribe to the newsletter and I'll email you personally with updates. As for new material. I can tell you that one new chapter will be about card games: video poker and blackjack. Another chapter will explore the newer 3D abilities of Flash with two 3D games, including a first-person dungeon game. The third new chapter will deal with the very exciting world of iPhone game development using Flash. In addition, existing chapters will get some new popular games: collapsing blocks and balloon pop. As you can see by the new look of the web site, the cover for the new book will be blue. I've also gone through the early chapters and made some improvements that will make the early steps of learning Flash game programming smoother for new developers.]]> Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:00:00 -0500 Second_Edition_In_the_Works!_id20101109-090000.html Catching Game Part 2 http://flashgameu.com/Catching_Game_Part_2_id20090312-131621.html

View video at Blip.TV. Download QuickTime Movie. Subscribe via iTunes. Download the source code (final game, parts 1 and 2).]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:16:21 -0400 Catching_Game_Part_2_id20090312-131621.html Catching Game Part 1 http://flashgameu.com/Catching_Game_Part_1_id20090304-124308.html

View video at Blip.TV. Download QuickTime Movie. Subscribe via iTunes. Download the source code (final game, parts 1 and 2).]]> Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:43:08 -0500 Catching_Game_Part_1_id20090304-124308.html Communication Between Movie Clips http://flashgameu.com/Communication_Between_Movie_Clips_id20081223-113241.html

View video at Blip.TV. Download QuickTime Movie. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:32:41 -0500 Communication_Between_Movie_Clips_id20081223-113241.html Understanding the Display List http://flashgameu.com/Understanding_the_Display_List_id20081021-102550.html

View video at Blip.TV. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:25:50 -0400 Understanding_the_Display_List_id20081021-102550.html Dynamic Filter Effects http://flashgameu.com/Dynamic_Filter_Effects_id20080903-113047.html

View video at Blip.TV. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:30:47 -0400 Dynamic_Filter_Effects_id20080903-113047.html Pausing and Resuming Sound http://flashgameu.com/Pausing_and_Resuming_Sound_id20080813-144516.html

View video at Blip.TV. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:45:16 -0400 Pausing_and_Resuming_Sound_id20080813-144516.html Game Inventory System http://flashgameu.com/Game_Inventory_System_id20080715-112852.html

View video at Blip.TV. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:28:52 -0400 Game_Inventory_System_id20080715-112852.html Simple Particle System http://flashgameu.com/Simple_Particle_System_id20080612-114832.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:48:32 -0400 Simple_Particle_System_id20080612-114832.html Continuous Animation http://flashgameu.com/Continuous_Animation_id20080529-125353.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Thu, 29 May 2008 12:53:53 -0400 Continuous_Animation_id20080529-125353.html External Constants From an XML File http://flashgameu.com/External_Constants_From_an_XML_File_id20080513-165202.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Tue, 13 May 2008 16:52:02 -0400 External_Constants_From_an_XML_File_id20080513-165202.html Countdown Clock http://flashgameu.com/Countdown_Clock_id20080403-123959.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:39:59 -0400 Countdown_Clock_id20080403-123959.html Mouse Fade and Base Classes http://flashgameu.com/Mouse_Fade_and_Base_Classes_id20080221-145113.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:51:13 -0500 Mouse_Fade_and_Base_Classes_id20080221-145113.html Creating a Snake Game, Part 2 http://flashgameu.com/Creating_a_Snake_Game,_Part_2_id20080114-113050.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:30:50 -0500 Creating_a_Snake_Game,_Part_2_id20080114-113050.html Creating a Snake Game, Part 1 http://flashgameu.com/Creating_a_Snake_Game,_Part_1_id20080111-181918.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:19:18 -0500 Creating_a_Snake_Game,_Part_1_id20080111-181918.html Playing Multiple Flash Movies Inside a Single Flash Application http://flashgameu.com/Playing_Multiple_Flash_Movies_Inside_a_Single_Flash_Application_id20071207-200008.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:00:08 -0500 Playing_Multiple_Flash_Movies_Inside_a_Single_Flash_Application_id20071207-200008.html Playing a Song With a Toggle Button http://flashgameu.com/Playing_a_Song_With_a_Toggle_Button_id20071116-154548.html

Hi Gary, I'd followed your AS3 toggle button tutorial to Play/Pause a song. 1. What can I do to allow the song to be played again by clicking the toggle button? 2. What is needed to make the toggle button to take on the "play" state when the song has finished on its own?

Expanding on the earlier tutorial about creating a Toggle Button, here's how to link the toggle button to a piece of music in the library and to have the toggle button react properly when the song is done. View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source file. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Fri, 16 Nov 2007 15:45:48 -0500 Playing_a_Song_With_a_Toggle_Button_id20071116-154548.html Shuffling Arrays http://flashgameu.com/Shuffling_Arrays_id20071106-153135.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:31:35 -0500 Shuffling_Arrays_id20071106-153135.html Matching Game with Card Pairs http://flashgameu.com/Matching_Game_with_Card_Pairs_id20071010-104340.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source files. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:43:40 -0400 Matching_Game_with_Card_Pairs_id20071010-104340.html Dynamic Buttons http://flashgameu.com/Dynamic_Buttons_id20071009-172544.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Download the source files. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:25:44 -0400 Dynamic_Buttons_id20071009-172544.html Saving Local Data http://flashgameu.com/Saving_Local_Data_id20070924-164348.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:43:48 -0400 Saving_Local_Data_id20070924-164348.html Physics in Animation http://flashgameu.com/Physics_in_Animation_id20070914-135900.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:59:00 -0400 Physics_in_Animation_id20070914-135900.html Collision Detection http://flashgameu.com/Collision_Detection_id20070911-103733.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:37:33 -0400 Collision_Detection_id20070911-103733.html Matching Game http://flashgameu.com/Matching_Game_id20070905-133456.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Wed, 05 Sep 2007 13:34:56 -0400 Matching_Game_id20070905-133456.html How to Make an AS3 Toggle Button http://flashgameu.com/How_to_Make_an_AS3_Toggle_Button_id20070827-172634.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Subscribe via iTunes. ]]> Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:26:34 -0400 How_to_Make_an_AS3_Toggle_Button_id20070827-172634.html Playing Sounds in AS3 http://flashgameu.com/Playing_Sounds_in_AS3_id20070815-114655.html View video in your browser. Download QuickTime Movie. Subscribe via iTunes.]]> Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:46:55 -0400 Playing_Sounds_in_AS3_id20070815-114655.html Podcast 4: ActionScript 3.0 http://flashgameu.com/Podcast_4:_ActionScript_3.0_id20070810-060000.html List to the Podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Transcript: G: Hi and welcome to the Flash Game University podcast, http://flashgameu.com. I'm Gary Rosenzweig and with me is William Follett. W: Hello. G: Hi and in this episode I wanted to take the time to talk about ActionScript 3 which is really what it's all about. The book ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University, as the title suggests, is about ActionScript 3. The site, even though there's no problem going to the forums and talking about earlier versions of ActionScript, it's really about game programming and ActionScript 3.0 means game programming, it really does. W: That's right. G: That's one of things that makes me so excited about it, it's ten to a hundred to even a thousand times faster than earlier versions of ActionScript. Which is important. I mean you think in a game, an example, you want to have a space rocks type of game, you have things floating around, you can have sixteen different rocks floating around and your ship and you're firing bullets, a lot of collision detection. You've got ten little laser blasts floating around in space, you've got sixteen rocks, you've got you're ship. You have to detect everything is colliding with everything else. It's a big loop, big test, big mathematical test being done and earlier versions of ActionScript that would take awhile. In ActionScript 3 it just happens, so fast. W: Okay, alright, a pool game. G: Well, ah, a pool game. W: Would that be faster? G: Yes. Well and actually... W: 'Cause your ball hits the other balls... G: Oh my. W: And each ball has to compute. G: It goes exponential, especially when you're breaking. So, there's things like that, that are just because of the brute force in ActionScript 3. The way it does it, is there's a new engine, there's actually two engines in modern Flash. You download Flash 9 player. There's one engine that interprets earlier ActionScript, ActionScript 1 and 2, and an engine that interprets ActionScript 3. The engine that interprets ActionScript 3 is way faster than the other one. If you stick to ActionScript 3 you can do all these calculations way faster. One of the ways it's faster is there's something in ActionScript 3 called strict typing. W: Strict typing. G: Strict typing, yes. What this means is you create a variable, and you say what that variable is going to hold. In earlier versions of ActionScript, even though ActionScript 2 allowed you to do typing, it wasn't strict typing. You could basically have a variable say, variable A. Variable A could be a string, a bunch of characters, it could be an array, it could be a number, it could be all sorts of stuff. In ActionScript 3 you might say it's an integer and that's all it's ever going to be. W: So A will always be an integer? G: Yeah and the speed is incredible. So, for instance, the three type of numbers are number, which is the equivalent to like a floating point value, you know something like 7.839 or whatever. W: Yeah. G: There's integer, which is you know a number like 1 or -5, and then there's even one called unsign integer, uint, which is just zero and up. W: Okay. G: The difference between number, handling a number, a number has got to be this thing, it's got to hold like decimal places, it's this complex construct and if you're going to do something like loop a million times and you're going to use this complex construct to represent this number you're looping, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, it's a lot more memory access, a lot more calculation each time to compare that number and see if, 'Is it equal to three?' Well, I don't know, I have to use this weird construct to determine if it's equal. But if you say it's an integer, it's a very simple little construct, a tiny little thing represented almost by bare bits in the computer. You can compare it, you can change it very easily. So, you can do like a loop using numbers, and then you can do the loop using integers, it would be like a thousand times faster, in my test. W: Oh. G: And the same thing with a string. Say, hey this is nothing...never going to be anything but a string. It's a bunch of characters, it's very simple, as opposed to having this overall, it's going to this object, it could be anything. That makes it really easy to do things and fast. So that's one of the things ActionScript does. Another it does, ActionScript 3 does, is it changes how things are displayed. If you've done a lot of work in ActionScript 1 or 2 and you add movie clips to the stage using ActionScript, you know that you've got this weird thing where you've got to add it to the stage, and then there's like depths and you can swap two things, be on top of each other, and it's really strange and weird how it works. ActionScript 3 throws that all away and everything is just, everything is children of the stage, you have the stage and you have it's children. So it's children may be three movie clips. Movie clips, they may actually have children inside them. So it might be four movie clips inside this one movie clip. And then each thing it just has a list, this is first name I'm going to draw, this is the last thing I'm going to draw. W: Okay. G: And you can insert something in the middle of that list, in the front of that list, in the end of that list and it's done. There's no strange swapping and having something that's at like this layer and that layer. It makes it very easy to things and of course it makes it fast. Another thing ActionScript 3 does to make things fast is it has something called a sprite. And in old versions of ActionScript we had something called a movie clip. Movie clips are basically, like the Flash movie is one big movie clip. W: Yeah. G: And then you can have movie clips inside that that are mini Flash movies that have their own timeline, they've got their own elements, and they can have movie clips inside of those, it's encapsulation, you can go as deep as you want. Well, what really slows that down for a lot of stuff is you put something on the screen, like say a little space ship. And the space ship doesn't have animation, it doesn't have anything, it's just an image. Inside that movie clip is an entire timeline structure for how that might be animated, how it might have labels and frames and key frames. Well, a sprite says it's going to be like a movie clip, but it's not going to have any of that. There's not going to be any timeline. It's going to be a static element, that's just going to be this one thing and it makes it so much easier. But without a timeline, it can render this thing on the screen very quickly. Now a sprite can actually have more sprites in it, and a sprite can actually have movie clips in it, that's fine, but the spite itself is not something that needs to be, you know, animated or whatever. So it's simple. It allows you to go and choose and say this is a simple object, this is a complex, animated object. W: That makes sense. If you're going to rotate a space ship on the screen you don't need the animation frames stuff. It's a waste. G: Right. You may have a dozen movie clips, but you may also have a hundred other elements that are not animated in anyway. W: Okay. G: These are all called display objects and then there's other types of display objects, like a little text field, for instance, is a display object. You know video is a display object, that type of thing. W: Okay. G: So, it breaks it down into more basic elements that are easier to understand, easier to build with, and easier to tell Flash exactly what you want and no more than what you want. W: Yeah. G: So, that's the three main reasons why Flash ActionScript 3 is faster. It is going to be tougher for people that have been doing ActionScript 2 and before to get used to. W: Now do they have to relearn a lot of stuff? G: There's some stuff, you know there's some stuff that's exactly the same, doing little conditional statements, if statements, for loops, that type of thing. There's some stuff that you have to get used to. You have to declare variables, for instance, a four loop, you would have said 4(i=0; etc. Now you have to say 4(Var i, and then you have say, 'What is i?' :int, for an integer =0. And then you can't, if you use i again in the same one, you can't say Var again, because you're not re-declaring it. So, some things you have to get used to. One of the big things, for instance, creating a button. Simple thing of creating a button. In ActionScript 2 and earlier, you can actually put a button on the screen and have a script attached to it, you know the script for that button, that says 'On press, and then like Go To and Play this frame.' You can't do that in ActionScript 3. You can't attach scripts to buttons actually. W: How am I going to use buttons if I can't do that? G: You assign a name to the button. You say this is 'My Button.' W: Okay. G: And then in the timeline you would actually say, okay, 'My Button. add event listener.' W: You would 'add event listener?' G: So 'add event listener' would say okay, I'm going to add an event listener, something that listens for events on this button and then you assign it, the event I want it to listen to which would be a mouse event, 'click' and then you would say when mouse event 'click' happens call this function. So the function might be 'My Button function,' and then that tells that button now to listen for a mouse click. Then you create a function called 'My Button function,' and you put inside that function, 'Go To and Play this frame.' So that's a good example of one thing was simple that's now very complex. But at the same time, once you get programming there are things that were very complex before, manipulating lots of objects and stuff, that are so simple. You know you have to get used to it. It'll take some getting used to. But I find things that took me awhile to do that I looked at 'Boy it's going to be several days before I get this game up and running in any state,' even a very basic state, I can get a game up and running in like a day. And it's just really quick and easy to do that and it's all fast. Usually have to learn to think a little different. You have to learn to do things differently. You can't Add Movie anymore. You know you actually go ahead and you assign an object identifier to a symbol in the library and then you actually create a new version of that. So say you had something called 'My Movie Clip.' In the past you would say, like Add Movie, or Attach Movie sorry, Attach Movie - My Movie Clip. W: Yeah. G: It would go onto the screen and then you'd have to manipulate where it was and all this stuff. In ActionScript 3 you would actually go and call it, in the symbol, you would actually attach an identifier to it, a class, that was called My Movie Clip and then in ActionScript 3 you would say, okay let's create a new My Movie Clip, just like you were creating a new variable, like a new integer, or a new string. You would be creating a new version of this movie clip and then you would say Add Child, and add the child to the stage or to another movie clip. That's how you would do that there. The interesting thing is that you can actually create an ActionScript class, a little AS file that's for My Movie Clip. So every time you create a new version of it, it's its own code, self contained. W: Okay. G: It makes it very powerful and very object oriented as well. W: And very fast. G: Yeah, and great as a game development platform. The encapsulation is great. Being able to do things like, oh for instance, I was just programming a game this weekend and I had, just to get things done really quickly I had everything just going to the screen, on to the Stage. So I added a bunch of objects, and I added a bunch of enemies and I added a bunch of things that are flying through the air in the game and I put them on the stage and then I realized, 'I really want to encapsulate that,' inside of something. Because I want to have some elements that appear on top, some background elements that appear on the bottom. So, I just simply, everywhere that it said Add Child, I actually said, instead of adding child to the stage I added child to a movie clip that I created. And every place I put Remove Child, so I just modified those commands and I knew that was all I needed to do. W: It was that easy. G: And then everything was in this movie clip. It was encapsulated in this movie clip and I was able to put that in a layer under the foreground, above the background. And it was very easy to move those things around and it's kind of neat. Quick, rapid development using techniques like that. So, very good. W: Rapid development that pays off, too. G: Rapid development that pays off, yes. W: I'm so blown away when you're showing me the sidescroller with the animated background. G: Yes. W: And how fast it was running. G: Yes, oh yeah. W: I've never seen that in a Flash game. G: I'm really so psyched about how fast it is and some of the cool things. We've got three or four now, ActionScript 3 games, including the one I'm working on right now that'll be up on the site and then they'll be probably taking over the site in ActionScript 3 really as pretty much most of our new development is going to be ActionScript 3 games that'll be up there. So anyway, I'm excited about it and of course you can read in the book, ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University, at the end of the month, more about all the cool ways to program games and there'll be more stuff at the site as well. If you've got a question about ActionScript 3, especially as it pertains to game development, ask it, at the site, by clicking on the Ask Gary link and I'll answer it in the blog. W: Or you can mention it in the forums as well. G: Yes, go to the forums as well. Let's get the conversation started. So, great. That's it for our initial set of opening podcasts. We'll be doing more of these and also some video podcasts with some tutorials, showing you on-screen how I do things in the future. Thanks a lot. Bye. W: Bye. ]]> Fri, 10 Aug 2007 06:00:00 -0400 Podcast_4:_ActionScript_3.0_id20070810-060000.html Podcast 3: Gary Rosenzweig Bio http://flashgameu.com/Podcast_3:_Gary_Rosenzweig_Bio_id20070807-060000.html Listen to the Podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Transcript G: Hi and welcome to the Flash Game University Podcast episode 3 from http://flashgameu.com. I'm Gary Rosenzweig and with me is William Follett. W: Hello. G: In this episode we're going to... W: We're going to talk about Gary. G: Well, yeah. W: Who is this guy? G: Well, I just want to give a bio since I'm the author of the book and the Dean of Flash Game University. W: That's right. G: I wanted to go into my history. You know, something for people our age Will, especially people into computers, they always like to talk about 'my first computer,' back, I used to use stone tablets with binary bits in them and tubes. W: Yes. G: My story starts with elementary school using a PDP 11 terminal. W: Oh my god. G: Which was like a keyboard with like a printer. There wasn't even a screen. W: Yeah. G: That's my first program that I typed in, but I can't claim to have written it, because I typed in like a Moonlander like thing that you would do. So then it wasn't until I got, just before I turned thirteen, that I got a TRS 80 model 3. W: In your own house. G: I kept begging, begging my parents, my relatives, 'I need a computer, I want a computer.' I remember it was like a thousand dollars for this monochromatic tape drive machine that had Basic built in. But within days I was actually through the 'How To Program In Basic' book and actually making games. W: That's right and you've talked a lot about how you'd sit down at that thing and they had magazines or something that you could copy games from. G: Yes. Yeah, the TRS 80 magazines and you could copy games and you could modify them, and then I actually sent a few into those, never had one published, but I sent some in. My parents, quite wisely, if I wanted to stay up all night programming on this thing they let me. I think they kind of realized that while other kids were out getting in trouble he's sitting, learning more computer skills, 'Yeah, he can stay up as late as he wants.' So, thanks mom and dad. W: You were lucky. G: I was very lucky. W: My parents weren't that caring. G: I went from there. I did a lot of game programming in Basic, and then I started to experiment with other machines because about that time the bottom dropped out of the personal computer market and you could pick up like Commodore 64's and Timex Sinclair's and all that like cheap and at flea markets and stuff. W: Yeah. G: So we started to collect these things at our house and I started to like, like I actually made a game for the Timex Sinclair which had 1K of memory. W: Oh my god. Huge! G: But it was fun to actually try to work within those constraints. But then in high school I had Apple II's and I started to do a lot of programming on Apple II's and simulation stuff because I was part of this special group, Northeast High School in Philadelphia, that did space shuttle simulations, a student club kind of weird thing. I won't go into that. But I was head of the computer group and I did lots of space shuttle simulation type stuff on Apple II's. And then I went to college at Drexel University for computer science. I was one of those rare people who knew pretty much from the time I was in ninth grade that I wanted to go to college for computer science. W: Yeah. G: And then I went to college for computer science and then I got my degree in computer science. There was no changing majors, no switching. I was lucky though, Drexel University had one of the first accredited computer science programs. I started in '87 in college and now, of course, there's hundreds and hundreds of colleges across the United States have accredited computer science programs and I can still recognize their curriculum. I'm actually on the advisory board for one here in Denver, and the curriculum is almost the same like with the same like, 'this is how you learn how to program.' And Drexel did this really early, I think they were like the twelfth school to get accredited. W: Now Drexel, what type of computers did you start on? G: Macintosh. Drexel had this interesting thing where it was even, before I started, but it definitely in full force in 1987 the entire campus was standardized on Macintosh's, every student was required to get a Macintosh computer when they started as freshman. So I got a Mac SE. W: Nice. G: 1987, September. W: You're getting into some serious graphic power. G: Yeah, 512 x 384. W: You bet ya. G: Two colors. It was great. We were all standardized on Mac, the whole campus was Mac. You could bring floppy disks, because you didn't have a network back then, so you'd bring a floppy disk to a computer center and you can load course work, actually courses that were not computer courses, like chemistry, physics, psychology. Everybody would have things that you would do, like in hypercard, that were actually things you had to take on a floppy disk and bring them back to your machine and you could turn in your homework. You'd put it on a floppy, you'd go to the machine, and there would be this network on campus that you could actually then drop it into the professor's folder and that was turning in your homework. It was really interesting. So that was cool, and then I did a lot of programming then, but not too much in the game develop...that was back... you know they didn't do...game development was not a career. Now it is. Now there are colleges teaching it. But back then game development was done by a few individuals. W: Yeah. G: And things like that. It was not... you were expected to get a computer science degree and go work for a bank or the NSA, seriously, the NSA was like one of the biggest employers of graduates from Drexel for computers or things like that. W: Yeah. G: I took...I had a few co-op jobs, during, and they were working for one company that did news syndication over pre-Internet modem lines. And I worked for one of the baby Bells back then, which doesn't even exist anymore. Who knows what the, how Bell of Pennsylvania became Bell Atlantic which became something which is probably Verizon now. W: Oh, our little Bell grew up. G: Yeah, but anyway and I did that, it was more like business type programming. So I did that. I took a detour because I worked on the college newspaper and I was editor in chief of the college newspaper and I love journalism so I actually went to the University of North Carolina and got a degree in journalism, a Master's degree, after my computer science degree. So, I was like one of the few journalist type people at Drexel University and then I went to University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and I was one of the few computer people in the school of journalism. W: So computers and journalism, how could that possibly get you a job in the future? G: Well, yeah. Well, actually what happened was I soon...I worked as an intern, actually an intern one year and then as a paid employee the next summer at The Baltimore Sun. I actually wrote a few, got to write a few news articles. But reporting was not for me because I hate reporting. I hate interviewing people. I hate going to people that just had some sort of tragedy befall them and then asking them how they feel. W: Or what kind of tree they'd be. G: Yeah. I love news writing though. I loved actually formulating a story because it was like programming. So I thought of going into newspaper management, but in the end at the University of North Carolina they loved the fact that I knew how to do everything with computers and they pushed me to really study that so I did actually my master's thesis on newspapers on computers. Which this is pre-Internet. So, there was actually floppy disk distribution and I did a demo of floppy disk distribution of the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina, The Daily Tarheel, on floppy disk and I did a master's thesis on that which is probably still on file. You know you can look up that stuff, Google Scholar, and all that it's probably there, I haven't checked. But then I did, at The Baltimore Sun I actually translated that work for The Baltimore Sun and did a special edition of The Baltimore Sun for the 1993 or was it '94 All-Star game which was there and which we did an electronic newspaper distribution. We actually had twenty people sign up for subscriptions. I finished the Hypercard presentation, this was Mac only actually, finished the Hypercard presentation that went on two floppy disks and finished it that night, stayed up all night, and then the morning they went like overnight to people that, twenty people that had paid to get a electronic newspaper version of the All-Star game. W: So what did they get a little... G: Special. W: Floppy disk. G: They got a floppy, they put it in their Mac and they saw pictures and news stories and everything from what was a special edition of The Baltimore Sun, but in an electronic format that I had put together. W: Oh, cool. G: That was kind of neat. So the I went and I went on a big road trip that summer and after I ran out of money going on the road trip I was looking for a job. I was actually at The Baltimore Sun working on another project at the time, a game, Digital Deficit, is what it was called, and that was in Hypercard as well, and I was looking through Editor & Publisher magazine and I saw an ad for a company in Denver that was forming that was part owned by Reuters, which of course is the largest news organization in the world probably. W: That's right. Or at least in England. G: But they were looking...it was going to be a multimedia computer newspaper for kids. And I said, 'I know how to do that!' So I applied and they flew me out here and hired me. Then we started doing this product that was a daily multimedia news journal for kids delivered over old cable modems, old cable modems are one direction. W: This is pre-Internet. G: Pre-Internet. So they were delivered over night, cable, to classrooms and to homes. So basically it was like getting a delivery of a CD-ROM every night, over the line. We decided to put games in these things, educational games. I started taking over doing some of the games and we needed artwork for the games, and we didn't have any artists to draw any artwork, so we started looking for an artist and we found... W: Me. G: Yeah, Will. That's how I met Will. Who was at the Art Institute of Colorado at that point. W: No, no. I graduated from there and I was at the University of Northern Colorado, designing pet treat packages for Monfort ,which is the meat packing plant. So I had a great portfolio for computer stuff. But I'd done a little bit in Hypercard, I had some animations. G: Right. And you were familiar with computers and computer art, and most of all you could draw. W: I was familiar with computers and what I didn't know I didn't tell them I didn't know. G: Yeah, so you did freelance a few games and then basically said, 'Well we're going to do a lot of this stuff,' so they just hired Will full time. So we started working together it was like late '94. W: That's right. G: And freelance stuff and then January of '95 Will started and actually at the same time they hired an audio guy, Jay Shaffer, who... W: He's also around here somewhere. G: He's around here somewhere. So we started working together, Will and Jay and I started working together at Ingenius, was the name of the company, with no O, Ingenius spelled with no O. Don't go to the website, it's owned by somebody else now, company is gone, closed in 1998. It dotboomed, before, it dotboomed, it dotbusted before anybody else did. W: Before the Internet was even valuable. G: Yeah, exactly, so and then thing is that when I went to this job and they weren't using Hypercard, they were using a program called Macromedia Director, version 4 which had just come out for Windows for the first time. So I started programming in this, and at that point I actually looked around for a book. I can use a book to learn how to program in Lingo in Macromedia Director and there wasn't one. W: There's no books. G: I actually went to a bookstore and looked for one specifically and it wasn't there and I got disappointed and I thought I could write one. So I knew nothing about writing books. Basically, I made the big mistake of actually writing the book and then going to publishers and saying, 'I have a book.' That's not how you do it folks. What you do is go to a publisher and give them a proposal, you go through all, months and months of going back and forth and they approve it and then you start writing. Writing it first is stupid because the publisher is almost never going to want exactly what you want. They want to hone the idea and market it and stuff. So I wrote this book and I couldn't find a way to publish it so I published it online for free. W: Yeah. G: Which everybody said I was stupid to do. Said it was daft to publish a book online for free and by 'online for free,' I meant I uploaded it to AOL. That's how it was back then. I ended up getting a lot of attention for that book. I ended up getting a freelance job that paid me way more than any publisher would for a book. W: This is why it wasn't a dumb idea. G: Yeah I know. W: That was a smart thing to do. G: It was smart. I didn't know why it was smart I just thought it might be. And then a few months after I got paid all that for the freelance job I did in the evenings, I actually got a call from a publisher that said, 'We need somebody to write a book on Lingo,' and we asked our guy who does our CD-ROM's and he says, 'Talk to this guy because he's written a book on Lingo that's online.' So I got my first contract to do a book and I did it, that was for Director 5, I rewrote the book and it was a big thing, The Comprehensive Guide To Lingo, or something it was called. W: Oh, it was huge. It was thicker than a Harry Potter book. G: Yeah it was. So that was my first one and then it quickly went to my second one. At the same time I left Ingenius to start my own company which is what I really wanted to do at the start. A year later I pulled Will with me after I got enough business going to need a full-time artist. So we're into 1996, '97 and then our business kind of grew, but it was you and I for awhile. W: Yeah, for a long time. G: And then at some point during that we were doing all these Shockwave games in Macromedia Director, sometime we decided, we had always known about Flash as a little animator thing, but we hadn't really used it for anything. I think I got a version to play with because it was cheap back then. And then I heard somebody say, at some conference that I was at, 'You cannot make games with Flash,' and I took this as a challenge. W: What? G: Because I thought, 'Well, wait a minute, okay,' you can...'cause I've heard that said before about other things, 'You can't make games in Hypercard,' 'You can't make games in Director.' But 'You can't make games in Flash,' and I said well there's buttons, you can use some logic in how the buttons work and we put together a silly game called The Urinal Game. W: That's right. G: In Flash 2. W: It was all film loops I think. G: It was all little film loops and buttons and as far as I know it may not have been the first game in Flash, but it was certainly the first one distributed pretty widely. W: Yeah. G: So we did that and then of course, future version of Flash did actually add more stuff, especially... W: Well, we didn't know. We did Invading Astro Blobs was just... G: Invading Astro Blobs was Flash 3 and that was an even more advanced game. It wasn't a quiz game it was actually an arcade game. And then Flash 4 actually had a rudimentary language that you could do conditions and loops and all this and we did a ton of games. We launched a big game, a big site of Flash games. We did, you know, so we had like ten or twelve games and then Flash 5, of course, introduced ActionScript 1 and things took off from there and I really started using it for a lot of games. W: I remember you challenged yourself. You said, 'I'm going to try to make classic arcade games,' with this early version of Flash. G: Yes. Well in Flash 4 you didn't have any sign or cosign functions or any way to tell angles and so I figured a way to do Asteroids using...I said, 'Well how did they used to do this back before they had advanced programming languages?' and I found out that the early system the would have a look up table where you look up and angle, say well it's five degrees. Five degrees means it goes off X and Y in this direction, because they didn't have sign or cosign. So I did that in Flash 4 and when everyone else said, 'You can't do that type of game because you don't have sign and cosign,' so I said, 'Well, we can.' W: Who says? G: So, we had a neat little game that's probably still up at GameScene.com, I think it's Flashteroids. W: It's a nice, solid game. G: We did that and then, CleverMedia, our company here grew. Jay who worked with us at Ingenius started in '95 too, he came on as our sound and video guy and actually did a whole bunch of website things in the first incarnation, CleverMedia 1.0. Which when the Internet collapsed, really the NASDAQ and everything went down, end of 2001 or middle of 2001, we downsized and it just became Will and I, again. Then we started growing again, as things grew and we started with videos and video podcasting and Jay came back on because he's an audio and video expert and he's here. Now we produce tons of games and we actually produce most of our games in Flash. We use Director and Shockwave still for 3D games, but ActionScript 3 is now so powerful there's really no reason to do 2D games in Director anymore. W: But we're still hoping to do 3D games in Director. G: Yeah, 3D games, definitely. We still do a lot of 3D projects and we have a lot of old games in Director that we maintain. So, occasionally we do stuff. So that's where we're at now. We're doing lots of games in Flash. We're trying to push...relooking at old games that we said couldn't be done in Flash or couldn't be done yet in Flash, now looking at them again and saying, 'Hey, we can now do this in Flash.' W: Yeah, and we're hoping they'll have Flash for the iPhone so we can make more games for those. G: Well, yeah one day. That would be great, or in Flash for other platforms as well. So that all leads into, of course, doing this book and...because over the years you know I ended up going from writing Director books to writing Flash books. I wrote twelve books. This is the twelfth book. A lot of them are Director books. I write a series called, Using Director, Special Edition: Using Director, which is a Que series, you know they have Special Edition: Using Word, Special Edition: Using Windows, whatever, so Special Edition: Using Director is my series and has not been updated since Special Edition: Using Director MX because MX 2004 didn't really add enough for me to go with, you know... W: It wasn't worth it. G: Yeah, they added JavaScript. Which was nice, but it's like either you're going to use JavaScript or you're not and if you don't need it, there's really nothing for me to add. So, I updated that series, there's four books in that series. I did a book on GarageBand with Jay, actually. W: That's right. That's right, with MacAddict. G: Yeah, MacAddict and Que, my publisher. This is the new book, which will be out and it's exciting and I can't wait to see how well the book's received. W: It comes out end of August (2007). G: Yeah, end of August and that's it. In the next podcast I want to talk more about ActionScript 3 and why I like it as a game development platform. W: Joy. G: For that it brings you up to date on all the stuff. I guess we should add we're in beautiful Denver, Colorado, that's where CleverMedia is located. W: That's right. At the top of the CleverMedia tower, looking out our port hole. G: Yeah, our stuff, our interests, I guess part of a bio type of thing. Let's see, for me, you know I like science fiction is big influence on me, movies, TV, media. I'm a media hound. So I'm married, I have a daughter. W: A daughter who likes to climb. G: Yeah, and she already has a Mac, she has an iMac that she uses for little things, plays little games on it. My wife owns a bookstore, The Attic Bookstore, http://atticbookstore.com. W: The scariest bookstore in Denver. G: Yeah, it's a haunted bookstore that we've built together and CleverMedia and The Attic Bookstore are located in the same building that we have. Just enjoying life here. Will just got married. W: Yes. I'm still recovering from that. I married my...well she wouldn't be my high school sweet heart, would she? G: No she wouldn't, because you didn't know her in high school. W: I only met her a few...seven years ago. G: Kind of feels like that though. You kind of do have that vibe between the two of you that people could easily say that, mistake you for being high school sweethearts, because you've got that kind of connection. W: I married a New Yorker which really made my life exciting and taught me a new word. G: Several new words I imagine. It's kind of neat because we started working together in 1995 and I mean we were both single and just young guys and now we're like both married, we own homes, we've seen lots of stuff. W: We're family men and homeowners. G: Yes, exactly. So it's kind of... W: We need to pay our mortgages. G: It's kind of neat when friendship goes through that and just like Will did some illustrations for my first book, Will's done illustrations for this book. W: Yeah. G: We have another artist here, Eve Park, who did some illustrations as well. W: She does some nice artwork. Although I'm a little bit jealous of some of the projects she works on. G: Yeah she gets to work...Will gets the big beefy projects that you know, because he's the Art Director and he's the senior guy. So then all these little tiny games and stuff, Eve gets to do and sometimes they're kind of neat. W: It's all so much fun. It's hard to let go. G: Well anyway. Well I guess that about brings us up to date. You can always go and 'Ask Gary' if you have more questions. The blog online. W: That's right, at http://flashgameu.com. G: http://flashgameu.com W: http://flashgameu.com G: Okay, that's it. W: Bye.]]> Tue, 07 Aug 2007 06:00:00 -0400 Podcast_3:_Gary_Rosenzweig_Bio_id20070807-060000.html Podcast 2: About the Book http://flashgameu.com/Podcast_2:_About_the_Book_id20070803-060000.html Listen to the Podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Transcript: G: Hi, and welcome to the Flash Game University Podcast episode number 2. W: Or welcome back if you've just listened to our first one. G: This is...we're at http://flashgameu.com. I'm Gary Rosenzweig and with me is William Follett. W: Hey guys. G: In this episode I want to talk specifically about the book. The book is ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University by Gary Rosenzweig. Hey, that's me. W: Some illustrations by Will Follett. G: Yes, and the front cover character and everything like that... W: By Will Follett. G: By Will Follett. So, I wanted to talk about the book and talk about what it's about. It comes out end of August, hopefully, according to Amazon. It's all done now at this point we're recording this the very last day of July. W: And you can probably pre-order it. G: You can definitely pre-order it, and I have a link at the website. You can even preview the book at this thing called IT Safari which I think I have a link to in one of my blog posts. But, no point in doing that now and paying all the extra money now because by the time you hear this it will be really close for the book to come out. So the book is about ActionScript 3 game programming. I'm really excited about ActionScript 3 because this is not...it's almost misleading to say well there's ActionScript and there's ActionScript 2 and there's ActionScript 3 and they're just like iterations of the same thing. ActionScript 3 is almost a totally different thing than previous versions of ActionScript. W: Really? G: Yes, there's an engine in Flash that interprets the commands and in Flash 8 and earlier it interpreted all these ActionScript commands and everything and it was very slow which made it hard to make games. W: It wasn't zippy at all. G: No. You couldn't program things like path finding and checking lots of collisions and all this stuff, because it was just too slow and it was a problem with Flash. ActionScript 3 is a completely new engine for doing this and it is way faster. For a lot of tasks, a level of magnitude faster, maybe two levels of magnitude, maybe a hundred times faster. W: Really? G: Yes, so there's amazing things you can do. It got me very excited about Flash's game development platform again. I liked it at first and of course I wrote two books on Flash programming before, but this time boy you can just do some amazing things. It's not that you couldn't do some things before, but before you had to optimize. You would like write a game and it would work and then you would have to spend like twice that amount of time optimizing it until it would actually work on most computers. ActionScript 3 you can actually just program it and it works and it's done. W: And it works fast. G: And it works fast, like the way you should program it. W: You can see the difference between similar games. G: Oh, huge difference. W: Earlier platform games were slow. G: I tried to make a platform game in Flash and it's kind of slow and it was hard. In ActionScript 3 you can do all of the calculations and everything so much faster. W: This new one is just right on. G: So, I was excited about that. I've decided to come out of kind of retirement. For the last four years I've been saying I've retired from book writing. But, I got so excited about ActionScript 3 and I said boy there really needs to be a book on this soon and I think I'm going to do it, why not? I wrote a new one. I've written...the books in the past they were Flash 5 ActionScript For Fun and Games, and then the sequel Flash MX ActionScript For Fun and Games. This is not a continuation of that series. W: It's a whole new series. G: It's a whole new series, even though some of the games, of course, I mean you're going to do a book on game programming and you're going to include like a matching game and there's a matching game in those two books and there's a matching game in the new book, but I didn't even look at the old books to actually write this new one. I completely wrote new code because the ActionScript 3 way of doing things is so different. W: That's basically to teach the fundamentals of game programming. G: Exactly, so this is a book from scratch. It's a whole new thing. You can almost think of earlier versions of Flash being a different program than this new version of Flash and this is doing it for this new program. I've also written a lot of books about Director and Shockwave and things like that. I wrote a book called Teach Yourself ActionScript in 24 Hours, for Sams, which was ActionScript 1. W: I remember that one. G: Yeah, that was not even ActionScript 2. So, that book is so obsolete now. This new one is just, boy it's a different animal in a lot of ways. The idea here is, I really want to teach people how to do things the ActionScript 3 way. The ActionScript 3 is not very well defined now, because it will be defined as people start using it in writing large programs in it. But I kind of adapted the way that the documentation uses. I adapted the way the Flex developers, Flex is another program that produces Flash movies just like Flash does, so Flex developers had been using ActionScript 3 for six months before Flash developers were, and I looked at the way they were doing programming and then I also looked at the way, 'what do you want to do for games?' and I adapted this style of programming for ActionScript 3 that I think works really well. One of the things you can do with ActionScript 3 is you can have like a ton of different files, like class files, so you can have like say, one that controls like the player, one that controls like the enemies in the game, one that controls the map in the game and all this. You can divide it up into a lot of things. That gets really cumbersome. It makes sense when you're doing like a large project like maybe multiple programmers, long development times and all that. But I think it bogs down game development, so I followed the one ActionScript class for each game type of thing. It makes development fast and easy. That's kind of the idea that the book teaches. The first game which is in Chapter 3, which is the matching game, actually builds up this class from like a version of a very simple thing, it just puts the cards on the screen and the next one, okay we're going to move them, and the next one I built it up in ten steps. The rest of the chapters take the approach of, 'here's the whole class,' and then here's how it's built and what it does, and that's how that works. In the book, let's see, what do we have in the book? There's twelve chapters in the book. It's about 450 plus pages. The first chapter really goes into the basics of ActionScript 3. So it teaches you basically a little bit about the language. It's for beginners, but it's also for people who might be used to programming in older versions of ActionScript. Then it shows you the basics, shows you how to build this class file, do a little "Hello World" program, you know what are the basic things for conditional statements, like if/then statements, and also for loops and stuff like that. You build a couple simple little examples. Second chapter is one I'm really excited about. It's building blocks for games. It goes through about twenty or thirty building blocks. Things like little physics of a ball getting thrown or collision detection or just storing data, that type of thing. W: All sorts of useful stuff. G: Yeah, they're like little nuggets that you can actually take and use in your games. W: You can use in other games. G: Yeah, and by building these little building blocks, you're getting ready for the next step which is to build a full game. So, I'm really excited about Chapter 2 because there's things like how to tell time, and things like that that are in there, that's real easy. How do you play a sound? That's a good example. So, playing a sound, I always had trouble with ActionScript 2, remembering what the sequence you've got to do to attach a sound and all that, and it's completely different in ActionScript 3 to play a sound. W: Really? ?' G: It's like two lines, and it's like, 'what is it again?' I haven't done it in a few weeks and I can't remember. Well, I've just got it in there, so it's easy to refer to. Even I've referred to it at this point a few weeks after finishing writing. So, that's Chapter 2. Then Chapter 3 goes into that matching game which is the basic thing where you have to match two cards, turn over two cards and see if they match. And it builds it up in ten steps, adding something to each part, and the last part, the tenth part is a fairly robust matching game with animation and everything, but you get to just kind of learn how to do it step by step. W: These are the basics, this is like the early classes in your university career. G: Right. There's something in this book for beginners and there's stuff for advanced users. Wait 'til you see what the last few chapters have. Chapter 4 is a memory game and a deduction game. A memory game being like repeat the sequence and deduction is basically Mastermind, the old game Mastermind, the tags and all that. So, it goes a little further into building games and it shows you everything about those games and how they were built in ActionScript 3. Then we go into, Chapter 5 goes into animation and there's shooting and bouncing games. So, a little paddle game, a paddle with bricks and everything. W: Which, luckily you've read that chapter about ball detection. G: Right, yeah there's some parts from earlier, from collision detection stuff. There's also a game in there called Air Raid in there, where you're shooting at little objects flying by. So, it's some basic arcade game stuff. W: Kind of cool looking... G: ...Yeah, you drew those neat, retro looking air planes. W: That's right. G: And then we go into picture puzzles, and we have a sliding puzzle where you know you click and the squares slide around the screen. We do some work on the image...there's a great image engine in Flash, so I actually take the image, it's one .jpg and I break it apart. W: In Flash? G: Which is great. Which in the older books we used to have to do things like, okay, break it apart in Photoshop and then bring it in. Well, here you just have to supply a .jpg and it breaks it apart. For the jigsaw puzzle, actually the same thing, now a lot books, other books I've looked at that have jigsaw puzzles in them, and it's like you have a grid and you drag the puzzle pieces onto the grid. W: Yeah. G: This is actually a free flowing jigsaw puzzle. Like you actually can attach two pieces together and then move those two pieces as one. W: You can build in different parts of the puzzle. You can build this corner down here. G: Build the edges first. W: Yeah, work on the edges, work on the middle. G: I did a lot of effort to actually simplify these ideas, instead of actually saying, 'Well this is...I can make this really complex.' But instead, how can bring this down to the nugget of what you're trying to learn here as a programmer, and make it still a good game. So, I did a lot of work where I tried to simplify things and not do them the brute force, obvious way. But try to look for clever ways to actually do these that are simpler than what you would first think to do. W: Yeah. G: The next one is more of a movement arcade game, it's Space Rocks, a game I think I've done in every book I've ever written, and it's basically Asteroids. W: Yeah. G: So, you've got rotation and firing and these rocks getting blasted apart, and all that. This is a great game, a lot people from my older books have taken this Space Rocks type game and customized it to be something completely different. W: Because they're learning, you're learning the fundamentals. G: Right. W: So you can build something greater. G: Exactly. And then the next one, this is something new. It's going to a casual game and I teach how to do Match Three. Now Match Three is also know by a lot of names, including Bejeweled and Diamond Mine, and things like that. It's a basic...if you go to Real Arcade, you know and you look at all their games, half of them are match three games, and they all start off in the instructions, you can recognize them because they say try to match three or more pieces by swapping, so it's like the whole casual game genre almost means match three. So, you're swapping these pieces and they drop down. You can actually build one, you've got the full source code in the book to build one. We actually did one, ours is little gems, because that seems to be the most recognizable thing to do. W: That's right. G: Then we move on the stuff that uses text. So, we have the trivia games, the question and answer games, and this is definitely, of my old books, people love to adapt these and I guess there are a lot of educators using these books. W: These could be testing engines. G: And I carry it really far here. Because not only does it start with a basic quiz engine, where you can ask questions back and forth, but it arranges them very nicely. And then I have it go further into having things like timers, so you have time to answer the question. You've got Hint, you can ask for a hint. And then after the question you can get an additional piece of information. So, for instance, you know an explanation of why that is the correct answer. Then I carry it further and actually go and say, well, how do get even pictures into it? And I have a little thing where you can ask a question like, 'Which one is an equilateral triangle?' and have four pictures, and the pictures are actually, it's still external XML. I'm using XML for these, so you actually can have a lot of quiz engines and educational engines can export XML, so you can bring this in to this, and/or write your own XML and then you can actually have these little images be like external .swf's that it brings in and asks questions with pictures. So, much more advanced than anything I've ever done with trivia and quiz in the past, and much more adaptable as well. W: Well, that sounds useful. G: Yeah, it should be. Chapter 10 goes into more traditional type of word games. Hang Man is one I teach very quickly to show how simple it can be, and then I go into a much more complex Word Search example, of how to do that, and actually randomly arranging the words and then being able to select them. The next one I go into, Chapter 11, is action games and here's revisiting the platform game. W: This is my favorite chapter. G: Much more advanced platform game than I've done in the past in a book, because I can do it much simpler in ActionScript 3. Actually, I do a complete two level little thing where you have to go and get a key and open a chest. People should have a lot of fun adapting this code, because it's two levels but you know you can go and build forty levels and have different things in it. W: Build as many levels as you want. It runs fast. G: Yes. W: This ActionScript 3 it's zippy. G: It is. W: I can't describe it any other way. G: It's great. And then the last chapter, Chapter 12, we actually turn ninety degrees and we're looking top down, and we do two top down games. One is a racing game, where you're actually racing around a track, using some interesting collision detection stuff to allow you...you know you hit the side of the road and you go slower and everything. And then I do another one, where you're actually driving around Flash Game University, a little fictional campus, and you can't go onto the city blocks you have to stay on the streets, and then you can collect objects. And actually I took that and I added a few things to it and it's actually at our website as Campus Clean Up. But in the book it's just the Chapter 12 game, top down driving game. A great one to adapt. I see a lot of Flash games now where you're driving around a little area, collecting things, doing things. So, this is a framework for that. But it's also a complete game as well. So, that's the twelve chapters. At the site, I don't have them up yet, but before the release of the book I hope to have up all of these games as playable versions so you can actually play them on the website and see exactly what they do. And they'll be the exact versions in the book, so you'll actually be playing the real things that you're going to get when you buy the book and get the source code. Also, I wanted to say that these games can be used, if you're not like well a super developer and want to go in and alter these and learn this stuff, it's still a really good library to be able to take these games, swap out the artwork, and put them up on your website. W: And create your own games. G: And create your own games. So, it's a library. And if you are a good developer, and you've learned all the stuff in the book, but you need a quick start, you know you have maybe clients or your boss coming to you and saying, 'I want a game like this,' it's like oh, it's a match three game, I can start with Chapter 8 from this book and then modify it from there instead of starting from scratch. So a lot you can do and there's a more detailed table of contents up on the website already at http://flashgameu.com and as I said there'll be the example games also posted to http://flashgameu.com pretty soon. So that's it for this episode. Next episode I'm going to talk a little bit more about me. W: Yes, let's talk about you. It's all about you. G: Enough about me, what do you think of me? So alright, that's it for this episode. Thanks. W: Bye. ]]> Fri, 03 Aug 2007 06:00:00 -0400 Podcast_2:_About_the_Book_id20070803-060000.html Podcast 1: Introduction http://flashgameu.com/Podcast_1:_Introduction_id20070731-131834.html Listen to the podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Transcript: G: Hi and welcome to the first podcast of Flash Game University, http://flashgameu.com. I'm Gary Rosenzweig and with me here is William Follett. W: Hello. G: We're going to start off by doing a short series of audio podcasts about http://flashgameu.com, about the book, ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University by me. W: And I did the artwork. G: And Will did a lot of the illustrations. We'll start with, I want to do a series here, I want to talk about the website, and then in future episodes talk about the book, give a little background about myself, and also talk about ActionScript 3, especially as a game development platform. So, in this episode I really just want to talk about the website. W: Okay. G: It's http://flashgameu.com. W: That's right. G: It's a place for Flash game developers to come. W: To learn. I mean this is a place of learning. G: It is an institution, yes. Let's see, we've got a lot of stuff. There's forums, there's a blog and everything. In addition to being this general community, it really starts out as a place about the book, which should be out at the end of August (2007). W: That's right. It's full of tutorials. G: Yeah. W: How to make the games and the concepts behind them. G: Right. It's an ActionScript 3.0 game programming book. W: Yeah. G: From Cue and there's links on the site already to pre-order it. I think August 28th is what http://amazon.com says, when they'll have it. W: After that, you can look for it in a store near you. G: Right. W: I usually see your books in Barnes & Noble. G: Yeah. W: That's where I shop for books. G: Sure. Yeah, I know I've seen them in Barnes & Noble, Borders, independent stores. W: Anywhere. G: They're mass distributed through Pearson, which owns Cue. W: They're everywhere. G: Right. W: I imagine you'll get a load of them just for your own bookshelf. G: No, they only send you ten. W: Only ten? Okay. G: Yeah, but well ten, but you know then all of these people, you've got to give some to your parents, and then you give some to like, you know and you'll get one because you did the illustrations. W: Oh, will you sign it for me? G: Oh sure. W: And then I'll sign it for me too. G: Sure. So, it's about that time, I'm going to talk about in the next episode talk about the book and go into detail about all of the different things, how the chapters work, and what's in the book exactly. W: Okay. G: So there's stuff, so you can find the source files, for instance, for the book, obviously, the source code files, .fla's and .as files. And they'll be on the website, they already are on the website actually. W: So you can see step by step? G: Well yeah. You don't have to type in all the code yourself. W: Oh, you mean copy and paste? G: Yeah, no type. Well no, you can actually open the files in Flash 9. W: Oh, of course. G: In Flash CS3. In addition to having that stuff about the book, and also be a section for like errata and stuff like that, like when there's something I want to point out in a chapter, or add to a chapter, or correct, because these books get published quite quickly. W: There might be a better way of doing it. G: There might be a semicolon when there should be a colon. You know, you never know. W: No, no, just a better way of doing it. G: A better way of doing it. So, there's that. There's also a blog on the site. So, here's what I've got in the past, you know I've written quite a few books and I want to talk about that in episode 3 about the books I've written. So, I get a lot of email from people, you know. W: Probably a lot of questions. G: Questions about things in the book, 'How do I do this?' 'I don't understand this, what you're saying here' or whatever. And in the past I've answered them just by responding to that person. That's not very web 2.0. W: No, it's not. G: There's no community there, right? It's one to one. And then the same person might ask me the same question a year later and I don't even remember the answer let alone you know what...I have to rewrite the whole thing and look at it again. But if I actually do it as a blog, so somebody emails me a question, they can do it as a contact form on the site, just click on the "Ask Gary" thing, and then I can respond on the website and they can get the answer and then others can share in the answer as well. Because if like two or three people ask me the same question you can bet there's another 30 or 40 that maybe don't ask me the question but are looking for the answer. W: Or maybe they're too shy to ask. G: Maybe. W: They want to know but they don't want to seem stupid by asking, so they'll let someone else. G: Or maybe they just don't...sometimes it's like 'I don't have time to email and get a response, I need to figure this out now.' But if you go the website and it's like, 'Oh, the answer's right there,' you've got it. So, there's that. There's going to be articles. I'm going to write some new articles, maybe ideas I have for things that didn't quite make the book or new techniques and things like that. W: That's right. G: I'll add those to the site. W: New techniques to make better games. G: Sometimes there's a fuzzy gray line between blog post and an article. You know blog posts can grow and grow. Well I already have one up on the website about how to create a button the ActionScript 3 way, and that could almost have been an article. But, so there'll be that. There's going to be this podcast and this podcast is going to actually be more than just audio, it's going to be video and audio. So these first four episodes we are going to do are audio, just introducing things about the website and the book and myself. And then I'm actually going to be putting video tutorials there. So, I'll be doing screen captures as I talk you through a technique in ActionScript 3. So, this podcast will be a multimedia podcast that will just grow and change in different directions. W: Are you using Flash in anyway to do this podcast? G: No, no. The podcast itself, of course, has to be QuickTime. That's how podcasts work. W: Not even Flash video? G: No, you'll be able to actually view them, we'll be using http://blip.tv to do it. So, you'll be able to view them on the website as Flash video of course. So, there's that. There's also forums. There's a community forum. So, if you don't want to ask me a question, but want to ask the community a question, you can go ahead to the forums and post it. That could be really useful to get multiple opinions on different things, get quick responses, because on forums people ten to respond very quickly. W: Meet people and let people know who you are. G: Exactly. So, there's already forums there that you can post to, and you can be a part of this community, which I hope will grow here at http://flashgameu.com. W: A member of the student body. G: Yes, a member of the student body, or maybe perhaps if you've participated enough, a member of the faculty. W: That's right. G: I don't know if we can drive this metaphor really far. W: We could. G: You can join one of the student organizations. W: I'm really holding myself back, I can't tell you. G: Yeah, I know. Our football team this year is not quite, but we're hoping to draft a good quarterback. W: The Flashkins. G: I hope everything cross breeds. Like I hope maybe an "Ask Gary" question turns into a podcast or a forum post gets featured on the blog or in an article and things go back and forth. As the dean of Flash Game University I plan to help make that happen. To keep adding more and more to the site as time goes by and everything. That's really all I want to say about the website. Get things going, start posting to the forum, start asking me questions, and in our next episode I'll talk more about the book. We'll talk to you then. Bye. W: Bye.]]> Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:18:34 -0400 Podcast_1:_Introduction_id20070731-131834.html