Ryan’s Tech Blog

We finally pushed our first flash game, Celest, out the door at work! The project was quite a learning experience. The point of the game is to get a spaceship into orbit with simple directional thrusters.

Check it out at celest.funfinds.us:

We’ve starting posting about those learning experiences on the celest blog:

• Celest, our first flash game
• Flash Community Fragmentation

Enjoy! Look at our ads!

There are several tutorials out there on how to do this, but they all differed a little, and figured I might as well note mine.  I’m replicating the setup I have at work onto a home computer, so this is my second time around.

1. Download and install Eclipse, the java version should be just fine
2. Pick a directory for your flash projects.  For this guide, I’m using the Eclipse default, “C:\Documents and Settings\Ryan\workspace”
3. Download the Flex 2 SDK, unzip it into a “Flex 2 SDK” folder in your project directory
4. Download the Flex Ant tasks, and unzip the file into a directory in your project directory
5. Install whatever version control tools you prefer
6. Open Eclipse, get to the workspace view
7. Make a new “General” project for the Flex 2 SDK
8. Go to Window->Preferences, select the Ant->Runtime node in the tree
9. Go to the “Classpath” tab, select “Ant Home Entries (default)”, and then click “Add External JARs”
10. Select the flexTasks.jar from the flex ant folder.
11. Click OK
12. Go to the “Tasks” tab, select “Add Task”
13. Name it “mxmlc”, and choose the flexTasks.jar from the dropdown
14. In the tree view, navigate to / -> flex2 -> ant, and then select MxmlcTask.class from the right pane
15. Click OK
16. Go to the “Properties” tab, select “Add Property”
17. Name it “FLEX_HOME”, and make the path to your Flex 2 SDK folder
18. Click OK
19. Click OK

Now you’re ready to start the hard part, actually making your flash program.