Book Image

Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds

Book Image

Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds

Overview of this book

Flash virtual worlds are some of the most exciting—and profitable—online business being built today. Using Flash, developers can build interactive environments where users can interact with the virtual world and one another, compete, and have fun. Creating a playful environment on an electronic network presents unique challenges as you combine a fun, upbeat frontend with some serious and complex server logic. This handy book assists you in building amazing virtual worlds in no time by implementing ActionScripts in a Flash IDE. With this book in hand, you will build virtual worlds that have avatars walking around and interacting with non playing characters, completing challenging quests, and allowing users to link with real-world friends. The fun begins with first exploring existing virtual world games such as Club Penguin, Mole, Dofus, and World of Warcraft. We will then design our virtual environment. Then we will create avatars and move the avatars in the virtual world. We will add some triggers to add amusement and life to the virtual world. We will allow the avatars to interact with other players and create a buddy list for each user. Then we will integrate buildings and other environment to the virtual world. We will also let the players interact with non-player characters to complete some tasks. Finally, we move on to add interesting quests to the virtual world, which need to be accomplished by the player to gear up to the next level of the game. This example-rich, hands-on guide sequentially develops a multiplayer virtual world—the platform, the environment, quests, avatars, non-playing characters, and interaction between them.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Making the quest system better


Quests can be more interesting if designed well; we have implemented several technical techniques of implementing different forms of quests. We will discuss several tricks to enhance the quests.

Avoiding linear quests

We discussed the Quest Chain that a quest is enabled only when the players finish another required quest. We should avoid designing all the quests in linear as the players are required to finish them one after the other. The quest chain should not be the only choice for the players to take.

Image a case where there are two friends playing in the virtual world together. The quests are all chained linearly. In the beginning, they start from the first quest and finish several quests together along the quest chain. On the other week, friend A is studying for an examination and stays away from the computer. Friend B, on the other hand, logged into the virtual world and finishes several quests. The problem now is friend A finished the exam and wants...