Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development Reviews: The book provides several examples that progress the reader through the programming of gradually more complex games. The reader should have a basic knowledge of Flash and Actionscript, as the book brushes over beginner-level concepts. At the time, the book is fairly up to date, however there is supposedly quite a jump between Flash 8 and Flash CS3, which uses Actionscript 3.0. Nonetheless, the concepts taught in the book are universally applicable regardless of what Flash version you are using. The inclusion of a CD-ROM is an added bonus and a must with this kind of book.

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development Reviews: As a physicist, I looked at the chapter on “Physics for Games”. It’s very introductory Newtonian mechanics. Applying these in time-discrete form for moving objects in the game. Gravity is considered for vertical motion, and wind is incorporated to affect horizontal motion. Freshman level stuff. If you are developing a game where you need to seriously incorporate physics, there are entire books devoted to it, like Physics for Game Developers.
Though to be fair, the book is about learning Flash and its effects. Other chapters offer code fragments. Of necessity, these are all elementary, from a programming complexity standpoint. But they help explain how to apply Flash. The most intricate part of the book seems to be when you model a 3d world. Nice rendering examples. Doesn’t go very deeply here. Flash almost certainly has more advanced functionality.

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development Description: Written by professional game developer, this the book goes through the development process to teach programmers and Web developers how to create professional quality games. It teaches techniques for producing 3D effects that can be used with “cheat” techniques to produce good results. It describes the actual science of game development.

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development Reviews: I’ve bought this book with the purpose of starting to make flash games. Well, i couldn’t have chosen a better way. The book is very easy to read and understand and the the examples are incredible. It explores the appropriate tools to create games like the BitmapData while giving other tools an explanation too. 5 stars.

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development Reviews: Glen Rhodes’ Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development is for those who have the basics down and want to learn to produce professional-quality games. The latest enhancements to Flash are taught to programmers and web developers who want to get up and running quickly. From producing fast 3D effects to the hidden powers of Flash Pro 8, this book provides methods for understanding advanced techniques and getting up to speed: indispensable for game developers.

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development Reviews: With Flash 8 Game Development by Glen Rhodes I expected to get a step by step process on how to develop games in Flash in the form of Actionscript examples and tutorials. I didn’t expect much in terms of the other processes of game design, but was pleasantly surprised when Glen related the importance of all game components. While the book doesn’t go into as much detail with other processes as it does the code, it describes the importance of each part, and gives several extra items beyond what I expected. There is a section on sound, optimization, game physics, portable games and 3D simulation as well as a section by Chris Hildenbrand about game graphics. And you make some fun games as well as explore more complicated versions which are included on the CD that comes with the book.

You should have at least an intermediate understanding of scripting. The basics of Actionscript are not described here - if you need an introduction to Actionscript read another book first. If you are confident with your ability to pick up Actionscript you will do fine, especially given the Actionscript for games primer at the end of the book.

This book gives a lot of helpful information on how Flash works and how to make games with this software. If you’re interested in Flash 8 in particular, it details the creation of a tile-based side-scrolling game using the new bitmap class. I learned several methods of number manipulation and Actionscript methodology that will help me save time and processing power on future games. I learned ways of creating games that I hadn’t thought of before, and he broke the physics down very simply and made it easy to understand. The tutorials and examples were thorough and easy to follow, with explanations of what each part of the code was doing.

The only qualms I had were a few typos in the code, the order of presentation of some topics, a few spots where “why the math works” was not completely explained and the process of planning the code/outlining functionality wasn’t as prevalent as I would have liked.

Overall though, this book has been extremely helpful in understanding how to implement different types of games. I was making my own version of the popular “Breakout” by Atari in no time. If you are interested in making games with Flash, this book is loaded with ideas and information on how to go about creating them.

Price: $16 to $106