Make Games First?

Ok I finally got the Adobe Flash but can I make games when I’am a complete noob? I know I need to learn actionscript which i’m looking foward to. But If I know decent actionscript is it possible to make a decent game on my first try?

yes, just use tutorials…a good game to make first would be a mouse avoider…on newgrounds theres some good tutorials.

Yeah, start simple is the key. Do a snake game if you want to learn about keyboard input. To a simple Galaga style game for collisions and shooting type stuff. Check around the internets for tutorials, and stick to actionscript 2.0 until you have a pretty good grip on the programming side.

It’s certainly possible to make a game on your first try.

But two things to keep in mind:

1) Your first few games will probably either take much longer then they would were you more experienced, or they won’t get done at all. So start small.

2) Your first game PROBABLY won’t be anything more then average. It might, but it probaably won’t. So don’t aim very high.

First, do a mouse avoider. Second, do some snake game. Third, you’re on the money!

Do you know any other programming language? If not, I think that it would be difficult (not impossible) to make a great game the first time around. The first few games, you should focus more about learning the programming concepts: AS is probably not the best language to learn if it’s your first — you can get away with grabbing snippets of code here and there even if you don’t understand it, but that probably would not equate to a good, unique, non-buggy, game.

My ultimate suggestion is: don’t be discouraged. If you think it’s hard… it’s because it is. I know PHP, Perl, C, C++, VB.NET, JavaScript, along with AS and I use most of those regularly as a Web Developer… I still believe AS is one of the harder languages I had to learn (it’s not as intuitive as some language like Ruby).

So you work like hundreds of hours on your first game, and it’s buggy and still doesn’t work and you just want to uninstall Flash — if you keep at it, I assure you that you’re upcoming games will be amazing because you’re one of the few that decided to stick with it.

My two cents.

Like being a mouse avoider will you still allow me to submit it to kongregate?

I don’t think you need to get approval before you upload your game — you can certainly upload it, but to reach the popularity of games like DTD 1.5 with like over 300,000 gameplays on Kongregate, it must be a really good game that people want to play.

Don’t start with a snake game… start with a mouse avoider. – mouse input, variables, text

Then change it into a keyboard based avoider. – kb input

And then make it duplicate the object so you must avoid multiple of them. – movieclip duplication

And then you should be fine with anything.

When I knew most of the AS Language, I saw Javascript and they’re pretty much the same. Object-Oriented Programming rules!