MJW's Flash AS 3.0 Avoider Game

The Michael James Williams Avoider Game was built from a multi-part set of Tutorials that start on this webpage:

http://avoidergame.com/category/base-tutorials/page/2/

and continue to a conclusion at the top of this page:

http://avoidergame.com/category/base-tutorials/

The tutorials run down the page from final part to beginner part, and so we have to go to the very bottom of page 2 to get to the very first tutorial.

We have to be careful when going through the listed Tutorials, because some are written in the old Actionscript 2.0, and the others are the latest Actionscript 3.0 (AS3) tutorials.

There is a page that has a master index of all the AS 3.0 steps at:

http://gamedev.michaeljameswilliams.com/2008/09/17/avoider-game-tutorial-1/

and I suggest that people use this page to access the tutorials and build the game.


The game being reviewed here was developed in Adobe Flash Actionscript 3.0 and Michael does a great job of building the game up step by step with brilliantly detailed instructions and explanations.

In total there are 12 tutorials that sequentially build up the full game in AS 3.0 :

AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 1: Basic Set Up
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 2: Multiple Smiling Enemies
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 3: Game Over
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 4: Menus and Buttons
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 5: A Score and a Clock
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 6: Several Small Improvements
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 7: Keyboard Control
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 8: Adding a Preloader
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 9: Music and Sound Effects
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 10: Multiple Levels
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 11: Saving and Loading
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 12: Garbage Collection

Doing these tutorials is a great fun way to learn ActionScript 3.0.

In the "Alien Game" at the start of this Blog post, we have only completed parts 1 to 6 of the above Tutorials, due to time constraints.

(Eg. Have to eat sleep work play guitar, and do other stuff as well).

Sometime later on it would be fun to add the other parts to the game, especially bonus objects (like coins or jewels) that the green alien could bump into and collect to earn extra game points. Levels and Lives would also be great.

The instructions on the MJW website are fully detailed, and he has a nice copy to clipboard feature on all of the code snippets which saves a lot of typing time.

He also has downloadable zip files for each part, so that when things are not working, we can download his AS 3.0 Class files, and compare them line by line with our own code.

If you would like to download the .FLA Source file, as well as all of the AS 3.0 class files for the Passy World version of the game, then click the link below:

Click Here to Download .RAR file of Source Code from Passy World

There is another page, where we can play amazing variations of his Avoider Game that people have developed, such as a great game called "Robot Saga: Escape". These games can be found and played online at the Avoider Game homepage at: http://avoidergame.com/ .

Michael James Williams is definitely one of the flashest game programming teachers to be found on the Net.

Passy World rates his tutorials as 12/10 !

So stop avoiding Actionscript 3.0, and get right into it !

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi