Glen Rhodes

Well, the new book is out It’s called Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development.

Paperback: 528 pages
Publisher: Charles River Media; 2 edition (June 1, 2006)

It’s not a “brand new book”, it’s a “Second edition”. For those who don’t have the original, it’ll be all great and new to you. For those who have the original, you’re going to find a few updates and items for Flash 8 (and that’s especially what Flash 8 is good at; games)… To me, the entire tile-game engine in Flash 8 is worth its weight in gold.

It’s a great book, and I hope people enjoy it – it took a bit of work to put together.

Click here to order!

I’m really excited about it, and it covers some of the best things that Flash 8 has to offer in relation to games. It’s currently being used as curriculum material at many educational institutions around the world.

We cover full tile game development (like Super Mario) making use of the BitmapData object in Flash 8, and you’ll get to learn all sorts of amazing things and effects that can be specifically applied to games.

For Star Wars fans everywhere, try out my cool Flash toy: The Lightsaber Configurator.  Choose the color and length of your lightsaber and even practice swinging it around, hitting a lightsaber practice droid.  You will NEED at least the Flash 8 player to view this.

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One of the most influential games on the PC of the last 25 years was undoubtedly Castle Wolfenstein.  So, when Flash 8 came out with the ability to create high speed bitmap graphics, I just had to put myself to the challenge, and make it playable online!  Click here to play it!

The engine is available to be licensed, and can be customized in a variety of ways. Click this link to see full details.

WolfenFlash 3D

This is an old favorite of mine, and so I simply couldn’t resist putting it in.  Click here to play it! It may seem a little old, or “retro”, but remember that’s the point. To accurately represent the original game.

click to play

For MTV, this was for the Viewer’s Choice Award for the MTV Video Music Awards. It essentially involved firing the “Moonman” statues out of a cannon in 3D, at the group, singer, rapper, etc., that you wanted to vote for. This game was used to gather all the votes for the 2005 VMAs in Miami, hosted by Sean “Diddy” Combs.

Title screen with instructions.

The game in action.

The ultimate winner, after all the “votes” were tallied, was Green Day, for their song American Idiot.

For Nikelab.com, a cool site run by Nike, I programmed the game “Catch The Train”, for the promotion of their new Shox NZ shoes. Unfortunately, no longer available online to play.

Catch the train in action.

For ArcadeTown, I did the game “The Black Knight: Get Medieval“, along with talented artist Brad Ferguson. The game is a great arcade smash ‘n bash game. I also did the music for this game.

Based on the hit show “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody“, this game, Pizza Party Pickup, is a simple game in which you must navigate through 10 levels to get to the top of the hotel, to get to the pizza party. Anyone who knows the show, will know what that means. Either way, it’s kind of a Pac-Man game, with the addition of needing to collect a key to escape each level, and navigate the maze. This one was the most played/popular game on Disney.com when it first came out.

Game Title Screen

The game in action.

For Shockwave.com, under SayDesign, I developed, programmed and did the music for the game “Domino Dementia“, a fun puzzle game where you must move and rotate falling dominoes into position to create matches, and clear the board.

Domino Dementia

This was one of my first games, all done in that annoying little Flash 4 window. But I was determined to make 3D work in Flash. It’s not true rotational 3D, but it is projection 3D. I got the idea for this game when I was flying from San Francisco to Toronto and I saw the clouds, and I thought, “What if there was a game where you had to jump from cloud to cloud. So I took that idea and thought, “What about a similar concept, but you’re moving through the human mind, and as each level progresses, we get deeper into the images of the dreams, from light and fluffy to nightmarish at the end.” – Read on to get to the game – there are 30 levels, so plenty to keep you going. (Hint: Use the shadow to know what you’re over when you jump).

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