Following my first flash game I quickly decided that I enjoyed programming them. But, I didn’t want to go through the mess that I had to last time with Glowsticks. That is why I decided to learn AS3. This time, however, I had a much better teacher (no offense to Cartoonsmart). I found a great site for video tutorials, lynda.com. I used their AS3 tutorial to get my game going. Without that I probably would have had such a tougher time learning ActionScript 3.0, and I highly suggest at least watching the free videos.

I decided to make an easy brick breaker game because I didn’t believe that I had the experience to program the games that I wanted to create. Creating a clone of a simple game was in my opinion the best decision for me. The learning experience that I had from making it really developed what I needed for my future games.

The development of Glowbricks is really what taught me how to reuse code with functions. It also showed me of the versatility of arrays, and why ActionScript classes are so great. I basically turned all of my ActionScript code into functions, and from that ease swept over me. I didn’t have to copy and paste code anymore. For me, that was quite a large step. Arrays really helped me in this game, they are how I was able to create all of my levels:

lvl1Code:Array = new Array();
lvl1Code = [
0,0,1,1,1,0,0,
0,0,1,1,1,0,0,
0,0,1,1,1,0,0,
];

Each number would count for a certain block. With this and other bits of code, I was able to easily create all 20 levels in the game in a very quick manner. The game was finished in less than a week.