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Want to thank me for making this book available for free? Just buy Special Edition Using Macromedia Director MX
 and we'll call it even!Advanced Lingo For Games
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| Games and Macromedia Director
Director does not get the respect it deserves in the development world. It is still seen as the simpler animation and presentation tool that it was before Director 4. However, there are thousands of games made with Director. Some are small puzzle games and others are complex strategy simulations. Thanks to Shockwave, Director-based games are easy to distribute, which makes it hard for the industry to ignore them. In the past, educational games were the primary type of game made with Director. Teachers and institutions were able to use simple games to teach children or college students. The use of games to provide instructional learning has been around for more than two decades, and Director is a tool that has been used to create many of these. Recently, however, Director has also been used to create games meant purely for entertainment. This is largely because of Shockwave, which has enabled developers like myself to distribute games at a low cost on the Web. Recently, Macromedia itself has embraced this game concept and has started promoting Director as a game development tool. They even started to use it to make their own games. They created the ShockRave site first, and then evolved that into the Shockwave.com site and ShockMachine, a standalone game browser for Shockwave content. These moves by Macromedia had an important side-effect. Macromedia added new features and speed to Director 7 and 8 specifically for game development. They did this to help their own content, as well as external game developers. Either way, Director 7 and 8 are now great platforms to develop games with, and future versions will likely continue this trend. Now, let's start making some games. | |