Flash as an IDE

Having used Flash for a few years to create animations and games, I feel that Flash is a program that is extremely useful. It has a friendly user interface where you can complete simple tasks such as motion tweens and create graphics; it can also be a very hard program to use as it is capable of creating highly complex games and animations.

It is easy to create graphics on flash using the line tool and the brush tool, although I will sometimes use Photoshop for more detail. Onion skinning is a helpful tool where if you are drawing an animation in flash as a frame by frame animation, you can see what the previous frame looked like allowing you to create more detailed pieces of work. Flash has gradient tools, transform tools, effects tools and other tools where you can refine a piece of Both Flash and Photoshop are Adobe, so it helps when importing graphics because the file formats will be the same, then allowing you to adapt the graphic further in Flash if you wish to. With graphics you can create tweens; this is where a graphic in one keyframe can be animated by having the same graphic in another keyframe. This allows you to put the tween between the two same graphics creating a small animation. The types of tweens are Motion, Classic and Shape. Scripting in Flash is easy once you have understood how it works and then it becomes a quick process with the help of code snippets. The layout of for the code snippets are easy to find and go through. The code snippets are pre-sets for simple pieces of interactivity like “click to go”. Code snippets make Flash easier to understand and get into. As action scripting in Flash can be quite difficult, it has a compiler error section where it will notify you of what is not working and on what line of code it is. If you are not an advanced user of Flash action script, this will help you understand the problem so you can fix it and learn how the program works.

Flash allows you to import audio files, different image file formats and videos files. Being able to do these allows you add audio to a game or animation you’ve created, adding audio brings the game to life, without this, the game would be less entertaining. Importing images and videos lets you go to each frame of a video and draw around the image so you can complete a rotoscope. Brining images in allows you to put what you want in as a background you’ve created in Photoshop or for other uses.

One thing about Flash is that you are not able to create 3D games. 3D games are popular for games on smart phones. Although Flash does not support 3D games, 2D games are still popular such as angry birds. It is a 2D game which has become a huge well known game and showing us that a simple concept can be made in Flash.

I feel that Flash is a program that is capable of continuing to be top IDE. Flash has competition from HTML 5 which is slowing becoming the more preferred IDE you use when it comes to apps. I feel that Flash is still a program that can compete with the competition as it has been around for a long time. Its user friendly interface and code snippets, will help bring people up to speed to create some high pieces of work that can be successful on the games market.