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!