Background

Primarily a J2EE designer/architect. 15 years of development experience. Probably took me about 100-150 hours to learn Flash IDE, ActionScript, and how to setup a decent development environment.

Tools

• Flash 7 IDE
• TextMate - good OS X editor – ActionScript development support
• Subversion – local source control (rollbacks are important)
• Audacity
• MTASC – open source ActionScript compiler

Sound Design

• Free editing software – Audacity
  • EQ is best used to cut frequencies – not enhance
  • Consider the whole sound field
• Balancing the sounds – Sound class
• Many samples on the internet
  • Think about making your own
  • Use EQ, effects, and other editing to make the sound unique/avoid lawsuits

Lessons Learned

• Do not use mp3s as sound files – especially for looping
  • mp3s are encoded as blocks – last block is silence filled
  • Flash compresses sound on import so use raw files
• Don't do other people's jobs
  • Working on physics engine just used a cheap dummy graphic that could be replaced with professional graphics later
  • Spent time working on sounds that were replaced by design team. Would have been better to make a list of required sounds and a delivery date.
• Get xml property config up and running first.
  • Make as much as possible in a game configurable
• Much of the tuning of a game is done by hand/feel
• Easier to tweak one aspect separately
• Allows non-tech folks to do final tweaking
• Relearn your trigonometry and basic physics
  • Math actually useful
  • Need to also learn "good enough" approximations of physics
• Figure out how to separate the project by developers and designers.
  • Make it easy for designer to work on graphics independent of game but also allow them to test the game.
  • We failed a bit here
• Externalize as much code as possible into files
  • Version control more effective
  • Easier to split up and merge changes
  • Can use external compiler to check code – compiling in Flash IDE is slow
• Keep team small as possible
  • Developers had to email fat Flash.fla file
• Only worked because we worked in shifts
• Get end-to-end setup ASAP
  • We had integration issues the day of deadline
  • Sticky session not turned on
• Many expected tools/libraries have to be invented or found
  • Logging, Config, Testing
• Static methods are useful
  • Singleton pattern
  • Would consider doing a mini dependency-injection framework for AS to get away from singletons. Uber-factory.
• Separate util/framework classes from UI classes
• When in Rome...
  • Prefer unit tests over static typing
  • Try not to do things the Java way

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