TIGSource Forums

So, for starters, I'm completely self taught, worked in Java for a while, modded Minecraft a fair amount, but finally settled with Flash, mainly because Flash games are so accessible. First game went quite well, aside from the fact that it was as linear as it gets (But that's getting into design, which isn't my point, here).

I decided to make a game completely without assets, because I'm far too meticulous with art, and I'll burn out and just stop working on it. So, keeping things rather minimalistic, I set out to make a game exclusively using AS3: No timeline, no saved movieclip animations, nothing. The game is one of those "eat smaller things to get bigger" kinds of games, only with an element of competition and bullets that need to be dodged. Perhaps somewhat ambitious, but the parts I thought were ambitious turned out to be a breeze. I got the screen-wrapping mechanics and gameplay down pretty well. But then...

It's just headache after headache. I spent about a month trying to display text. Advanced anti-aliasing, double-checking the format had a font color that would be visible, I even just tried to build a movieclip that contained a textbox, that would be populated upon EnterFrame. After a month of dealing with this, the problem was stupid: I had embedded the font, but not the individual CHARACTERS of the font. I wasted a month, here.

After that, the block of my main function worked just fine, but after adding in a start button (that, on click, would run the very same block of code), it just didn't work. Nothing spawned. And after tweaking it some, the player would spawn, but you couldn't move until he died and respawned. Maybe it had something to do with the variables being declared at the start of the function, and this break between creating the object and placing it on the stage screwed something up. The player object itself shouldn't run any code until it was present, though; the only thing in its main function was to create an onEnterFrame listener. I don't even remember how I fixed this problem, but it works, now.

It just feels like, the more I work in Flash, the more random it feels. The rules I thought I knew seem to either be entirely different from what I've known, or apply only sometimes. It works so well when I rely on stage events, timelines, and pre-rendered movieclips/animations, but when it's exclusively AS3... Things feel like they just break.

Has anyone else had ridiculous problems working in Flash, or am I just not as savvy with this as I thought I was?

delete flash from your hard drive

download flashdevelop
get flashpunk or flixel or some other thing if you want a prerolled framework, or don't, i don't care.

that is how to make a game in pure as3
enjoy not worrying about 99% of idiot flash problems anymore. it's like an actual useful programming language! you can even skip fucking around with eventhandlers for most things altogether.

Yeah, Flash is pretty disastrous when you use the built-in stuff. The less of things like TextField, onEnterFrame, etc. that you can use, the better. If you write your own rendering layer and event loop (and/or use one of the frameworks mentioned by Radix above), it's reasonably workable. Still though, maybe you'd have a better time with something lower level like C and OpenGL?

I get the impression that I would love working on a lower level, but I just can't bring myself to start over with a new language. Flash is very much a pain in the ass, but it's what I know, and it's what I'm comfortable with. As much of a hassle as it is, it's a familiar hassle.

I know it wouldn't even take that long to get up to speed with C++. I would help my friend with a good handful of things, and he was taking a class that taught it. It's just getting out of my comfort zone here that I'm struggling with, as irritating as that is.

But Radix is right: I'm mainly focused on browser-based games, for the time being. I have been considering checking out Unity, as that can do both in-browser, and standalone, which I feel would be a nice segue in mediums. Correct me if I'm wrong, though. lol

Never use the built in stuff. Like previous said get flashdevelop. And write everything yourself or use existing engines.

Also if you get the hang of it it's easy to start with away3d/stage3d/starling/...
You would be making 3d games like it's nothing.

i would say it depends on what sort of games you want to make but unity is mostly excellent. i switched to unity a while back and have been using it professionally for a year and would never go back to AS3.
but if you go that way just watch out for the trap of falling into javascript/unityscript when transitioning just because it has a similar syntax to AS3. for a number of reasons--performance, easier mobile compatibility, library interoperability, and professional acceptance--C# is the real standard for unity and i wish they'd just drop support for their other idiot langs. it's only barely less easy to transition to anyway.