Foundation Game Design with Flash

So you want to make a video game. Where do you start? What do you need to learn? To whom can you look for help? If you’ve ever asked any of these questions, you’ll know how difficult it is to find the answers. I asked myself these same questions many years ago in a little village outside of Bangalore, India, where I was teaching programming and interactive media at an international school. All my students were playing games and they all wanted to create games, but there were no comp- hensive books or online resources available on how to do this. A little bit of research turned up something surprising: not only did basic game design require relatively little programming knowledge but the same set of techniques could also be used over and over again in different contexts to create completely different kinds of games. It was fun to do, the results were immediate, and it was a great creative outlet. The result of this research was an in-house textbook on game design that formed the basis of three high school–level courses and inspired the writing of this book.