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Creative Tip: Learn to Make a Flash Video Game.

Flash skills are increasingly in demand, and there is a shortage of good Flash designers on the market today. Yet, despite the business opportunities, many print designers find the leap to interactive Flash design intimidating.

If that sounds familar, here is a great series of tutorials detailing how to create a simple Flash-based shooter game from scratch. The series was developed by Kongregate.com and includes free downloadable Flash source files for the game “Shoot” shown above. The tutorials walk novices through the fundamentals of using Flash as a game building tool, and explores the elements needed to pull together a simple, interactive shooter game.

While building a simple arcade game might appear a bit frivolous, the Flash skills you’ll pick up along the way are serious business.

Kongregate Flash Tutorials.

Here are links to the 9-part Kongregate Flash tutorials (or shootorials as they call them). The first part is a broad overview of Flash that also includes links to download a free 30-day demo of Flash CS3 from the Adobe website.

Link: Kongregate Labs

Tutorial 0: Introduction to Flash!
Tutorial 1: Ship Movement Via Keyboard Input
Tutorial 2: Scrolling Background
Tutorial 3: Missiles
Tutorial 4: Enemy Ships
Tutorial 5: Collision Detection
Tutorial 6: Adding Score, Health Meter, and Game Over
Tutorial 7: Adding Power Ups, Mini Bosses and Bosses
Tutorial 8: Adding Enhancements, Audio and The Kong API

My modified flash shooter game:

In preparing this tip, I felt it was important to show an example of what could be done in a limited amount of time. I downloaded the example Flash files and created my own modified version of this shooter game in about half an hour. This example shows an easy change that replaces the original graphics with new images.

Source: Over the next couple months, we’ll be throwing more Flash and Web Development tips into the mix. This week I’ll be looking for more tips at the Luminous Works’ Flash Essentials workshop (Starting this Wednesday). If you are a designer in Seattle looking to jump into Flash, I’d love to see you there!

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Creative Tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

5 Responses to “Learn to Make a Flash Video Game.”

  1. Deane Nettles Says:
    November 24th, 2008 at 9:13 pm

    I tried this, and it works in Flash Player, but doesn’t seem to work online. Any suggestions? A specific way to publish it?

  2. Craig Swanson Says:
    November 24th, 2008 at 9:55 pm

    Hi Deane. If I understand your question properly, you’ve been able to play the game’s Flash movie (SWF file) in the Flash Player — but you don’t know how to embed that file on a web page. That might make a good subject for a future tip. For now, here are links to a couple posts that address this issue:

    Nettuts: Insert Flash The Correct Way
    A List Apart: Flash Embedding Cage Match

    Hope this helps!

  3. Micah Shaak Says:
    March 25th, 2010 at 5:38 am

    I love youtube but it can have some bad points. Like with copyright and things.

  4. Christinia Leason Says:
    July 6th, 2010 at 4:58 pm

    The best baby generator is http://bit.ly/9C5rgd

  5. vb Tutorial Says:
    August 12th, 2010 at 4:19 am

    Hey i have done some work with vb and was wondering how different is java from vb?

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