It’s been a couple of years now since I wrote a Flash game. They’re fun and easy to write and don’t take much time. For me the fun is in the design and programming. The result of the process might be a playable game–but I make no promises.

I’ve taken down all my old work, since it was out of date and I barely functioned anymore. That’s the problem with programming: The platforms keep changing. The Flash CS 4 of today is a whole new ballgame and I need to get up to speed quickly so turned to my favorite Flash platform how-to author: Colin Moock. I think I have every book he has written on ActionScript that is published by O’Reilly. Since beginning of the 21st century Mr. Moock has exhibited genius when writing about Flash programming.

Moock’s current Flash programming book is Essential ActionScript 3.0 from 2007 which is old by Internet standards. But I’m a couple of years behind the times and EAS3 got me up to date quickly: Subclass Sprite and Shape not MovieClip, how to use events, how to animate, how load resources, how to redraw the stage intelligently. Nice stuff that is scattered all over Adobe’s support site. Apparently there is more Internet info on Flash and its buddies ActionScript, Flex, MXML, and Air then on the Mac OS X APIs!

One technology I want to use in my game is Moock’s Union Platform. It looks like a quick and elegant way to incorporate multiple users into my game. We talk a lot about the power of social networking and data mining but under all that talk is the power of multi-user applications. I remember years ago when I worked at Apple asking Kurt Piersol what comes next after OpenDoc (the hot technology of 1997) and he said MUDs: Multi-User Dungeons. And I said Huh? Isn’t that a buch of guys fooling around in a fantasy world online? Yep, he replied and smiled mysteriously.

12 years later I get it. Any with Moock’s help I’ll put MUD goodness into my little Flash project