Why this Book?

This is the second book in the Blazing Games Guide to Flash Game Development series of books. If you have not read the first book, it is freely available on the Blazing Games web site (and is distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License) in online html format as well as in a downloadable pdf format. While you don’t have to read the first book before this book, it is free. The first book covered the creation of ten small web games that were created in Flash. The games created in the first book were NIM, Bomb NIM, Video Poker, Cribbage Squares, Pent Up Anger, Three Dimensional Tic Tac Toe, One of those Weeks episode 1, Dragon and the Sword, String Along, and Lights Out.

While the first episode of One of those Weeks was covered in the first book, chapter one of this book is going to review the creation of that game. As the first book is freely available, it may seem redundant to repeat the material here, but I have decided that it would be best if this book was a self-contained volume. Those of you who have read the first book can simply skip over chapter 1, or better yet just skim over the first chapter.

While finishing the previous book, I was thinking about possible ideas for the second book. My Java Game Development book is going to focus on a single larger game so I was thinking of doing that for this volume. At the same time, having a game developed over a single chapter is nice as this book is being written and released live (as I finish a chapter I am going to release the chapter on the Blazing Games web site) which means there is going to be a noticeable delay between chapters. Now that I actually have my visitors voting on which article or book I work on, the delay aspect could be long. Historically, my Flash book seems to be more popular than my Java book, even though Java is (in my opinion) vastly superior and has free tools so it can be developed for no cost. There are a number or reasons for this (difficulty of Java, Built in animation, better browser support) so I doubt the popularity difference between my Java and Flash books will be changing in the near future.

This, of course, leads to the question why I did decide to go with One of those Weeks as the subject of this book. First, the game already was being developed. Second it is really a large game that is broken into many smaller games. These smaller games (episodes) can easily be covered in a single chapter. This makes the game the ideal game for this book. Once this book is finished, I will have to decide if there is going to be a third book. This will depend on all sorts of factors (such as the future of Flash itself) but if Flash is still a reasonable development environment when the time for the decision comes there will probably be a third book in this series. You will find out in the last chapter of this book what that decision is going to be.