Best way to start making this game?

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to flash with years of experience in VB6 and VB.NET programming. But I need to make a very simple game and need to know two things - is there a cheap or free flash program I can do this in? And the best way to start it? I do have a very old copy of Flash MX I believe.

I know it sounds partially violent but what I want to have is two character's heads hand drawn by me. And I want to animate the mouth of one of them talking - just movement, nothing specific. And the other main event I need done is when a key is pressed by the user, I want the woman to slap the man's head and make a slap sound. Thats all.

As far as animation goes in flash, this does not need to be smooth or flicker-free graphics/animation. It can be really crappy which is what I am aiming for. I know this is completely wrong on how to do it but what I want to do is start out by showing one image but having his mouth move a little. Maybe flip between two images with changes in his mouth. Then when the user presses a button, it will animate through a few images of the whole screen redrawn showing her hand coming up, hitting him and going back down. Can I just load ne wimages for the whole screen showing this change in each one? And after, instead of going back to the first screen, now start at another one which shows his face more red from the slap?

I know any good flash game would have movable image objects to do this but for a really corny one, can I just redraw the whole screen image with these changes? Shouldn't this be easy by just detecting the key press and then animate through the frames like in a GIF based on a time interval?

Thanks!!

If you can afford to spend some time for this, I would suggest downloading the free FlexSDK ( http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/dis...ownload+Flex+4 ) and FlashDevelop ( http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs...itle=Main_Page ), so that you can use the latest technology from flash to create your game......

Anyway, the game can be made really easily, if you use the flash timeline you can do something like:

Code:

---

stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN,evt_kdown,false,0,true);

private function evt_kdown(e:KeyboardEvent)
{
  if(e.keyCode==32) //if space is pressed
  {
      woman_mc.play();
      mac_mc.play();
      snd_slap.play();
  }

}

---

This isn't obviously the full code, but should give you an idea of the basics. You can build this entirely in code too......but since you are new, I would suggest a free framework, flixel ( http://flixel.org) , to help you get started in a coding-only project.

Thanks, I looked at the pages and will download and install them tonight. In the code you showed you have woman_mc.play - is that an animation that is added to the project already and it is just being called to play it?

yeah, it's supposed to be an animated flash movieclip! You can create a simple swf in your flashMX and then embed it as movieclip in flashdevelop. Or if you don't mind learning, you can draw the animation states in a sprite-sheet and use the methods in flixel to import it and play the animation(though, that way the above code will have to be re-written from scratch). If you don't want to learn flixel and still want to use spritesheets, there are many tutorials out there on it, but to be specific, look for "bitmapData and scrollRect" tutorial for as3.

Flixel ? Sprite sheets ? Come on man, it's two movieclips on the stage with a simple button handler event to trigger a gotoAndPlay().

Why over complicate things ? The last thing Tybeeware needs is to be screwing around with FD and the Flex SDK when this task can be done in the IDE ( MX is more than capable ) using as1.

Squize.

well yeh, but tybeeware said he has vb.net "programming" experience, and not much flash knowledge, so I thought he might feel more comfortable in a programming environment like FD, And also he said he is looking for a free alternative. Besides flashMX might be more than enough for this one project, but knowledge of the flexSDK will benefit him in future. And flixel isn't that hard to get started with.....


Anyway, I also gave the timeline version of the code as a hint, so I don't think it matters much.