Note: I originally wrote this for www.gamedev.net, where I'm a reviewer. Thought it was on-topic here, so here it is.

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If you've ever read one of my reviews and rolled your eyes when I took issue with something unrelated to the book's content, then skip ahead a couple of paragraphs.

The copyright date on this book is 2007. Adobe officially completed the acquisition of Macromedia in late 2005. Yet this book is still called [i]Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics[/i].

Well, given that Adobe hasn't yet done an Adobe-branded release of Flash at the time of this review, the title can be forgiven.

[i]Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics[/i] is an excellent guide to doing game graphics in Flash. Unlike other "How to write Games in Flash" books, this one concentrates solely on graphics. There's no discussion of ActionScript or deployment or anything else you'd need to make a full game. This book isn't intended to be an "All In One" guide. And that's what I like about it. I've seen too many books that claim to contain all the info you need to develop games in Flash, and they inevitably fall well short in most categories.

This book covers graphics. And that's important, mainly because Flash is quite a different vector graphics tool than others of its type, like Illustrator, Freehand, Canvas, etc. Unlike these tools that were designed largely to make graphics for print, Flash is designed from the ground-up to make graphics that render quickly. And that means that it works very differently from the market-leading vector tools. And that means that you need a tutorial that takes such a method into account.

And [i]Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics[/i] is that book. It's written by a genuine Flash graphics veteran, Robert Firebaugh, and many of the examples are taken from actual commercial games upon which he's worked. And this trend also extends to bitmap and 3D graphics. The way Flash works with bitmaps and 3D is different from the norm. The book does give good coverage to both, showing how to seamlessly merge bitmap and vector graphics and how to to "fake" 3D using some Flash-friendly commercial 3D tools.

The book doesn't start with a few chapters of game design philosophy or software engineering tips or any other kinds of filler. It gets right into the practicalities.

There are, however, a couple of practicalities that I wish would've been covered a bit deeper. For example, early in the book the author recommends that you remap the shortcut keys so that the common drawing commands can be done with the left hand, thus leaving the right hand free for mousing or graphics-pad-ing. I would like to have actually seen his recommended keymap beyond the simple recommendation that I make some changes from the default.

As a final note, don't forget to check out the pack-in CD, because the author does something that every "how to do something with Flash" should do. All of his drawing examples are drawn progressively on a timeline and are included as FLA files. That means that if a particular effect can be done with ten steps, he does each step on a separate frame on the timeline. That way you can actually watch each step as it's done by simply along the timeline. It amounts to having animated tutorials for many techniques.

[i]Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Graphics[/i] is not a book I'm going to outgrow immediately. It covers a narrow subject comprehensively. Good book.

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John Hattan
www.thecodezone.com