I recently got an email asking me if about my opinion of Director for casual games, and whether I was going to continue to use Director. In short, I think Director is the perfect choice for casual (and beyond) game development. Below you’ll find an expanded version of the reply I sent. In this post I’ll talk about what makes director great for games, discuss facts about some of the Director myths out there, a bit about the future of Director, how to get started making games with Director, and some great samples of games made with Director.

Highlights of using Adobe Director for games

Why do I think Director is great for games? Here’s why in a nutshell:

• Support for web-based games, Windows and Mac downloads. There’s a minimum amount of conversion required, and really quite simple to have one Director file make games for both Mac and Windows, as well as in a web browser.
• Great support for bitmap sprite handling. Director’s powerful sprite engine and bitmap compositing is pretty easy to use and perfect for games.
• Lots of support for game requirements natively and via xtras. Things like collision detection, ability to change screen resolution, physics engines, multiplayer communication support, mouse centering/repositioning are all really important for game development, and Director supports all this and more.
• 3D capability. While it’s not the latest and greatest 3d engine anymore, it’s the only big-name web plug in out there that supports 3d.
• net communication and media streaming built in. This makes it pretty well suited for streaming animation and music, doing online multiplayer games, dynamic content fetching, etc.
• “Adobe” and “Shockwave” are pretty well known, so it’s more likely people will take the time to install the Shockwave plug in if they don’t already have it, compared to other game engine plug ins out there.
• Very easy to learn to use. It is by far the easiest programming package I’ve ever used to get real games up and running quickly. It was much easier for me to learn and use than Flash was.

I believe some of those bullet points even make it a better choice over Flash. Now to be clear, I’m not saying Director is the absolute best no matter what game you’re trying to make, only that still is incredibly well suited for game development.

Busting some myths about Director

Just to list a bit more about why I think Director is a great choice for casual games, I’m going to do a little bit of myth busting about Director for those who may not be too familiar with it.

• Director isn’t dead. It was neglected a bit these last few years under Macromedia, but Director still runs great on Windows and Mac, and Adobe has announced a new version, and a commitment to making it compatible with the new OSes and hardware.
• Director isn’t slow anymore. Back in the days of Iron Helix and Total Distortion Director had some pretty slow and unresponsive high-profile games, and frankly it’s main reputation was for hideously unusable student-project CD-ROMs. But those days are long gone. Today Director is snappy and responsive, both it’s programming language and it’s graphics engine.
• Director isn’t an old-fashioned Hypertalk-style programming language. Are you cringing at the thought of having to write code like “put the contents of Textfield into CommentBody”? While Director still supports verbose lingo (as it’s called), it is more common to use “object.property”-style dot syntax, as well as full JavaScript if you prefer. On top of that, it supports OOP concepts like object inheritance, script instancing, and more.
• Director can be used to make virtually every style of game out there. Again, back in the old days it was a challenge to get good performance out of scrolling games and games with lots of moving objects, and certain tricks had to be developed in order to fake that kind of functionality. I remember an old online debate on a Director forum as to whether or not Director could be used to make a Starcraft style game. Today, there’s no debate, the answer is yes. Director is used to create casual games, first person shooters, and Massively Multiplayer RPGs.
• Director’s file sizes are no longer an issue. It used to be that a 5mb game was pushing the limits, and Flash was favored over Director to keep file sizes down. Even so, Director can make a 5mb game no problem. But today the industry is seeing larger and larger casual game successes, like the 28mb Hidden Expedition: Titanic and the crazy-big 74mb Travelogue 360: Paris. Director is excellent at file compression and can make pretty small games, but also scales up. And it’s net streaming capabilities allow for more possibilities.

The future with Director

A lot of people wonder about where Director is headed and wonder if they should time and money into using it. My strategy with using Director for my own games has been pretty straightforward. I’m going to continue to use Director for making games until either my games and ideas outgrow what Director can do, or until Director ceases to function on my target platform, which is primarily Windows (and it currently works great). As I’ve previously mentioned, Adobe has announced that there will be a new version of Director and as much I’d love to see new features and capabilities, the only thing that is required for me to continue to use Director is support of the new Mac and Windows OSes and hardware. And I have no reason to believe that Director 11 won’t address that. So I see myself continuing to use Director for a long time to come.

Get started making games with Adobe Director

If you’ve never used Director and are interested in how to use it for making games, I can suggest going to the Adobe Director site and download the 30 day trial of Director.

I’ve used Director to make two commerical games: Rocknor’s Bad Day (a scrolling game), and Rocknor’s Donut Factory, a logic puzzle game. But I didn’t start with those games. One of the first things I ever did with Director was follow the Invadirs tutorial, which is still on the web right here:

http://brennan.young.net/Edu/Lingvad.html

It’s really easy to follow and it taught me all about making games in Director; it gets some of the basic principles laid out without being too complex for beginners. One problem with this tutorial is that it is ancient and was written using the old-school “verbose syntax” of Lingo, although Director now uses “dot syntax” or Javascript if you want. But as I followed it I converted the code from “verbose syntax” to “dot syntax”, to update it. It was pretty simple, it just means turning the Verbose code (like this below)

set mySprite to the spritenum of me
set the locH of sprite mySprite to the mouseH

To Dot syntax, (like this below)

mySprite = me.spritenum
sprite(mySprite).locH = the mouseH

If you can’t figure out how to convert a line from Verbose to Dot, don’t worry about it, Director still supports verbose syntax and you can mix and match whenever you want.

After doing the invadirs tutorial half-way though, I jumped ship and started making my own game that was similar to Atari Adventure, just as a test. It really was incredibly easy to get going.

Other game examples

If you’re interested in what games people are making with Director, check out some of these fine places on the web:

• Robotduck.com Cool little web games ranging from simple mini-games and 2d platformers to 3D snowball fights, all done with Director.
• Phosphor Demo a Halo-like 3d first person shooter; this link is to just a test of the game.
• Sherwood Dungeon, a massively-multiplayer Online RPG. Also check out the other games on Maidmarian.com.
• Rocknor’s Donut Factory My own logic puzzle game for Windows. I’ve not yet gotten around to making a mac version (sorry!).

Got other cool shockwave games to showcase? Let us know in the comments.

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