Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified

First off, I loved Jobe's first book (Flash MX Game Design Demystified). It was full of concepts for motion, collision, physics, A* Path finding as well as applied Actionscript code. EXCELLENT!

So I was very eager about the additional new concepts and applied game development in this Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified -- things like what performance tweaks for Flash Player <7 will now screw up for Flash Player 7. squeezing more game power out of Flash via Java or Director, actionscript performance profiling, more benchmarking normal AS2.0 script vs hand-rolled FLASM, more multi-player projects on other platforms besides Electrotank's multiplayer server, et al.

I didn't find it here.

This felt like it was a lateral move translating AS1.0 into AS2.0.

IMHO, if you _don't_ have the original Flash Game Design Demystified book _or_ you feel you would have a hard time converting AS1.0 code/concepts into AS2.0 code, then I'd recommend that you pick this book up.

Flash is one of the easiest tools to make games nowadays. With that book on hand, this task becomes child's play. Jobe Makar has a fantastic didacticism and he still manage to write a pleasant text. It is not necessary to be an advanced programmer to understand the codes, by the way, with the visual examples, even designers pursuing the basics of Actionscript can learn the hints. After reading the book, the reader besides being qualified to project you own game, he will be much sharper in Actionscript 2.

The book begins with a short introduction on how to plan the concept of games: choosing a theme, a gender (action, adventures, cassino and so on), defining the technology, the number of players, to know the audience and calculating the hardware requirements. That part of the book is weak and the author admits that this is an annoying subject for him.

However, from the moment that he begins to speak about programming, his enthusiasm multiplies by one thousand. The guy was graduated... Read more

I found this book great to learn programming basic game physics but it is certainly one of the worst book to pick if you want to upgrade your ActionScript knowledge from 1.0 to 2.0.

The source codes are ALMOST NO DIFFERENCE from ActionScript 1.0. It is almost as if the arthur thinks that by adding variable declarations, ActionScript 1.0 becomes ActionScript 2.0.

No true Object-Oriented Programming practices (which is the true strength of ActionScript 2.0) at all. The coding style are simply ActionScript 1.0 structure (with variable declarations).

Still, this book is great to pick if you are new to game development. However, be aware that this book is NOT demonstrating how to program in ActionSctip 2.0 properly.