Flash Tutorials

Please note that these tutorials were developed using Macromedia Flash MX.

Beginners Tutorials | Games Tutorials | Other Tutorials

Flash Introductory Course

These are the course notes, files and useful links for a short introductory course in Macromedia Flash that I teach. The course is intended to last around 8 hours, and is usually divided into 4 2-hour sessions.

Hours 1-2

The first two hours are spent learning about the Flash interface, drawing tools and basic animation. Much of this can best be learned from the lessons and tutorials that come with Flash itself, however the following web links are amongst my favourites on these topics:

Useful Links

Training Cafe - free online training courses for Macromedia products

A Tweening We Will Go - Flash tweening tutorial


Hours 3-4

Hours 3 and 4 are spent learning about creating buttons and adding simple interactivity - allowing navigation between different frames of the timeline.

Building a button/frame navigation system

Useful Links

Flash buttons tutorial


Hours 5-6

Hours 5 & 6 concentrate on using multimedia elements in Flash - bitmap images, sound and video.

Sound file

A short Quicktime video clip to download (2.6MB)

Useful Links

Using Video in Flash


Hours 7-8

Hours 7 & 8 introduce more complex ActionScript, processing user input, and conditional logic (if statements).

Using Input Text 1

Using Input Text 2

Using Input Text 3

Games 1 - random number guessing game

Useful Links

Atomic Learning - video training for a number of popular applications, including Flash.
Suggested by Raymond Domin.

LearnFlash.com - sells video tutorials for learning Flash - they send you free videos each week if you subscribe.

Flash Kit - one of the most respected Flash tutorial sites on the web - some articles can be a bit 'techie'.

GotoAndPlay - a forum for Flash game programmers


Games Tutorials

Games 1 - random number guessing game

Games 2 - controlling a player with the keyboard

Games 3 - detecting collisions

Games 4 - Space Shuttle Game


Other Tutorials

Preloader tutorial

Preloader file (fla)

Preloader example - click on a video thumbnail

Creating a slider
Slider FLA

Creating a drop down menu
Menu FLA

Multiple Choice Quiz Template (FLA)