McCullick Games

The first problem I ran across when trying to publish the Fisher Girl game onto portals was that I had used more than one file when building the game. I was dynamically loading in external assets like xml, png, and mp3. Most game portal sites only want one file, so all of those assets need to be embedded in one .swf file. Once you have a single swf your game can go viral because now when a portal sees your game and they can download it and host it easily.

In this tutorial I am going to be embedding assets from the Lost Garden Fishing Girl game, so you will need to download the .swf file from Fishing Girl:Game Prototyping Challenge. Of course you could use any swf that has linkage ids set.

Opening a Shared Library in FlashDevelop

Start a new AS3 project in FlashDevelop. Create a new folder inside the src folder called assets and copy the FishingGirl.swf into that folder. In FlashDevelop you should now see your assets folder and the swf file. Expand the swf file by clicking on it. You should see a small grayed out folder called Symbols, expand the Symbols folder. The items inside the Symbols folder that have a small image next to them are the symbols in the Flash file that have a linkage id set.

Embedding Assets

Open your Main.as file and put your editing cursor at the top of the class and then double click on the fishSmall1 symbol. This will auto fill in the Embed code for you. Directly under the Embed code type in a class name, so that your code should end up looking something like this:

To learn more about the Embed syntax: http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=853

Now when you compile your .swf the asset FarGround1 is actually embedded in your swf and can by referenced by the class name "FarGround1." To get a DisplayObject you can now call

var fish:DisplayObject = new FishSmall1();

However, It's too much work to always be referencing these assets as Classes, I'd rather be able to say something like SpriteManger.getSprite("fishSmall1") and get back a DisplayObject that I can put right onto the stage no matter how the fishSmall1 was embedded. My SpriteManager does just that. It is a singleton so it can be accessed anywhere and you can add a Class and give that class an id String. Then whenever you want a copy of that image you can just call getSprite with that String. Example:

So now you can embed an asset from a shared library swf and display it on the stage. Feel free to use the SpriteManager class in your project and if you find a better way to manage sprite assets in a code only Flash project let me know.