Customer Reviews
Great for getting into AS3 games - By: P. B. Larsen, 30 Mar 2008 
I have read G.R.'s old Director book & it helped me a lot then, so with no thought I put up a pre-order on this book. I knew if I was going to have a chance to learn AS3 as an old Lingo-dude, this was the time.
It arrived & I could see it was writtenin the exact same way as the old Lingo book. Though its about AS3.
If you are a designer or no top programmer, then this book is great, it will get you into AS3 fast!, & then you can always buy one of the other university books like "Advanced Actionscript 3 with Design Patterns".
But start with this. Its writtenin a great language & show the stuff that gets you there. Its not just about games, but a way of making AS3, which you will take with you into the other projects you make.
Thumbs up for Gary, also visit his book related website: http://www.flashgameu.com/
He writes tutorials & answer questions there.
Okay Book - By: Mr. E. P. Faherty, 14 Feb 2008 
This book contains some nice effects & has a good way of describing game physics.
The code is not object orientated & I would suggest other books to supplement this if you are new to AS3.
I get the feeling that the author has not adapted from AS1/AS2 & is not experiencedin general computing. There are several bad practicesin this book. These practices are the ones that stop AS & flash from being taken seriously.
An AS3 primer in sheeps clothing? - By: LaunchCode, 05 Nov 2007 Although I have years of game programming experience, I had absolutely no AS3 experience at all - so I figured this book would be a good way to show me game techniquesin AS3.
It starts off with a nice & easy introduction to AS3, covering the basics such as classes, packages, imports & splitting your scripts up. It then goes through a variety of "Game Elements" such as timers, keyboard & mouse interaction, collision & external data. This all makes sense & is well written, if a little sparse on the detailsin places. For example the first few chapters explain how the book is going to pretty much place the entire games into a single class, yet the "Game Element" scripts are written as pure functions meant to be dropped onto the timeline - I'd have preferred to see them as classes you could run stand-alone, but it's a minor detail.
Chapter 3 starts with the games proper, kicking off with a 'Matching Pairs of Cards' game. Gary quickly gets the basic game up & running, but it is nice that he didn't leave it here - instead he enhances the game with a timer, card reveal animation, scoring & sound effects. This is a good technique & one I appreciated.
Chapter 4 moved onto Memory games (think Simple Simon, Master Mind, etc) which seemed to serve more as a vessel for explaining how arrays work than a fully fledged game.
Chapter 5 is really about Time Based animation (vs. event/frame based). This is demonstrated via a simple shoot-em-up & a Breakout game. Both are extremely basic, which doesn't matter so much as they serve their purpose, but it would have been nice to see the Breakout game enhanced especially.
Chapter 6 is about bitmaps & manipulating them (demonstrated via a Sliding Puzzle & Jigsaw games). The Jigsaw game was disappointingin that it didn't cover how to make the pieces look like jigsaw pieces. But the bare essentials are there.
Chapter 7 introduces rotation & the math involved. It takes the Air Raid game from earlier & enhances it slightly, & also creates a basic Asteroids clone. Everything is done via pretty basic trig (sin/cos).
Chapter 8 shows off a "re-usable class" that creates a point burst effect. This is a good idea & to be honest should have been used more through-out the book (the idea, not the point-burst). This chapter also covers making a Bejewled style game - which I was pleased to see, because although simple on the surface there are a lot of logic steps involved, which are all covered. A few game modifications are suggested at the end, but not gone into.
Chapter 9 covers Word Games, which is pretty much a tutorial on using Strings & Text Fields. The resulting Hangman & Word Search games are somewhat lackingin the 'fun' factor, but useful primers all the same.
Chapter 10 is the 'Quiz Game' part - & it covers multiple choice quizes, extending them out to include pictures & a 'deluxe quiz' mode. The quiz data is all suckedin from an XML file, so a large portion of the chapter goes towards covering this.
Chapter 11 is a Platform Game. You control a character, you run & jump, collect a couple of items, land on a few baddies heads & try to find the exit. It's a very simple game & this is a tiny chapter overallin the book - which I found surprising given that platform games are generally extremely complex when done properly. This isn't really done properly & reads like filler to me. The levels are built entirely within the Flash IDE, block by block. Each block is then 'read' by the AS so a rudimentary collision system can be constructed. The hero & baddies are inserted & that's pretty much it. The jumping of the hero is particularly bad, the collision is also a little suspect. I imagine a younger wannabe Flash game developer would love to create a Flash Mario affair, but sadly this goes about itin entirely the wrong way. You get a platform game at the end of the chapter, sure, but it isn't a very good one.
The final Chapter covers two racing games. Both are overhead, one similar to Super Sprint, the other like the original GTA, but with a trash collector. The end result is quite fun, but I do still worry about the scalability of the approaches usedin building each game.
Overall if you are either brand new to game development, or AS3 (or both!) then this book is a good starting place. It certainly won't answer all of your questions, & some of the techniques offered are definitely lackingin scalability - but you will have fun following the steps & making the games.
The downside is that if you have any game dev experience (even on just a casual basis) then the majority of the 'core game logic' offered here will have been relatively obvious to you anyway, & only the AS3 & Flash specific oddities will be relevant. You won't learn any advanced game making tricks - none of the gamesin the book ever have more than a handful of sprites moving at once. So if you wanted to re-create Geometry Wars for example you will probably run into serious CPU issues *fast* because you haven't been taught how to optimise Flash based games at all. This is most evidentin the platform game chapter.
The Math offered is very rudimentary & you'll get only the most basic of results from it. I strongly recommend the Keith Peters book "Foundation AS3 Animation" - that deals with animationin much more detail, covering everything from decent collision to re-bound effects, gravity, rotation, intersection & real-world physics.
However AS3 Game Programming University is a good book. It's enjoyable to read, the source code is available online & Gary runs an interesting blog worth adding to your feed reader. I still can't help but feeling that the book serves more as a "Learn basic AS3 via some simple games", than a real game development bookin its own right.
