Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Design

In this two-part mini series, you’ll learn how to create a Flash spaceship game, where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make your ship fly higher, to try to avoid the obstacles that appear on the screen. In this first part, we’ll focus on the design of the game, by drawing the main game objects and putting together the (mouse-controlled) menu and screen interface.

Final Result Preview

Here’s a look at the design of the game, which we’ll be putting together:

Creating the Graphics

In this section, we’ll draw our game’s main graphical objects: a spaceship, a laser beam, a diamond, a meteor, a planet, and a star – all in the pixel art style seen in the SWF above, and all using Flash Pro.

Designing the Menus and Screens

Here, we’ll create our menu interface, help screen, game over screen, and HUD.

Links mentioned in the video:

• Abstract Font
• Installing Fonts in Windows
• Installing Fonts for the Macintosh

Coding the Menu Interface

Now that we have all of the graphical elements, we’ll write the code to make our menus interactive, and handle the navigation between screens.

More info on AS3 Events: Taking a Closer Look at the ActionScript 3.0 Event Framework.

Check back in a couple of weeks for the second part of the series, where you’ll learn how to program the actual game mechanics – including the microphone-based interaction!