The Essential Guide to Flash Games - Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript

"Chapter 3 Creating Super Click (p. 99-100)

We have spent a good portion of this book creating a game framework, but so far, we don’t have much to show for it. We will now create a simple game that makes use of the framework as a demonstration. Let’s take a deep dive into our first example game, Super Click. It is a simple game that is similar to many early Flash viral games. It is not original by any means, but the main point we want to demonstrate here is how the Game and Main classes interact.

To do this, we’ll first discuss the elements we need for the game in a simple technical design specification. Next, we will discuss how we tie all of this together into a set of functions to actually create a game. Before we start with the code, we will lay out a very simple technical design document for our game. This document will be used to modify create a Main.as class for Super Click that extends the GameFrameWork.as class. It will also be used to create the SuperClick.as class file that will extend the Game.as framework class.

Creating a Super Click game design specification

We are going to create a simple game technical specification document. It will describe basic game play, but more importantly it will describe how we are going to plan on implementing the game logic. There is nothing wrong with just jumping in and starting to code a game for fun. Experimentation can bring you great rewards, but when you start to design a game that you want to sell or especially one that might be for a client, you will want to plan out the game logic at least to some degree before you jump in and start coding.

Defining the game basics

The game basics will describe the idea behind the game and the general game play fundamentals.

- Game name: Super Click
- Game objective: Click the good circles, and avoid clicking the bad circles.
- Game play description: Blue and red circles will start to appear on the screen. They start small and get bigger, finally disappearing when they have reached a certain size. The player must avoid the red circles and click the blue circles. The quicker the player clicks a blue circle, the more points are awarded. If the player does not click enough circles on a level, the game will be over. It the player clicks a red circle that game will also be over."