Making Games With FlashPunk Video Series Redux Survey

(Zachary Lewis) #1

I’ve found that many people have watched and learned from my first FlashPunk video tutorial series available on this Vimeo channel, but many have been discouraged because the version of FlashPunk I used has changed.

I’d like to record a new series starting from the very beginning, but I’ve got some questions for the community.

  1. What is an ideal length for these videos? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? As long as it takes to cover one complete topic?
  2. Once I’ve covered the information found on the tutorials page, what else should be covered?
  3. Is GitHub a good place to store my tutorials, or is it too confusing for people to use? Should I make a separate tutorial on using GitHub to view and download source code?
  4. Anything else you’d like from the tutorials?

Thanks for your comments! I know a lot of people never make it to the forum, but they have seen the videos on YouTube (which aren’t even the complete listing), so I’d like to make something to really help the community.

(Zephyr Raine) #2
  1. I’d really go to as long as needed to cover one topic since it would be very frustrating to wait the second part of a tutorial that we’ve started earlier.
  2. Maybe a complete step-by-step to actually make a game ? Or something more detailled and advanced points dealing with game logic and, you know, some stuff.
  3. Github is quite accessible provided you took the time to learn how to use it by searching and clicking a little bit everywhere, so I think a Github tutorial wouldn’t be really useful.
  4. Nope.
(Zachary Lewis) #3

I wasn’t thinking of splitting up a tutorial across multiple days. I’d record it all the same day and upload it at the same time, but if a long tutorial is broken up into multiple movies, do you think that would make it better and easier to navigate?

For example, if I did a tutorial on making an Asteroids-style game that was 30 minutes long, would it be easier to follow and use as one long video, or three smaller videos that are logically grouped (for example, movement, shooting and collision)?

I guess with bookmarking and stuff it’s easy to link directly to a time in a single movie, but with playlists it’s easy to “skip chapters.” I see pros and cons both ways.

(Zephyr Raine) #4

Oh, in this case I’d go for the playlists with splitted videos provided they are splitted logically as you suggested, and not because of the length.

(TheHuckleberryWill) #5

I find that videos about 8 minutes long are best (with my tutorials anyway). Also, I quite like the idea of the logical grouping. Oh, could you put them on YouTube as well? You would get more views and I don’t much like vimeo anyway.

I think you should spend quite a while explaining tweening & particles in-depth. My reasoning behind the length, is that if someone wished to quickly learn just about particles to add to their game (maybe they already know most of the rest?) instead of skipping through the video to get to the right bit they could quite easily watch the entire thing.

(JasperYong) #6

Your videos are fine on itself with some minor adjustments on some codes, maybe some update on the description would suffice in later dates. I would preferred one full video with tags for fast forward skipping, or use youtube annotation feature to tag relevant tutorials on it

I dont really mind about the video length as long it have good info without distracting music :smile:

I personally would do a basic tutorials, and further discuss on the the previous video (advance collision, recycling, world/level switching, xml)

example:
0:00 Intro
0:30 Getting Started with FlashDevelop >(future video) Getting started with ???
4:00 Add Player
6:00 Add Enemies >(future video) Recycle your entities
8:00 Add collision >(future video) collision class vs. type
(yadayada :P)

p.s. is there a reason why you avoid using youtube? p.s.s. Thank you for your awesome videos! couldnt get into punk without it! :smiley:

(Zachary Lewis) #7

I originally wasn’t able to upload videos longer than ten minutes on YouTube, so I chose Vimeo. I now use YouTube to upload my new videos.

I never bothered uploading the old videos onto YouTube because they were already outdated by the time I was able to upload them.

(Aelloon) #8

The best video in your tutorial series (at least in my opinion) was the one where you made the simple shoot 'em up game. It also followed the other tutorials rather nicely (putting the knowledge to use).

Length really doesn’t seem to matter - particularly when you’re doing all of it on the screen (as long as it isn’t super slow). I believe a single video would be easier to follow as a whole but a video in three pieces would be easier to reference.

Thank you for the tutorials, they’re great and one of the many reasons why FlashPunk is great for new people.

(Zachary Lewis) #9

Well, :poop:. Now I’ve got to update those tutorials.

Thank you so much for the kind words. They really mean a lot to me. :heartbeat:

(Wayne Makoto Sturdy) #10

I followed your tuts when I first began with Flashpunk and found them invaluable, so I think a remake would be incredibly valuable for newcomers. I liked the way they were split up, in logical blocks that made them easy to reference when I needed to.

Length doesn’t bother me, I am watching to learn, not to reinforce my AADD.

I once tried to start my own repository on Github but had a hard time with it; I wouldn’t say no to a nice video tutorial.

With the whole youtube / vimeo thing, I’m the IT guy at a public school where all internet traffic is run through the state’s proxy servers and they censor youtube, but not vimeo (and I assume this might be the case elsewhere). I have a way of circumventing the proxies, but maybe others do not, just food for thought.

(Zachary Lewis) #11

The beauty of YouTube is the community. It’s massive, integrated into Google, and easy to share. Vimeo has a much smaller community and is geared toward film makers. Additionally, YouTube has lifted the majority of the restrictions that originally gave me cause to switch to Vimeo in the first place, so I’ll definitely upload there; however, I’ll probably put copies of the videos on the CDN that’s hosting this community’s uploads so we can cleanly embed the videos into useflashpunk.net. This should also help people who are unable to reach YouTube.

(TheHuckleberryWill) #12

Well, the sort of person who is watching the tutorials would possibly be able to circumvent them anyway. I know I can and I am 14 :smiley:

Oh, I think GitHub tutorials would be cool too. I am starting to get the hang of it now, but they would have been useful when I was learning.

(Zachary Lewis) #13

I’d love to do another tutorial on GitHub, especially now that they have the visual tool.

(VanderJamesHum) #14

When I first discovered flashpunk on the old site, I was totally drawn in because the tutorials were so simple yet informative. And Zach, your videos had such a chill approach to learning, sort of like my favourite school teacher would have, and I was prototyping chaos only with a few simple functions.

The new tutorials on the main page now are even better, and the Coin duder saga has also improved upon the old videos with its shorter format. So, in my opinion the “point of contact” with flashpunk is just excellent and its easy for beginners to get inspired to push on learning more, rather than being intimidated and running away to something else.

In my opinion what FP could really use is some intermediate or advanced tutorials focused at developers who have a familiar enough grasp of the engine and it’s basics and are eager to explore the real power of the punk. There’s a lot of really cool functions and features hidden away that could do with a little explaining. Things like quadPath and linearPath are good examples.They’re a little more advanced, seem scary at first, no one talks about them, but are actually quite easy and fun to use when figured out.

more candidates for this treatment (imo)

PreRotation - I have no idea how to use this and feel like it definitely needs a solid tutorial.

TiledSpritemap - sounds powerful, but what the hell is it and how does it work? people are asking this question.

For a long time I was also oblivious to the fact that Entitys could have multiple graphics at once and switch out they’re graphics at runtime. Something that I feel could have been made clear to me in a tut and saved me a lot of time. There are lots of simple things like this that when discovered, spawn unprecedented amounts of on screen chaos, but often aren’t discovered until after a workaround has been made. Coin duder saga has done really well in this respect, introducing things like FP.recycle(), FP.create() and explaining them in the context of why you would recycle() instead of remove(). //end(this)

My thanks to all who helped get the new site up and running, navigating the Way Back machine was a headache

(me_19) #15

First of all thank you very much for all your input and the great tutorials you have made so far! It would be great if you could make a fighting game tutorial where you show us how to make characters move, jump, attack, and where combos are introduced!

(Ani Mittra) #16

I would like to see more tutorials for different genres other than platformers. :smile: But really I have plenty of ideas I’d like to see tutorials on.

I would like to see tutorials for things like making an animation queue (have one animation play, and then another play when it’s complete) for playing animations in a turn based game.

Maybe things like NPC dialogue, creating a system similar to the dialogue used in many Japanese games (Fire Embelem, Phoenix Wright, etc) where characters have different graphics/animations for emotions. Making it easy in the engine to specify which state that character should display, and how the text should animate to convey emotion (like a slow type writer effect, you see this effect used well in the Paper Mario games). And then making it easy to create cutscenes with this, straight from code.

There are tutorial’s for top down shooters, but maybe one examining enemy AI’s, especially for bosses with different attack patterns or states.

Maybe something to show how to handle accounts or leaderboards or IAPs, storing data in a server somewhere.

Kudos for helping the community!