Strategy Games focusing on Terrain Generation

The intended audience for this course is the programmer with some experience in writing ActionScript 3 familiar with development using Adobe Flash Professional CS5, Adobe Flash Builder 4, or FlashDevelop. This course is taught by John Nyquist, author of our popular Blender Tutorials.

Read what Gary Rosenzweig from FlashGameU.com has to say about this course...

"John's a great teacher. He makes complex concepts seem simple by explaining them in small steps with great clarity. You'll find that you are not just following along, but you are gaining an understanding into the process of how the project was developed. You'll not only learn how it was built, but you'll also know how it works."

You'll learn how to create terrains, using spatial averaging, draw with the graphics class, dealing with bits, connected component labeling to detect regions, and more. It's assumed that you'll work through this course from the beginning, but for convenience (and later reference) you can find major sections and their time indices listed below:

Course Summary:

00:00:00 Intro and overview of the course.

00:02:50 Development Options - Flash Professional, Flash Builder, and/or FlashDevelop.

00:04:29 Starting Project - Setting up for your environment

00:04:29 FlashDevelop 3.3

00:07:08 Adobe Flash Builder 4

00:09:18 Adobe Flash Professional CS5

00:10:40 Creating the mam package and Terrain class

00:12:09 Graphics Class - learn to use the Graphics class to draw and color shapes

00:27:00 Creating noise

00:29:20 RGB - using bit shifting to extract RGB values

00:34:57 Spatial Averaging - softening the noise to create the land forms

00:51:20 Gridlines - drawing gridlines with a Graphics class object

00:59:06 Creating the Grid and Node classes

01:08:23 Game Class - Tying the Terrain, Grid, and Node classes together with the Game class

01:25:06 BitmapData class - dynamically create bitmaps in AS3

01:38:00 Bits & Bytes - We take a side track to cover bits, bit masking, and bit shifting

01:55:17 Terrain - adding Mountains and beaches

01:59:17 Connected Component Labeling (CCL)

02:46:27 Creating an interactive test for our CCL algorithm (and debugging)

03:14:39 Creating the Region class and integrating it with out CCL test

03:27:52 Bringing in Symbols

03:46:29 Recap and some Flash Builder 4 favorite features.


Like all our tutorials, this one includes the source code. You'll also get project files for Flash, Flash Builder (Flex) and Flash Develop.