Friends of ED have, as usual, assembled a star team of authors to contribute to Flash Games Studio, and in the process have created yet another Flash classic.
      There is a breadth and depth to this book that I have not seen in any of the other locally-available alternatives on building games in Flash. Bear in mind though that I am no gamer nor a games creator, but I do know a well-written book when I see one. And the more time I spend with using and reading about ActionScript, the more, I believe, I can tell when an author knows what they are doing with it.
      The author list is impressive, and their names may be familiar to habitués of online Flash forums—Thomas Poeser, Justin Everett-Church, Kevin Sutherland, the ever-reliable Sham Bhangal, and more.

Intelligence, Artificial And Otherwise.
There is a lot of ActionScript in Flash 5 Games Studio. That’s as it should be—building games is a programming-heavy exercise.
      Designing and building Flash games has been touched on in other Friends of ED books, particularly those on the subject of ActionScript. It is Flash Games Studio that really digs deep into how and why games programmers do the things they do, and it makes for fascinating reading.

More Than Meets The Eye, Or Joystick.
My favourite chapter is Understanding Artificial Intelligence, and it is not so much because I want to make intelligent characters for games as the fact that I believe computer gaming has a great deal to teach us about user-centered design.
      Games-players can become immersed in wholly artificial experiences for hours on end. Digital sounds, images and motion are orchestrated so effectively by the game’s creators that they become miniature universes for their users. There is a lesson in that, for designers of other kinds of web projects.
      Far too many websites, especially the corporate ones, suffer from a kind of well-meaning but bland institutional mediocrity. The web is not some kind of market hall for grim economic transactions. There should always be a sense of playfulness online. There is room enough for joylessness in our daily work.
      Understanding A.I. shows us how to build a virtual pet using fuzzy logic. I have not seen much logic crisp or otherwise in the planning of most corporate web sites, so even the fuzzy kind is a vast improvement.

Also Good.
Flash Games Studio contains 3 chapters about 3D in its various manifestations. It is the little things that counted for me in these chapters—stimulation into imagining how to use 3D in a manner that is not gimmicky but adds some dimension into an otherwise flat world onscreen.
      Flash games designers and programmers, experienced or otherwise, will get an immense amount of value out of Flash Games Studio. Non-games people should also take a serious look at it, with a view to applying some of the principles of games design to projects that are not overtly about gaming in any way.

The Book:

• Title: Flash Games Studio
• Author: Sham Bhangal, et al
• Publisher: Friends of ED
• Publication Year: 2001
• Pages: 724
• Illustrations: Monochrome
• ISBN: 1903450675
• Rating: 4.5

• Introduction to Gaming
• Optimizing Graphics for Games
• Flash’s Built-in Objects
• Event Handling
• Turn-Based Games and Advanced Logic
• Structured Real-Time Programming
• Turn
• Designing a Platform Game Construction Kit
• Interactive Sound
• Music in Games
• Understanding Artificial Intelligence
• The Third Dimension
• Real 3D
• Ultimate 3D
• Mech Attack
• Online Data Multiplayer Applications
• Director for Flash User