Learning to Flash

Intuition has spent a lot of time working on ideas, writing them into pitches for places like Adult Swim and Kongregate, (my user name is: aeiowu) but we haven't had a chance to really flex our development muscle as of yet. So while doing all this "scholarly" writing and whatnot, I've taken on the task of learning actionscript in hopes of helping out the prototype situation later on.

I normally like to learn things on my own, or through the interpipes somehow, but Josh did some research (he's learning, or relearning actionscript as well) and found some promising books for designers who want to code, rather than coders who want to learn a new language. Call me fickle, but I need a book from an author who knows how to relate to me, and given I have more of a design background, is working out very well.

I'm through the first ten chapters at the time of this post, and am working on my own programming problems with the help of Mike. I have made a couple "cool" demos from the tutorials in the book and my own marginally customizable "particle system" (just using the x and y scale of a movie clip). The particle system is really just a jiggly sphere, but the lesson I learned here was how to control the parameters of a function outside of the function itself because I built the function so guidelines could be applied when assigning the function to each movieclip.

function bubbler(thing:MovieClip, jitter:Number, size:Number):Void
{
var xVal:Number = 0;
var yVal:Number = 0;
onEnterFrame = function()
{
xVal = (Math.random()*jitter) - size;
yVal = (Math.random()*jitter) - size;

thing._yscale = yVal;
thing._xscale = xVal;
};
}

//Initialize
bubbler(blob_mc, 22, 222);