Nintendo Wii Flash Game Creator's Guide by Todd Perkins
Published April 2008
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Summary Whip up awesome Wii games using Flash and ActionScript. Nintendo Wii Flash Game Creator's Guide lays out each next-generation technique alongside real-world examples and cut-and-paste code samples. Learn how to design exciting Flash animations, create cool characters, simulate realistic motion, and use the Wii remote control in innovative ways. Plus, you'll get the latest tricks for supercharging your games and tips for distributing them on the Web.
Beyond the "wave 'em around in the air" controllers and the very creatively-done games, one very cool new feature of the Nintendo Wii console is the "Internet Channel", which is a simple web browser that you can use to display web content on your television. And one of the nicest things about the Internet Channel is that it supports Flash. And this is significant if you are a small-time game developer, as it means you can get some simple game content running on the Wii with a minimum of fuss and no need for complicated registrations or content restrictions. Just write up some Flash content, point your Wii's browser to your page, and start playing.
Unfortunately, there's a catch. A large amount of Flash content is difficult or unplayable on the Wii because of Flash version problems, game size issues, or inability to work well with the Wii controller. And that's where Nintendo Wii Flash Game Creator's Guide comes into play. It's a beginner's tutorial to Flash programming as well as a guide as to how your content can work best with the Wii's constraints, specifically displaying content full-screen on a television, the Wii-mote, and the version of Flash that you can use.
The book is aimed at a novice programmer who's approaching Flash for the first time. The first hundred pages or so are a tutorial on how to use the Flash development environment as well as the basics of ActionScript coding. If you have any Flash experience at all, you'll likely find yourself skipping the first third of the book in favor of the Wii-centric content in chapter three and beyond.
As shown in the chapter excerpt we recently posted, there's no real magic to using the Wii-mote -- Flash thinks the Wii controller is a mouse. That doesn't mean that any Flash content that uses the mouse is going to work well on the Wii. The Wii's controller is at best a clumsy mouse, and any games that require intricate movement or control will be frustrating on a TV. Hence you need the ability to control large objects with imprecise movements, and the book does a good job of driving this point home with its examples.
The examples are cute and large and are clearly written from the ground-up for the Wii. They include a simple "point at the circle" game, a hammer-the-nail game, rock-paper-scissors, and the like. They make the point that Wii Flash games should be simple and obvious and playable from across the room. They also show various techniques, like how to calculate controller acceleration.
There are some things I really wished for in the Nintendo Wii Flash Game Creator's Guide. One is more technical information. While it's a great guide for getting beginners started creating web-based Wii content quickly, you'll likely outgrow the book in a hurry. There is a lot of information I would like to have seen regarding running Flash content on the Wii, such as a benchmark of Wii Flash performance, "how much" of Flash 7 is available, how to do an on-screen keyboard, how to detect multiple buttons and/or controller, and the like.
The next thing I wished for in the book is a discussion of networking. While a couple of the games would have been a natural for networking, like the rock-paper-scissors game, networking was left out.
As it stands, Nintendo Wii Flash Game Creator's Guide is a good beginner's guide to developing Wii content in Flash. I hope to see a book on advanced Wii Flash programming someday, but this is enough to get you going.
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