Posts Tagged ‘emanuele feronato’

• By Rich

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  books, emanuele feronato

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  Book Reviews

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  Flash Game Development by Example Book Review

  25th May 2011

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  Emanuele Feronato is a familiar name to anyone who’s ever searched for something to do with Flash game development on Google. The tutorials he publishes on his blog are as ubiquitous as the platform itself. They provide nuggets of code usually meaty enough to accomplish the task at hand. Be it creating a Match-3 knock-off, a landscape generator or showcasing a new library. The complexity never really leaves the shallow end of the pool, which I suspect is the main reason beginners flock to his site.

  But with a book you leave the safety zone of “this is just enough” behind. When people have put down good money, the expectation levels are rightly higher. So it was with intrigue that I started reading Flash Game Development by Example. It covers the creation of 9 games across 300+ pages, which is an average of 30 pages each. Probably 28 more than he uses on his web site 🙂 I was curious what this extra space would provide.

  The first game we make is Concentration or “Pairs”, the classic card game. Everything is done in the Flash IDE at a size of 550 x 400, and it leads you step-by-step through creating an FLA, creating your Main.as, entering a trace statement to prove it compiles and then explaining what imports and packages are. The explanation for the Sprite package for example is “This class allows us to display graphics”. That’s true, and while I’m not expecting a detailed explanation at this level I did expect a little more. Emanuele then starts creating the game, kicking off with a loop to make an Array of 20 tiles. Every single line of code is explained – rapidly jumping through AS3 syntax as it goes. It’s as if the single line of source “for (var i:uint=0; i<NUMBER_OF_TILES; i++)” caused Emanuele to stop and realise he had better explain what a uint, a constant and a for loop is before he can carry on.

  The problem with this approach is you forget what it was you were building as you try to deal with a rapid onslaught of new information. And it doesn’t let-up. By page 19 the game is dealing with adding a Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm. A quick trip back to the Flash IDE creates some tiles, and more code starts displaying them and adding event listeners for clicks. By page 31 you’re deep in the realm of indexOf Array checks, event.currentTarget magic value access and modulo operations. Nearly every line of code is still being explained but the pace is borderline frantic. And just like that, it ends. The game is complete, a few homework assignments are given to you and we’re on to Chapter 2.

  Chapter 2 is about building Minesweeper. So multi-dimensional arrays and iterative scanning for mines. It also contains probably my favourite quote in the whole book:

  “Just think about a function like a mad witch. You give her some strange stuff such as bat wings and lizard tails, and after making something mysterious she gives you a potion to turn someone into a frog. The great thing is once you’ve made your functions (witch) you don’t need to know how they do the magic anymore.”

  🙂

  However this is a bit of code taken from the function it teaches you to make:
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