Then, while digging through some old files tonight, I found this gem:

The mock-poster was made by my friend Mike Smith (producer of what I firmly believe to be the greatest fishing game ever made – Creatures of the Deep) and it instantly brought a smile to my face.

Mike cast me in the role of the Sokka on the left and my friends Wade as Zuko and Benson as Aang (the Last Gamebreaker.)

Even M. Night’s travesty cannot ruin the original animated series and the pure awesomesauce it inspires.

(One day I will have to tell the story of how ‘Havadog: The Last Street Vendor’ made it into a kids game on the DS.)

Yuki 7 is a fictional movie franchise – a fictional, female version of James Bond if you will. The Yuki 7 book “Seductive Espionage” is written in a documentary style, chronicling Yuki’s rise to popularity and the careers of her creators.

The pulp style and flavor of Yuki is one of the main influences on Ray Ardent (the original back-ground mock-ups were done in a style similar to Darts) and I’ve been a huge fan of Kevin Dart’s work ever since I stumbled across his table at Comic-Con four years ago.

Absolutely brilliant and inspiring work!

Noobie Noobinson is a local Vancouver band composed of pure awesome. Stick around for the end section to see what I’m talking about.

There is a an exciting movement in the world of indie and professional film and television that completely changes the landscape for small and indie producers; cinematographers are choosing HDSLR picture cameras to shoot their productions.

Yes, you read correctly – using a picture camera to shoot movies.

The above video shows a cinematographer who shoots CSI Miami on a Canon 7D – a camera which will run you a little under $2000, with lens. A show like CSI Miami can afford almost any camera and the fact that a high budget show chooses a camera like this shows that they are more than capable of making a AAA image. And he’s not alone in Hollywood, the Canon 5D was used on the season finale of House.

The quality of image is nothing short of stunning and it makes independent film making more affordable than ever before.

Brilliant! Time to make a film.

The single greatest thing about the techno-creative world that we live in – is that the only major barrier stopping anyone from creating and sharing is action.

Have you always wanted to make a book – an insane book, 300 full color pages of the photo’s from your childhood?

What if you wanted to make a font, out of your handwriting?

Or if you wanted to make custom pieces for your action figures?

Or are you crazy enough to make your own car?

The previously closed-off world of manufacturing, distribution and creation are available to almost anyone and are becoming more open each and every day.

Do you have a dream to create something?

What’s stopping you?

A substantial amount of work was done on an updated Gatchaman movie before production was stopped.

Now, we only have this early promotional trailer, which only hints to the awesome Science Ninjutsu that we could have seen.

Now – bring on the live action Starblazers!

On Dec 1st, 2009, I hadn’t written a line of code since high school, way back in 1992. High School computer programming was done in BASIC and was taught by the drama instructor. It wasn’t exactly a solid programming foundation.

I knew that 2010 was the year I would go full time with Ninja Robot Dinosaur, making Flash games on my own. But without the ability to program, there wasn’t a lot I could do.

I needed to learn how to program Flash games – and fast.

Not only did I need to learn how to make them, I wanted to learn the right way. No mad hacks weak-sauce AS2 code that runs through some miracle of weirdness – I wanted to learn to write proper OOP code.

Dec 2009 was not going to be an easy month. I was in the middle of moving from the east coast of Canada to the west coast (Canada is really big), I was also working over-time, finaling Gundead Defense for iPhone and getting a milestone ready for a Wii game I was working on at Longtail Studios. For most people, relocating a family while crunching at work would be enough – but I thought ‘What the hell, I’m going to learn to program ActionScript 3 too.’

I set a sizable goal for myself – complete one AS3 Flash tutorial a day for 30 days.

I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

This isn’t called ‘Boot Camp’ for nothing. It isn’t easy. Expect to spend 2-5 hours per tutorial (depending on the scale of the tutorial, your own experience and debugging ability).

Learning to program is like learning to speak a new language. There will be late nights, very late nights and a few early mornings.

Step 1: Get your Software.

Download Flash and Flash Builder. Both have free trials and many tutorials are written so that you need one or the other.

If you are on a PC, you can get FlashDevelop for free. FlashDevelop is a suitable replacement for Flash Builder and many developers prefer it over Flash Builder.

Step 2: Beginner Tutorials

The AS3 101 Tutorials by Dru Kepple are a great way to get your feet wet with the fundamentals of programming.

Tutorial Tip: Sometimes, when doing tutorials, there are typos. If you have completed everything and it’s still not working, don’t be afraid to download the demo code and compare it to your code.

Each tutorial covers a fundamental aspect of programming and gives you a project to complete based on the lesson.

AS3 101 – Variables
AS3 101 – Functions
AS3 101 – Branching
AS3 101 – Arrays
AS3 101 – Loops
AS3 101 – The Display List
Optional – AS3 101 – XML

The AS3 101 Tutorials will help you get oriented with coding in Flash and will give you a basic understanding of the building blocks of programming.

Tutorials – 6

Tutorial Tip: Cutting and pasting the code doesn’t teach you anything. It’s best to type in the code yourself. Not only will this force you to read every line of code, it will help you in finding typos – a handy skill to have when it comes to debugging your own original code.

Step 3. Get your book on.

Even with all of the awesome tutorials available online for free, I still recommend working with a book or two. Online tutorials frequently have typos that can have you bashing your head against the wall (this comes from experience), while most books from reputable tech publishers are thoroughly proof-read and tested. This can save you a lot of agony.

These are the books that I found most helpful:

Get it on Amazon.ca

An easy read and a fantastic starting point for people who have no idea what they are doing when it comes to programming games. It has very little to do with ‘Design’ and really focuses on getting you up and running writing AS3 code and understanding the basics.

Tutorials – 5

Get it on Amazon.ca

A fantastic reference book, handy for looking up information. Not game focused, but very thorough, easy to read and infinitely useful.

If you order these books right away, chances are they’ll be on your doorstep after you’ve finished the AS3 101 tutorials in Step 2.

Step 4: Beginner Game Tutorials

FlashGameTuts is both a blessing and a curse.

On the plus side, you get to build the basics of some core games – breakout, shooter, platformer and tower defense. On the downside, the code isn’t the cleanest, the comments aren’t the best, there are frequent typo’s and some functions don’t have any tutorial elements.

note: Some links to source files are broken on FlashGameTuts – but the correct links can be found on the creators homepage: http://www.mrsunstudios.com/tutorials/

Flash Game Tuts – Breakout
Flash Game Tuts – Winter Bells
Flash Game Tuts – Rhythm Game
Flash Game Tuts – Vertical Shooter
Flash Game Tuts – Platfomer
Flash Game Tuts – Tower Defence

Tutorials – 6

Doing these tutorials was a huge turning point in learning to program. Not only was I finally making games, the errors in the tutorials forced me to pay more attention to what I was doing and taught me how to debug. Prepare for frustration, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

Step 5 – Let’s Meet Emanuele

Emanuele Feronato is a wonderful human being and his contributions to the Flash game scene cannot be understated. One day, I will meet him and buy him many beer.

Emanuele’s blog has many year’s worth of tutorials on making Flash games, both AS2 and AS3. He is especially adept at taking a popular game and building a prototype of that game with his own code.

Most of Emanuele’s tutorials are not thoroughly commented, but they give you a great idea of how to tackle tons of different game mechanics in Flash. The tutorials are also great for learning how to read code.

Tutorial Tip: I like to print out tutorials and read them the night before I do them. This helps me wrap my head around the whole tutorial. At the very least, I recommend reading the whole tutorial and making sure you understand the intent of the tutorial before opening Flash and building the game.

We’re going to go through 10 of Emanuele’s Tutorials. Here are the ones I did, but feel free to search the site and see if there are tutorials of games that are more interesting to you. Just make sure to do the AS3 version of the tutorial.

Make a Game Like Cirplosion
Build a Game Like Sproing
Create a Game Like Snowflakes
Chronotron Prototype
How to Use a Flash Tutorial to Make Your Own Game

Emanuel’s site is also a fantastic source for anyone looking at working with Box2D and Flash. (Box 2D is a physics engine for Flash). Here is a great starting point with Box2D:

Box 2D for Absolute Beginners Pt 1
Box 2D for Absolute Beginners Pt 2
Creation of a Flash Artillery Game with Box2D
Box2D Rope
Platform Game Basics Using Box2D

Tutorials – 10

The last group of tutorials focuses on the excellent set of game libraries from Adam Atomic called Flixel.

As I said in Flash Tactic’s post, I’m a big believer in using libraries like Flixel or Box2D to get your game up and running quickly.

Flixel for Absolute Beginners
Seifer Tim’s Flixel Tutorial
Multiple Rooms in Flixel

note: Flixel is a frequently updated library – and as such, the tutorials run the risk of being outdated. In this case, either check the Flixel forums for help (the Flixel community is nothing short of awesome) or, go through the excellent Flixel Documentation and see if you can solve the problem on your own.

While the BootCamp method is no replacement for an actual education in computer science, it did take me from a ‘White Belt’, not knowing anything about code to a ‘Yellow Belt’, able to read other people’s code and having a general idea of how to make things happen in a Flash game with code in a month.

It exposed me to multiple methods of programming and syntax so that I could figure out which ones worked best for me.

Best of luck in your Boot Camp. If you find any other additional tutorials are helpful links, please put them below in the comments and if you make it throught the boot camp, it’d be awesome if you could let me know.

Good luck!

True – this episode is filled with inside jokes, but Anthony Carboni… that dude makes me laugh.

Keep in mind that most of these tricks are ridiculous on their own, but when you mix it with another ridiculous trick – well, that’s just not right. Not you mention that you can just tell they had a blast filming this.

TERRY & AARON MIX FROM ODYSSEYBMX.COM

So what happens when you add a set of Flash libraries for that makes is even FASTER to make Flash games?

Six months ago, in Dec 2009, I had never programmed a game, ever. The closest I came was a non-functioning bowling score app I wrote in BASIC on a Mac in grade 12 (which was back in 1992…) Since then, I haven’t programmed anything. Nothing, zip, nada.

Today, Ray Ardent is a 12+ level platformer with 10 power-ups, parallax scrolling, multiple dinosaurs with their own AI (who explode into chunks when they die), cut scenes, music and fx, motion blur, pick-ups and double jumps (because double jumps are awesome!).

Not bad for a guy who’s never programmed a game before.

Flixel - FTW

There’s absolutely no way making Ray Ardent would have been possible without Flixel, the awesome Flash library from Adam Saltsman (aka:Adam Atomic) of Canabalt fame.

Without Flixel, my first game probably would have been something signifigantly smaller, simpler and I know for a fact that the code would have been a gigantic mess.

Flixel gave me a structure to follow and set the framework which allowed me to have a basic prototype up and running in a couple of days (knowing what I know now, making the original Ray Ardent Prototype would take a couple of hours, as opposed to a week).

As Ray Ardent grew in scope and complexity, the Flixel framework let me get new features up and running quickly and if I needed to build something from scratch, it was easy to extend and build upon Flixel. When problems came up, the Flixel Community was fantastic, with helpful responses and code samples.

As a bonus, I met a couple of other local developers using Flixel through the community and we’ve gotten together a couple of times to talk games, Flash and life.

Flash game libraries take the pain out of a lot of elements of game development that are boring, repetitive and time consuming, letting you focus on making the game. It is a solid foundation upon which you can build a game.

For any developer looking at Flash and making Flash games, I cannot recommend libraries enough. Yes, you’ll have to learn to use Flex/FlashDevelop and yes, you’ll have to learn some new commands, but the amount of time you save in the long run is more than worth it.

All of the libraries below have everything you need to get started:
- Great Tutorials
- Great Community
- Regular Updates
- They Are Free

Game Libraries:

Flixel
Flash Punk
Push Button Engine

Physics Library:

Box2DFlash