I felt that it was really helpful to learn how to make complex shapes out of the simple rectangle and circle we’re provided with at first in Flash.
This wasn’t too difficult of an assignment, working through chapter 2 of Rex Van Der Spuy’s Foundation Game Design With Flash. Following every instruction precisely had me finish the entire tutorial in about two hours. I probably would have finished sooner had I not needed to make some of the figures on my own- such as the cat which while wasn’t difficult technology wise, artistically it proved to be a bit more of a challenge. I did, however, appreciate how Rex Van Der Spuy went into such detail on how to create each object and sort of gave an art lesson in the process of showing how to set up a flash game. I knew that you could use shapes to make more complicated scenery, but I never quite understood how to exactly use it to its fullest.
Spuy’s tutorial talked about lower camel case- a naming function in which the first word in the name is lower case while the second, third, fourth, etc. word is capitalized. So for example, titling a word document “Trinity University” would be “trinityUniversity”. It was interesting though, since the lower camel casing really came into play for the title of the project and the layer names. Symbols and movie clips followed regular naming trends and the first letter was capitalized.
This is the final version of the first stage (except after this I had made the flowers pink) that Spuy had us work towards. It contains five instances of clouds and eight of flowers as well as one instance of the cat.
A phrase that kept coming up in the tutorial was “instance of ____” where ____ would be the name of a symbol we had been using. What that meant to me at least was that was a time when that symbol or graphic was on the stage. So there can be multiple instances of a symbol- such as the multiple clouds and the multiple flowers. Every time someone drags a graphic from the library onto the stage an instance is created as there is a moment now where that symbol is on the stage.
I wasn’t faced with difficulties, and I grew fond of the developer window. I do kind of wish some of these tutorials would include the keyboard shortcuts. I don’t necessarily like using my mouse and clicking if there’s another way to simply press a couple of buttons. Having the keyboard shortcuts could make the whole creating process much smoother. However, I am excited to start learning about the actual coding part. I do wonder, what other programming languages is Action Script like?
Twist the Fact 