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The first minute is all intro, so either hang on in there or skip ahead – it’s well worth it.

Taken from The National‘s fifth album High Violet.

In week 8 of the ActionScript intro we move on to collision detection and using hitTestObject to find out if two objects overlap, and what we should do about it if they have!

In this bundle I’ve combined both Week 8 Lessons 1 and 2 into a single document and provided the full source code to the exercises, but it’s recommended that you work through it yourself instead of just copying and pasting the code. I know typing in code isn’t fun, but by typing it rather than pasting it you get a far better idea of how everything fits together and you’re forced to think about the code and what it’s doing a lot more.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to build a simple Breakout/Arkanoid clone like this:

I’m not saying that it’s a fun game, but it’s starting to shape up – we’ve got functions, graphics, input and some basic collision detection. These are the tools you need to be able to write a proper game! We’re making progress! =D

Download link: An Introduction to ActionScript 3.0 – Week 8 (both lessons combined)
Audience: Beginners who know a little about variables, functions, objects and how to perform some basic programming math. You’re going to have to focus for this one – but you can do it!
Format: PDF
Content License: The document, its contents and the provided source code are released under a creative commons non-commercial attribution share-alike 3.0 license by me (r3dux) and comes with no guarantee of correctness, fitness for purpose or anything of the sort. The background was sourced randomly from the Internet last year and I’d be happy to add a correct attribution or remove it if it’s yours.

I’ve tarted up the breakout game above (from its more basic state as included in the download pack) to wait for a mouse click before starting, reset on click, and also reset when you lose the ball or break all the blocks, plus I’ve added a change in ball speed dependent on whether the ball hits the left or right side of the bat. The updated flash file can be found here – however, be warned that ALL THE CODE is in the same file, and it’s just bodged together to keep things as simple as possible while actually doing something vaguely useful. What I’m saying is – don’t write your stuff this way. When you write your awesome code use classes and methods and public/private access restrictions and do things properly! Also, faking mouse events is a sure sign of badly designed code, okay? I just used it to keep the code size down.

Honest

Week 7 of the ActionScript intro yet again carries on with the theme of coding rather than just talking about coding and yet again comes as a document instead of slides. All the text output we’ve been using so far has been to the debug console, which a.) is only useful for debugging, b.) is only visible in a web browser to people using the debug version of the flash plugin and c.) looks rubbish. So to remedy this, we’ll be looking at TextFields and TextFormats, and how we can use them to display text of any size, colour, font, orientation etc, and even generate random text formats.

In this bundle I’ve combined both Week 7 Lessons 1 and 2 into a single document and provided the full source code to the exercises, but it’s recommended that you work through it yourself instead of just copying and pasting the code, ya dig?

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to build a font clock like this, not that you’d particularly want to (because this melon is for display purposes only =P) – but you get the gist:

That’s got to just about cover most of the things you might want to do with text (i.e. choose a font, a colour, a size, a location, and an orientation).

Download link: An Introduction to ActionScript 3.0 – Week 7 (both lessons combined)
Audience: Beginners who know a little about variables, functions, objects and how to perform some basic programming math.
Format: PDF
Content License: The document, its contents and the provided source code is released under a creative commons non-commercial attribution share-alike 3.0 license by me (r3dux) and comes with no guarantee of correctness, fitness for purpose or anything of the sort. The Adobe Quickstart PDF was printed from content created and owned by the Adobe Corporation and the subway font used in the font-embedding example was created by Johan Waldenstrom (great font, Johan!).

Comments & feedback always welcome.

I’ve had a musical dumpster diving kinda thing going on since I was a kid where I’ll go into record shops and buy a dozen of their cheapest/on-special/reduced-to-clear albums by bands I’ve never heard based on two vital criteria:

1. The band name – the quirkier the better, and
2. The album cover art – the cooler the better.

This is the perfect example of judging a book by its cover, and I’m fine with that, because sometimes I’ll end up with some awesome music I’d never have came across if I’d played it safe. Due to the very nature of the selection process, I sometimes also end up with what can only be described as a mixture of Jazz and Funk (i.e. Junk!), but you’d be surprised how often it yields the good stuff. Also, I can walk out with a dozen albums for like $40AUD, so I’m definitely playing the numbers game too.

On one such trip a while back I picked up a copy of Belasco‘s album Knowing Everyone’s Okay for some ridiculously low price – and it’s a really good!

The album version is a little slower and longer, but I can’t find a radio edit anywhere so I’m going with this live version. Awesome stuff.

Week 6 of the ActionScript intro carries on with the theme of coding rather than just talking about coding and as such again comes as a word document instead of slides. This week is where we start to have some fun with classes and dynamic creation of symbol instances. We start off by binding a bubble image to a simple class, and then tie it into the mouse cursor position, add in some colour transforms to liven things up and and stop our instances from giving you eye cancer by making them fade in and out through some manipulation of the each instance’s alpha property.

In this bundle I’ve combined both Week 6 Lessons 1 and 2 into a single document and provided the full source code to the exercises, but I highly recommend that you either start from scratch using the document as a guide or work from the 1st example source code and only peek at the completed source code if you get stuck because if you’re reading this then you want to learn to code, and you’re not going accomplish that by copying and pasting alone.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to build this:

Not a bad starting point for moving onto some way cooler stuff, eh?

Download link: An Introduction to ActionScript 3.0 – Week 6 (both lessons combined)
Audience: Beginners who know a little about variables, functions, objects and how to perform some basic programming math.
Format: PDF
Content License: This material is released under a creative commons non-commercial attribution share-alike 3.0 license by me (r3dux) and comes with no guarantee of correctness, fitness for purpose or anything of the sort.

Comments/feedback always welcome.

Bonus: You can find the code for the above animation with the start/stop on click code here.