A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending Flash Camp Philadelphia. It was a great conference -- nice atmosphere and interesting people! I'm looking forward to it again next year.

I was also invited to speak at the conference, so I gave a talk on ActionScript 3 game programming. I spoke about how games are built, the pros and cons of the standard game inheritance hierarchy, and a few alternatives to it. I also talked about some techniques such as:

- Timing using getTimer()
- Decoupling game logic and animation from Flash Player's frame rate
- Rolling your own display list for benefits such as depth sorting
- Using the Flex Builder profiler to optimize your game

A lot of these techniques are used by the newer game frameworks such as Flixel, so it's good to have an understanding of what's going on behind the scenes!

I've uploaded the slides and sample code. Hopefully someone finds it useful!

ActionScript3.0 Game Architecture - download slides and sample code