Introduction

Hello random reader.

My name is Jonathan and I am currently [5-20-08] nearing the end of development for my first full featured commercial video game. When I was going to school as a programmer I thought of video game development as unattainable. It was the larger than life harder than hard to break into career that I wasn't even going to try for. While that appeared to be the case in 2002 now it is not. Casual games have become a real money maker and now I'm actually a small part of that.

The game I have developed was in flash using Actionscript 3.0. It is a "flying" game that simulates 3d movement through space using 2d imagery. This technique has been used before in flash and it also dates back a long way in arcade and console gaming. It is the same technique used in Sega's Afterburner and Space Harrier games from the late eighties.

I plan to use this blog (something I never thought I would do) to walk through the things I learned and to offer some of the helper tools I built to the public. These include a class to manage loading in external images in mass and displaying a loading status, a class to manage sounds in a thread pool so that, for example, all sound could be stopped and then resumed as when a player pauses the game, and classes to handle the creation and management of a limited 3d environment. More than anything I hope to give someone a good resource for understanding the peculiarities of Actionscript based game development and a way to get past all the little snags that you're bound to hit when entering that world.