Video game design with Adobe Flash encompasses several core skills that are prerequisites for any game developer. These skills include Actionscript programming, along with familiarity with the Flash user interface, an understanding of game design principles, without which making playable games is an impossibility, and the artistic talent and technical ability to create attractive video game graphics.
Adobe Flash is unique as a game creation platform in featuring a comprehensive toolset for creating optimized digital game art while including a sophisticated means for animating game graphics. The learning curve for Flash is steep due to the complexity of its many features, but there are many books that teach writing Actionscript for games, such as Rex Van der Spuy's Foundation Game Design with Flash. There are even more titles that demonstrate how to animate in Flash, such as Flash Cartoon Animation: Learn from the Pros . And books such as The Game Maker's Apprentice devote several chapters to the principles of good game design.
However, at the time of writing, there is only one book that purports to concentrate exclusively on designing video game art for the Flash platform. That book is Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics by Robert Firebaugh.
Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics Shortcomings
As the title of the book would suggest, Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics is a little out of date. Reprinted in 2007, the same year Adobe released Flash 9, the age of this book is illustrated by dead links in the list of web resources for digital illustration and game art and design, including the author's own website, which no longer exists.
Other than outdated supplementary material, Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics has one unforgivable flaw: it is printed in black-and-white. A book that professes to be the definitive guide to making video game graphics in Flash does its readership a disservice by not including color in the game art examples used throughout its pages.
For example, the author explains that by taking the background image of a game, and producing a movie clip in Flash in which the color settings of the background image are gradually adjusted, reusable new content is created without increasing the file size. This is a useful technique with practical applications in game art creation. However, the point would be more impressive if the accompanying image in the book did not show 8 panels of the same background image in a uniform shade of grey.
Admittedly, all of the video game art and Flash source files are included with the book in glorious technicolor on a CD, along with a trial version of Macromedia Flash Professional 8. However, printing this book, of all books, without the use of color suggests an editorial team that did not know their subject or audience, or a cost-cutting operation on the part of the publisher. Regardless, this disappointing omission is typical of the reading experience offered by Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics.
Designing Video Game Art in Flash and Photoshop
The book features 10 chapters. The first chapter is an effective overview of the drawing tools in Flash, and despite Flash now being several years older than this book, the graphics toolset of the program has remained fairly consistent. This detailed chapter is somewhat at odds with those that follow, in that it only tells half the story, because the author's software of choice when it comes to creating game graphics turns out to be Adobe Photoshop. The reader is assumed to have both a copy, and an advanced knowledge of, Photoshop.
The next 2 chapters comprise of pre-production and production considerations. The pre-production section touches usefully on the vital game design document, and how to create a prototype of a game. However, the majority of the chapter dwells on the development team. "Producing a successful Flash game requires many team players specializing in specific roles". The author lists 13 posts he considers necessary. This is only useful as a breakdown of the skills required by a Flash game developer, all of which can be put into practise by between 1 and 3 dedicated game developers sharing the workload.
Flash Video Game Art Design and Development
In successive chapters, the author demonstrates how the game graphics were created for a variety of successful Flash games produced by game developer Electrotank. Using the drawing tools in Flash, and the filter effects of Photoshop, the production process for creating animated video game art is demonstrated for a variety of game genres. These include:
- Puzzle games Fruit Smash and Mah Jong Jade Expedition.
- Real-time multiplayer games Bugball and Go Bananas.
- Scrolling shooter game Digikid.
- 3D isometric game Mini Golf Gold.
- Platform game Deep Dive.
While each example is demonstrated in some detail, and is supplemented by monochrome images representing the color graphics being created, the examples lean more towards Photoshop than Flash, and those few graphics that do concentrate on Flash drawing are so basic that there is greater detail given in the documentation that ships with the program.
Furthermore, concerning creating 3D video game graphics, the author merely demonstrates their importation into Flash, not the creation of the 3D art itself. For this, the reader must "consult the 3D software documentation", assuming the reader has a copy of the expensive 3D Studio Max program to consult.
Look Elsewhere for Making Video Game Art
That Electrotank, whose Flash games are showcased in this book, employ skilled game artists is not in dispute. However, translating that artistic and technical skill into Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics does not appear to have been as successful as their Flash games have been.
Outdated and poorly presented, this book might offer some inspiration to the casual browser. But the game designer serious about developing casual games with superior art created exclusively in Flash would be better looking elsewhere for instruction, such as with the free Flash illustration videos by CartoonSmart.
Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics by Robert Firebaugh
Available from Charles River Media
350 Pages, Soft Cover
Originally Published September 2006
Cover Design by Tyler Creative
ISBN 1-5845-0483-8
Nicolas McGregor - Nicolas McGregor studied English at Stirling University, and later, Information Technology. Amongst his interests are: independent ...
