Quick Flash Tips: Shortcuts and Overlooked Details
It’s all very well being a great Flasher – whether that means being a great coder or an accomplished artist – however there are a few small details which I occasionally see in Flash games that could make a subtle, yet noticable difference. In this quick post I aim to show you the main offenders and how to quash them, as well as throwing in a few handy Flash tips.
Buttons of Frustration
First up, buttons. Many times I’ve seen a game with great potential only to be let down by frustrating buttons, barely clickable apart from the surface area of the text. It’s quite easy to ignore this detail but can mean a lot less frustration from the user if implemented. Double click your button and create a keyframe (F6) on the ‘HIT’ frame. Whatever you draw on this frame isn’t visible by the user, and acts as the clickable surface area of the button. So go ahead a draw a big black box over the text. This now makes it a hell of a lot easier to click and generally increases the game’s professionalism. Job done.
Framerate Fatigue
This generally only happens with newcomers but I’ve seen a few slightly more experienced users overlook this one. Framerate. Just look at the properties panel in your Flash and if you’re making a game OR movie, please, don’t keep the default 12 fps. I like my games smooth and fast, so I always head towards 55 fps when I start a game.
Moody Tweenager
Have you ever seen those tweens on characters that, when fading out, leave the limbs looking seperated? It’s simple. Break apart your symbols and make one whole movieclip to fade, instead of fading all the limbs together. Flash treats symbols seperately which is why you get this nasty effect when fading out more than one part on a character’s body simultaneously.
Aesthetics are Everything
The look of a game can count for everything, so make sure you have a nice colour scheme going on, and any menu buttons are neatly aligned by using the align feature. When using the align feature of Flash, make sure you have clicked on the ‘To Stage’ button, to keep everything relative to your canvas size. This should be on the right hand side of your Flash application.
Sound: Explained
I’ll outline these real quick here:
- ‘Event’ – Plays independantly of the Flash timeline and won’t stop until it reaches the end or is stopped by code, or the ‘Stop’ option (below).
- ‘Stop’ – Put this on your timeline to stop your ‘Event’ sound.
- ‘Stream’ – Will only play for as long as the timeline it is on. Handy to use for lip-syncing music videos and animations.
- ‘Start’ – This will start a sound but won’t play another instance of that sound if it’s already playing, unlike ‘Event’.
Short Uppercut!
Might as well throw this one in here to streamline your development experience:
Pressing CTRL + ENTER will test your .swf from the very beginning.
Press ENTER while in the main Flash timeline to see your Flash play out in real time in front of you. Only good for seeing small parts in movies and animations where you don’t want to watch through the whole thing. Useless for games.
When writing in your code on the actions panel, always click the tick above the text entry panel to make sure everything is alright, then click the lines to iron out any minor creases. This stops nasty suprises when you export your .swf for testing without checking your code first.
Check out The Ultimate Flash Resource Post for more information on how to improve your Flash experience.
(5 votes, average: 3.40 out of 5)
Loading ...
I see the first one around alot. Even on submissions by well-known people. It kinda pisses me off when people put all of the time into a game or movie, only to forget to make all of the text clickable.
I couldn’t agree more on the buttons bit, too many developers make that mistake, including those that are experienced. Nice post, simple, but effective.
Thanks for the comments guys !