Assembling The Game or Sim

From MySLife DAS Wiki

1 File Naming
2 Combining Files
3 The Finish
- 3.1 Update the Wiki
- 3.2 Update the Blog:
4 Related Links and Tutorials
5 Students Contributions

Topic Summary: In this topic you will learn how to combine scenes created by different people into a single Flash file (.fla).

File Naming

When working in a group environment, there will be many files created for the team's project. Some files will be for art, some for ActionScript, and some will be complete scenes.

The first step in any collaborative effort is organization:

Make sure that all the FLA files have unique names first and foremost.
If you have multiple files with the same name, the newest file copied to the editor’s computer would overwrite the file currently on the system, this will make you loss a lot of work!

If you run into issues of files with the same name, do one of the following:

Ask your team member to change the file name or right click (or apple-click) on the file from the wiki, and save as (rename).

Combining Files

Now that we have all the files on the editor’s computer, we can now start to piece the whole game together.

Step 1: Open a New File

What would be handy is to go ahead and have Flash open with a new file to be created.

Step 2: Open File to Copy

Now we can open the first file to be copied in to the total game file. You can either go to open file, or go to the file directory where the files are stored, and double-click to open it.

Step 3: Copy Frames

After the first file to be copied is open in the new tab, click on the new tab. Now you’ll see 2 tabs, one tab called “untitled-1” and the other the first file name. The easiest ways to select the contents of the file over is click on the timeline frames and highlight every frame.

Now we need to copy those frames by right click (apple-click), and copy frames.

Step 4: Paste Frames

Now let’s go to the “untitled-1” tab and click on the blank keyframe on the timeline. Now, right click (apple-click) on the blank key frame, and then chose paste frames. This will copy over anything that is also in the library associated with the frames you copied.

Step 5: Repeat

Now, you can close out the file that you opened for the first copy over. On the total game file, on the top layer of the timeline, go ahead and click on the next frame that is absolutely blank. I mean nothing on it what so ever.

Now let’s open the next file in the games sequence. Do the same thing you did for the first copy over, and repeat with the other files until you get everything copied over to the total game file.

The Finish

Now we have all files copied over to the total game file, let’s make sure that the scenes are labeled correctly. Now we have the game, and it’s ready for the ActionScripting.