Tag Archives: Other

POLL: What should my next tutorials cover?

Hey everyone, I know I haven’t personally written a tutorial in awhile, but I’m planning on writing a few in the upcoming months. I want to make sure I cover the material that you would all most appreciate. This is your chance to let me know what you want to learn.

If what you really want to learn isn’t on this list, or if you want to vote for multiple answers, just leave me a comment.

Personally I’m leaning towards the top-down shooter, because I’m getting a bit bored of the other series — but if you all vote I promise to go with the winner.

Thanks for your input,

Ben

 

PS. I’m still looking for guest writers. If you’re interested in giving back to the community by writing a tutorial, email me at as3gametuts@gmail.com

PSS. If you want to be more involved in the AS3GameTuts community, join the forum, here: http://as3gametuts.forumatic.com

My Story — Our Site

Hi everyone. Thanks for sticking with the site and forum, despite my lack of activity.

I think you deserve a bit of an explanation about my recent disappearance.

I started programming when I was 13, using MIT’s revolutionary software, Scratch. Five years later, thanks to an amazing online community of teachers and tutorials, I’ve worked on many Flash games, I’m a professional iPhone/iPad app developer, and I’m currently sitting in an MIT dorm, getting ready for my freshman year to begin! It’s been quite the ride of teaching and learning to program over these 5 years!

Needless to say, the transition to college is a big one, and my free time has dwindled. I expect my workload to be intense, and therefore I can’t commit to being very present on the site and forum in the near future.

I wish I could say this is the end of my hiatus, but I can assure you that I haven’t abandoned AS3GameTuts.

I’ll try to check in every once in a while, and keep the site up-to-date. If you want to contribute to the site in any way during my absence, feel free to reply here, send me an email at as3gametuts@gmail.com, or send me a message on the forum. Perhaps you’d like to write a guest-post tutorial, or you’ve assembled a group of links, tips, news, etc that would be helpful to post on the site. Honestly, I’m not making any money off of the site (I’m actually losing a few dollars per year for the domain name). The site is my way to “pay it forward” to a community that has given so much to me. If you’d like to contribute to this effort as well, let me know (don’t worry, I’ll give you credit/rights/etc to any content you contribute).

And hopefully after a little while I’ll settle into a good rhythm and perhaps have the time to start writing full-length tutorials again!

Cheers,
Ben

News! Birthday, domain name, stats, and more!

This is the final month of this site’s first year. That’s right, next month, on March 5, AS3GameTuts is turning 1! (Feel free to wish us a happy birthday!)

Thanks to all of your amazing support over the past year. With little advertising at all, this site has been viewed over ten thousand times since its creation, mostly during the past few months.

Check out the graph of the site views over the past year,with February only 6 days under way.

If you’ve visited this site before, you would have seen the URL listed as as3gametuts.wordpress.com.

But check it out — we now have a brand new domain name: AS3GameTuts.com

You can think of this as marking the graduation out of the “beta” version of the site :-)

The first year has been great, with 3 tutorial series and a couple of extra posts thrown in for fun. But the next year will be much, much greater for AS3 Game Tuts. Stay tuned for even more tutorials, including the conclusion to the platformer, a turn-based RPG, an overhead shooter, an overhead adventure (think classic Legend of Zelda), as well as a plethora of mini lessons, extra tips, and maybe even some guest posts. Stay tuned. (I’ll try to keep to this promise… if I’m falling behind, feel free to give me a gentle reminder.)

The goal of this site is to help you all learn to make the games you’ve dreamed of creating. Hopefully my choice of tutorials which I plan to write accomplishes this, but if there is anything you would like to know, I am completely open to suggestions and requests.

So please, if there is anything you wish for me to write about, or even if you just have a general comment or suggestion about the site, fill out the following form. Thanks!

Resources: Beginner Tutorials

If you’re looking for some great beginner tutorials besides AS3GameTuts’s Getting Started with AS3, or Pong, here is a list of some of my favorites:

Highly Recommended:

The Avoider Game Tutorial – Michael James Williams

This is basically the pinnacle of the flash gaming tutorials for beginners. Michael J Williams takes you through 12 easy-to-follow steps to make an Avoider game complete with many features. After you complete this you will feel very confident with the basics of AS3.

Other Great Tutorials:

How to Create a Brick Breaker Game in AS3 – Flash Game Tuts

This tutorial is from the website that gave me the inspiration for AS3 Game Tuts.  It is a very thorough tutorial on creating a Breakout style game in AS3. This site has many other helpful tutorials for all sorts of game styles.

AS3 101 – ActiveTuts+

So you want to figure out actionscript 3? This is the place to do it. It doesn’t teach you to make any specific games, but if you start from the beginning and read all the way to the end, you will be an actionscript pro.

Flash ball game creation tutorial – Emanuele Feronato

This is a quick tutorial that shows how to move a ball around using the arrow keys. Useful.

Number guessing game in AS3 – iLike2Flash

Create a simple higher-or-lower guessing game in Flash AS3

Kongregate AS3 Shootorials:

This 8 part tutorial series from the Kongregate will teach you to create a horizontal space shooter flash game in AS3. You can see what the result looks like by clicking here.

The AS3 tutorials don’t link to one-another, so bookmark this page if you need to and use this list of links to find each section.

Kongregate AS3 Shootorials – Part 1

Kongregate AS3 Shootorials – Part 2

Kongregate AS3 Shootorials – Part 3

Kongregate AS3 Shootorials – Part 4

Kongregate AS3 Shootorials – Part 5

Kongregate AS3 Shootorials – Part 6

Kongregate AS3 Shootorials – Part 7

Kongregate AS3 Shootorials – Part 8

If you know of any great beginner tutorials that I left out, please let me know in the comments so I can update the list.

And if you think you’re beyond the very basics, you might want to give my Platformer tutorials a try.

Thanks!

10 Tips I Wish I Knew When I Started Programming

When you first start learning to program, there are a bunch of easy mistakes that make you waste time or lose motivation. Here is a list of my Top Ten Tips for new game programmers, which might save you a lot of time and trouble:

1. Start small

  • One of the all-time biggest mistakes for new programmers is to choose a massive project to be their first game (like a complete RPG)
  • I know it’s sometimes hard to hold yourself back, but a lot of people (myself included) have wasted time by trying to take on too big of a project in the beginning
  • Start with small, simple games, and work your way up to the big league once you know what you are doing

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