NickCummings.com

Flash is so frustrating for me. It’s not that the program is especially difficult to learn or terribly designed, necessarily; I’m just irritated that I’m choosing the slow but steady path in teaching myself how to use it again after years without so much as dabbling in the software.

The last Flash project I made was completed in late 2006, so it’s been nearly four years since I touched the software. Things are fundamentally similar, even after Adobe bought out Macromedia and attempted to Adobe-ize the interface (largely a good thing), so the pace at which my beginner-level Lynda.com tutorials are moving is maddening. I’m trying to remind myself that if I just stick to it and take my time to really nail the fundamentals I’ll be better off in the long run, but that’s not how I’ve taught myself tools in the past. At a certain point, guided instruction is far less helpful than poking around for hours and figuring out things through trial and error. It’s how I got a feel for Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro and Vegas. Even when I was 10 years old and first poking around in HyperCard on an old Macintosh, the books I read only got me so far — after a while I wanted to simply see how far my knowledge and imagination could take me.

I’m frustrated because my goal from the outset has been to start making games. The consensus from all sides of the games industry is that the only way to become great at making games is to just start making games and keep making them. There’s no introductory path or universal hierarchy of toolsets; all that matters is being able to make something that works and, ideally, can speak for itself why it was worth making.

So I’ll stick with the ten-minute explanations of how to use the shape tools to draw every sort of oval the mind can conjure up. I’ll try not to fall asleep. But fortunately, if I stick with my schedule I’ll be scripting within a week, and that’s when things get interesting.