Adventures in flash:
coding is only half the battle

A long time player of silly flash games, last summer on a whim I downloaded a trial of Flash to play around with and see what I could do with it.  I ended up having a lot of fun, making some silly animations and playing with ActionScript.  Counter to expectations I wasn’t bored with it by the time the trial ran out.  After a few months of itching to get back into Flash, I finally broke down and bought an adobe web design suite, since I was lacking a legitimate and up to date version of Photoshop anyway.  I canned the small stuff from the summer and start working on something a bit more ambitious – the recreation of a small but incredibly fun game I used to play on my commodore64 years ago.  However this lead to an immediate obstacle:  I love coding, but I’m a horrible artist.  Doing anything with a mouse, other than straight lines or rigidly shaped arcs, is an exercise in futility for me.  Sure I can make that little stick figure do wonderful things and have complex interactions with other stick figures, but at the end of the day it’s still just a poorly animated mess of stick figures (I was tempted to include some examples, but they really are too shameful to share).  After some pathetic attempts at simple figures, I gave up on it and looked for a new route.  “Aha,” I said, “perhaps a drawing tablet will get me somewhere.”  So I got a Wacom Bamboo for Christmas thinking maybe I could do a bit better with a pen than a mouse.  But alas no, somehow, inexplicably, attaching a pen to a computer does not make my abilities with that pen any greater.  Oh well, guess I’m stuck ripping off sprites until I can get a good flash artist to back me up.

------------------------------------
MINI SURVEY: We at Antharia are contemplating getting rid of our weekly blog. If you read the blog and would like it to stay, PLEASE leave a comment.  We will do this survey for a month or two and then make a final decision.  Thanks to all those that read us.
------------------------------------

Posted by Ben Matics on February 23, 2009 at 09:36 pm EST

Copyright © Antharia. All rights reserved.
No part of this blog may be reproduced without prior written permission.