CH. 1: DESIGNING GAMES

• Approaching Game Development
• Focusing Your Game
• Developing a Story Line and Characters
• Designing the Interface
• Formulating Good Gameplay
• Developing the Logic
• Writing the Code
• Checking for Errors
• Preparing Your Game for Distribution

CH. 2: USING DIRECTOR

• Using the Stage Window
• Using the Property Inspector Window
• Using the Score Window
• Creating Bitmap and Vector Graphics
• Importing Media into a Cast
• Writing LINGO Scripts
• Compiling and Compressing Your Game

Ch.s 3-17 present games in increasing order of difficulty. Here’s each chapter’s game along with the major ideas or skills presented in that chapter.

CH. 3: SCRAMBLE: MANIPULATING GRAPHICAL SPRITES

Scramble is a “sliding piece“ puzzle.  This game introduces “sprites” and teaches you how to apply multiple behaviors to a graphical sprite.  This includes generic button behaviors, comparing and changing sprite locations, changing a sprite cast’s member, and creating “soft blinks”.

CH. 4: PAINTER: PAINTING WITH SPRITE TRAILS

Painter is less a game than a tool---you create a simple program that allows users to draw and paint on the screen usinga mouse.  Programming this game teaches you how to paint using smooth lines, how to add “paper masks”, and incorporating a degree of randomness into the paint’s properties.

CH. 5: MONK MANIA: PLAYING SOUNDS

Monk Mania is a musical memory game---increasing numbers of monks sing in a certain order, and then you try to recreate that order.  This game, because it involves music, teaches you about Director’s  Score function---how to add sounds, “puppet sounds”, playing sounds, and interrupting sounds.

CH. 6: TIC-TAC-TOE CHALLENGE: ELABORATING ON A SIMPLE GAME

Everyone knows tic-tac-toe! This version of the famous “Xs and Os” game will teach you how to create an introductory screen, how to apply the “take turns” behavior, how to “tween graphics”, and how to add a rudimentary level of “Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the game.

CH. 7: GREMLINS: GENERATING RANDOM MOTION

Gremlins is a dart game where you throw graphical “darts”. It introduces the random function to rotate and move the sprites, change cast members, and add crazy behaviors!

CH. 8: GO: PROVIDING TWO METHODS OF PLAY

Go is an ancient Asian board game.  This computerized version teaches you how to place random pieces on a board, update a game board, activate game pieces, and allow the user to move game pieces.

CH. 9: SMAC-MAN: UTILIZING KEYBOARD CONTROL

As you might have guessed from the name, this is a version of Pac-Man (one that incorporates a cops and robbers theme).  Creating this game teaches you how to detect keyboard events, keep Smac-Man from moving places you don’t want him to go, simulate walking, and even how to add secret “cheat” codes to your game.

CH. 10: THE GREAT ERUDINI: ANIMATING WITH FILM LOOPS

This is a fortune-telling game where users input text questions and “The Great Erudini” answers, seemingly with quite a degree of intelligence!  This game teaches you to set up animation sequences, then convert those animations into film loops, and finally display and edit the film loops.

CH. 11: OLD-FASHIONED PINBALL: APPLYING REALISTIC PHYSICS

This game mimics an arcade pinball machine.  To do that, you’ve got to learn how to make objects move in ways that don’t violate the laws of physics!  Therefore, you apply gravity, friction, as well as magnetism and magnetic attraction to objects.

CH. 12: BACKYARD BRAWL: CREATING DYNAMIC CHARACTERS

Backyard Brawl is a two-dimensional fighting game.  Creating the game teaches you how to create and use global variables, how to have the characters inflict damage on each other, indicate pain, and use “bot” control for your fighters.

CH.13: COVERT MAYHEM: ANIMATING IN THREE DIMENSIONS

Covert Mayhem is our first three-dimensional game.  You’ll learn how to generate walls, how to move objects on three axes, how to translate an entity’s properties into movements, and how to tell whether objects are colliding with each other,.

CH. 14: MARTIAN DOGFIGHT: PRODUCING COMPLEX VECTOR GRAPHICS

This is a graphically updated version of the venerable “Space Defender” space shootout game.  This game teaches you how to add new components (including complex vector graphics), fine-tune your components, and edit shapes.

CH. 15: FROGGY: PUBLISHING INTERNET CONTENT

Froggy is, you guessed it, Frogger---the game where a hapless froggy tries to cross a busy highway without getting squished.  This game introduces some aspects of producing your games---previewing in a browser, setting custom dimensions and compression settings, and creating a game loader.

CH. 16: ROBO-PONG: EXPORTING DIGITAL VIDEO

Pong was the first commercial arcade video game, created back in the seventies.  Robo Pong is a fancier version, but it’s still basically a ping pong game.  This games teaches you about Quicktime and AVI videos and bitmap graphics.

CH. 17: EPIC SKETCH: INCORPORATING FLASH MOVIES

This is a virtual version of an Etch-O-Sketch.  It includes a “knob movie”, a screen movie, and a background movie.