The first space shooter game is fifty years old! But game developers keep improving on the basic idea, coming up with new twists on the classic formula. In this Activetuts+ Session, you’ll learn all about creating shoot-’em-up games for the web. Pew pew!

Game development often requires being able to detect more information than just, “two objects are overlapping”. We need to know how much they are overlapping, where they are overlapping, and what types of objects they are. We need to process this quickly, for games where hundreds of objects could be overlapping at any given point. And we need to calculate how the objects should respond to this overlap: should they bounce, slide, or explode?

Working hard? Take ten minutes, sit back, and try one of our interactive quizzes. Test your knowledge of Flash, math, debugging and more, and expect the number of topics to grow in the future!

Some people find debugging code relaxing – you have a set goal you want to achieve, and you just hammer away at it until you’re done. This can be the case, but often it’s just frustrating and boring.

The right knowledge (of error codes, for example) and tools (like loggers) make the task much easier, so in this Session, we’ve compiled a bunch of resources to help you fix bugs in your Flash projects.

A huge proportion of our actionscript tutorials involve tweening in some form or another, whether it be a subtle transition between scenes, animated UI elements or more dynamic game movement. A huge proportion of those rely on Jack Doyle’s GreenSock tools; more capable, faster and lighter than alternative tweening engines.

If you aren’t yet acquainted with the GreenSock tweening platform, it’s time you were. This session will help you on your way..

Unity is a multi-platform game development tool, designed from the start to ease creation, which just happens to contain the most powerful 3D engine this side of a million dollars. This session will introduce you to Unity, taking you from the absolute fundamentals and working towards development of a fully functional game. Awesome.

“If you think dogs can’t count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.”

Phil Pastoret was dead right! We all use mathematics daily, without even being aware we’re doing so. Of course, in code development, math plays a more obvious role. This Active Session is dedicated to tutorials which focus on mathematics and how it can help you as a developer.

During this large session of screencasts, Platform Evangelist Mike Taulty takes you through the fundamentals of Microsoft Silverlight 4.

Are you new to ActionScript? Have you previously built Flash projects with AS2 but have decided that it’s time for a change? Are you an experienced developer looking to improve your skills or simply refresh your memory? The AS3 101 series is an ever-growing course of tutorials aimed at helping everyone with ActionScript 3.0 fundamentals.