Flash As Game Development Tool
Traditional game developers sometimes try to fight Flash’s nature when they first make the transition, but often the best way to get the desired result out of Flash is to play to its strengths. Take, for example, a character in a game you want to animate depending on its state (idle, running, jumping, etc.). An artist has given you image sequences of each of these states. The character’s state may be controlled by user input with the mouse or keyboard, or by AI. A conventional approach to this problem would be to write a script that updates the character with the correct frame of animation based on what the game is telling it to do. However, this requires the script to know how many animations there are, how many frames each animation is, and whether the animations loop or only play once. It also has to add the new image to the Stage and remove the old one. In addition, it adds overhead to any other code running in the game, which can become troublesome if you have many characters on-screen at once. Flash made possible the whole new category of games, like tower defense games, match 3 games, dressup games, girl games…
This is a perfect example of an area where Flash shines over other game development tools. Because the environment is built around the concept of timelines and animation, you have a tremendous amount of flexibility when it comes to controlling player states, game states, or any other objects in your game that are more than a still image.
Another area where Flash has flourished is in website development. I started using it at an ad agency, building branded websites for clients. Flash includes many features for working on the web, including streaming support for content, the ability to load data from a variety of external sources, and, of course, its browser-based player that places Flash content alongside anything else in HTML. Much like games, websites tend to be experiential, but they are also usually meant to be informative. When they are intended purely for entertainment they can resemble a game on many levels, short of a score or accomplishment-based outcome. In fact, because of the similarities in how each type of content is produced, the line between Flash websites and games nested inside them has become very blurred. Possibly Flash’s strongest use out of the box is as an animation application. Much like post-production programs (like Adobe After Effects) or multimedia authoring tools (like Adobe Director), Flash is centered around the concept of a timeline. By default, events occur in a linear order, and objects on the timeline can have timelines nested within them. This allows for very complex animations to be built relatively quickly.
Consider for a moment an animation of a character walking. In order to look convincing, all the character’s appendages would have to be separated and animated independently. Additionally, they must move across the Stage so the character is not just walking in place. To move all the parts at the right speed would be very cumbersome and time consuming. Instead, with nested timelines, the walking sequence can be contained inside a clip that is moved at a different rate across the Stage. The trick is in knowing what Flash does best and where you need to alter its behavior.
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