Question about Flash Animation

[William H.]

I was wondering if anyone here has experience with Flash animation. I thought it would be interesting to try and make a short film or one of those flash games, but I don't know anything about the process.

The penguin game seems to be not too complex, how many hours might have been involved in making something like this? If you haven't seen it, look here:

http://n.ethz.ch/student/mkos/pinguin.swf

What is the best software to start with? I don't want the most expensive and certainly not the cheapest, but something in the middle that is highly recommended.

That game called the Crimson Room looks a little more complicated, how many hours would it take to make this one?

Any other thoughts or advice on this topic would be appreciated.

 

[mickky]

You can only create flash movies with Flash. It is a fairly sophisticated web animation program that uses keyframe animation to create vector-based graphic movies.
I've been using it for about 5 years.

It's fairly easy to learn, but quite time consuming to master. If you aren't already a digital artist, you will not have much fun creating anything with it. Also, you need some understanding of keyframe animation to get up and running quickly.
The game required a bit of external programming experience to do.

The method of drawing in Flash can be quite irritating, as compared to Illustrator.

 

[evildave]

There are quite a few third-party Flash animation solutions. (More after their inappropriately huge "sponsored links")

http://webdesign.about.com/cs/flashauthoring/

 

[ceptimus]

It's fun to play with if you like computer graphics. The current flash program (2004 MX) can be downloaded and tried, free of charge for 30 days, but after that must be purchased. The cost is quite high, about $300 or so. A 'student' version is available at lower cost.

 

[peptoabysmal]

I was wondering if anyone here has experience with Flash animation. I thought it would be interesting to try and make a short film or one of those flash games, but I don't know anything about the process.

The penguin game seems to be not too complex, how many hours might have been involved in making something like this? If you haven't seen it, look here:

http://n.ethz.ch/student/mkos/pinguin.swf

What is the best software to start with? I don't want the most expensive and certainly not the cheapest, but something in the middle that is highly recommended.

That game called the Crimson Room looks a little more complicated, how many hours would it take to make this one?

Any other thoughts or advice on this topic would be appreciated.

The best thing is to get a copy of Flash (if you are a student, definitely go to your campus bookstore and get it there, way cheaper to learn on) Once you go pro, you will need the commercial version to be legal.

The game you mention also uses a few fairly simple physics alogrithms. There are quite a few books on the market on how to make games in Flash, which include some of these algorithms.

If you don't know Flash, to say how many hours is irrelevant, it will be a little bit of a learning curve to get up to speed with Flash. But I would say someone well versed in Flash could produce a fairly interesting game within two weeks, including producing some simple graphics. To produce a game with professional polish and perhaps even multi player capabilities would of course take quite a bit longer.

I produce online courses in advanced chemistry and so forth with a team of other programmers and graphic artists and we use Flash quite a bit for this purpose. I mostly do the advanced scripting and data loading backend stuff.

It's not strictly true that you need the Flash program from Macromedia to produce Flash movies, but to make a game, yeah you need to get the Flash authoring program.

Flash MX 2004

If you want to do movies within Flash, I'd also recommend Sorenson Squeeze for Flash.

ExSqueeze Me