Creating a SWF game for a Dummy.

Cafe Society
1

Backstory: My wife has a mild addiction to point-and-click Flash games, like the ones where you have to get out of a room or rescue your cat. Recently, I’ve been thinking about trying to program one for her for the next significant event which requires gift-giving (Valentine’s Day, or her birthday, or our anniversary, depending on how long exactly this takes).

The problem: I have absolutely no idea how this works. As in, I don’t even know whether this is something you have to draw or program or know Java for. I did try downloading some open-source Flash authoring programs, but they’re all geared towards making animations. So I can happily animate a little circle crawling across the screen, but I can’t make it interactive.

My skills: I’d like to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent guy, so I’m confident that given an appropriate program and some basic instructions, I can grope my way forward from there. (I don’t have any time constraints, so if this takes a year, it’ll be her Valentine’s gift in 2010. :)) I can draw everything I want to draw using the Powerpoint drawing tools, so complex CAD is not required. I can also program if I need to - I’m familiar with old programming languages like Fortran and Pascal, so if learning Java would help, I can do that too.

Can anyone point me in the right direction here?

Edit: Dammit, I just realized that it looks like I’m calling my wife a dummy in the thread title. :frowning: I meant to call myself a dummy, as in the “____ for Dummies” series.

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bump I’m guessing you’re going to need a good book on the subject. Might want to get a mod to kick this over to GQ or The Game Room.

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I do flash game development (swf files are published flash).

First, you will need either Adobe flash, or flex or a free development tool such as FlashDevelop. For a beginner, starting with Flash is easier, because the drawing tools are part of it, and you can easily see the timeline and objects visually, where as the Flex and FlashDevelop IDEs are strictly code based and a bit more difficult to learn. From what I have seen from other flash game developers, they also use Flash instead of Flex for 99% of game development, although Flex may be used for web forms, tables and data driven applications.

Actionscript is the language you will need to learn, Actionscript 2 and 3 are both Object Orientated languages. The code for your game will need to be written in Actionscript, and Actionscript 3 is the current version of the language. I recommend you learn Actionscript 3 and purchase Flash CS4.

There are a plethora of books on Actionscript 3 and Flash - try to find a beginners book which starts off with simple actions and animations such as button presses triggering an animation, and moves on to OOP, you will definitely need to learn OOP to create a game.

Once you know Actionscript 3 and can create objects, the first step in creating a game would be planning. Storyboard the game, plan the characters, the states of every object in the game, conditions to end the game, etc.

Another tip is to look at other people’s code and sources for games too, and see if you can change the game. Buy the source for a good game - Novel Games isn’t bad for price or quality of code ( http://www.novelgames.com/ ).

There are also books on flash game development, but they assume you have knowledge of Flash & Actionscript to start with.

Even once you have learned flash, it still takes quite a bit of time to build a decent game. Typically a new game will take myself or a coworker around a month to develop. Even a simple memory game with cards took about 4 days to develop the first time. I’ve been working in Flash for about 8 years now, and if it wasn’t for the code libraries we’ve created at our work for many games, it would take far longer, and even so we still have many libraries still in Actionscript 2 which we need to convert to Actionscript 3 in order to keep current.

Flash programming has moved from what once was a very simple somewhat useless language, to a decent OOP language much like java.

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Looks like this is going to be next year’s Valentine’s Day gift then! Thanks a lot, that explanation rocked.

I already have the game idea pretty set. Rather than being locked inside a room, the concept will be that the player is locked outside of our house and has to find a way in; the twist will be that the player is actually her teddy bear (who can fit through some narrow places a person wouldn’t be able to fit and is too short to trigger the motion sensors) and that he went outside to pick a tulip for my wife. I’ve watched her play the point-and-click games so I think this should be pretty straightforward once I have the tools.

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You are welcome. Sounds like a cute game!

For your game idea the logic wouldn’t be too hard. You could probably utilize logic from similar types of games. The programming would probably be the least time consuming portion of process if my work was developing it.

The design & animation part of making a game is usually the most work. You would probably want to design your basic objects first either in Flash, Illustrator, or Photoshop or a 3d tool compatible with Flash. Then you would need to take your storyboarded animations for each action, and any cut scenes, and then animate those. Once you have all the pieces in flash, you can then get to work programming the game.

If I had a similar project for work, the design & animation portions would take 4 to 8 weeks work from 2 or 3 designers & animators depending on the level of design a client wanted - the programming would be only about 2 or 3 weeks with one or two developers.

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If your wife is married, why does she need a Single White Female game?