Create a Flash image gallery using photoFlow component

When I am designing a web site or a web presentation, I always look for a nice way to show photos. No matter how many time you may spend on the design, nowadays if you don’t show your pictures in an effective way, your work will look cheap.

The hand that will help you a lot to manage this problem is photoFlow, a Flash component that will display multiple images in a vrey interesting way. The guys at Flashloaded know they have released a nice component, so they want me to review their work through this ReviewMe post.

First of all let’s see how does it look:

All your photos will be stacked in perspective behind the active photo, and the user can browse them clicking on a photo, acting on the slider or watch them cycle as in a slideshow. Read more

Create a flash game like Security – part 3

Time to do what you asked for a while: the 3rd part of the Security Flash game creation, covering the exit and some more features.

First of all you should read parts 1 and 2, then follow me and learn to create some interesting things.

Exits

Most of you asked for exits, and here they are. First of all, it’s very important to consider one thing: when you design a game with more than one level, it’s very important you do not allow the player to skip levels with the “Forward” or “Step forward one frame” or whatever you call the Flash function to advance frames.

You can’t place levels on every frame or you are making levels that will give no fun because they may be skipped by the player.

There are several ways to do this, I’ll start with the easiest to code. Let’s proceed step by step

The first thing you need to do is designing the levels, with all the objects in them: hero, cops, exit, walls, and so on.
I am designing very simple levels because level design is not the aim of this tutorial. Read more

Creation of a Ragdoll with Flash part 1: Verlet integration

Some of you in this On the horizon post requested a Ragdoll tutorial, so I started reading and experimenting until I got something good.

But it’s not easy nor intuitive.

If you want to follow me in this jouney, open flash and prepare an huge amount of aspirin, you’re going to feel a real headache.

Ok, let’s start.

The first thing we need to consider is that a ragdoll, or a simple ball, is a particle system in the space.

We’ll start with a single particle in the space: a ball.

Let’s define the attributes of a particle in the space: Read more

Creation of a game like String Avoider tutorial

A really interesting “avoidance game” that was made in those days is String Avoider. The author of this “More than 1 million views” game in Newgrounds explains it in 12 words: “Avoid colliding with walls and guide your string through each unique level”.

And that’s it. The aim of the game is guiding your string through some levels without touching the walls.

It’s very similar to the ball game I am discussing in this site, but this time the ball is controlled by the mouse and has a “tail” that responses in a very “real life” way.

Something very hard to code, you may say. It’s not that hard to reproduce a string movement in Flash, even if the built-in string class does not help us…

(laugh)

… but let’s start with the tutorial. Read more

Creation of the engine behind “Nodes” game with Flash

I always surf the web looking for great Flash games. One site where you can find good ones is Newgrounds.

The #1 Daily Feature in 06/19/2007 was a simple game called Nodes. I suggest you to play it for a couple of minutes. The idea is very simple and the engine behind is very simple too.

You have to drag some “nodes” (actually some circles”) and there is a “laser” (actually a line) that connects all nodes.

Let’s see how can we made this engine in 20 lines of code, brackets included.

The only object we need to draw is the node itsef. Read more

Creation of a platform game with Flash – step 1

November 3rd update: part 2 released.

Back from my holidays, here I come with a brand new tutorial serial.

This time I will talk about platform games.

“Platform game, or platformer, is a video game genre characterized by jumping to and from suspended platforms or over obstacles. It must be possible to control these jumps and to fall from platforms or miss jumps. The most common unifying element to these games is a jump button.”

This is the beginning of a very interesting article taken from Wikipedia.

I strongly recommend you to read it… all in all it’s a piece of our history.

I think we can develop interesting Flash platform games.

The very first step is introducing the level. I decided to code the level as a tile-based level, so you should read How to load levels in a Flash tile based game tutorial before all. Read more