Essentially because of many of you, our book, the “Essential Guide to Flash Games, Building Interactive Entertainment in As3”, actually paid Steve and I a royalty yesterday (even with that crazy-long title). After receiving a years worth of the most puzzling (I wish I could show one here) advance recoup statements possible, we finally received an extra email  that detailed out (in its own uniquely puzzling manner), to our amazement, that we were going to be paid an extra check worth 75% of our original advance.

Now, to say that Steve and were and still are slightly disappointed with the final product would be an understatement, so this gives us hope that we will be able to convince the publisher to allow us to create a second edition some time.   We think the final product turned out very well, but enough quality wrinkles are there to make us hope to get a version 2 out some time soon. When we were going through the final revision for the first version, Flash Player 10.1 was released and it broke every game in the book. We had based most of the code and engine off of the sleep-based active render  timer that I created with my buddy Chris in 2008. Flash player 10.1 killed this timer by making it run very poorly.  With only a single month left before the final edition was due, we completely re-wrote the engine, each game, and every chapter as we were doing PDF proofs.   Any experienced author will tell you that this is NOT the place or time to re-write a 750 page book, but we were NOT experienced authors. We just knew that we  needed to get a new timer and game engine in that would work with FP 10.1.

In any case, we were successful in getting the chapters and games re-written in the PDF proofs, but it was at the expense of some of the care we normally would have taken to ensure that everything was perfect in all of the chapters. PDF proofs are not easy to edit or update and some of the notes and marks were not placed in the final edition. 99.5% of the book is correct, all the games run fine, and all of the explanations and code samples work, but we still need an errata page that helps to clear up some of the misprints and text left over from the version 1 to version 2 re-writes.

We are just now finishing up our 600 some-odd page O’Reilly book on the HTML5 Canvas (games are used in most of the examples, but it is not strictly a game dev book).  There was no giant version 1 to version 2 re-write this time, so we hope to have a much cleaner first edition. Who knows, with some luck, this one might re-coup and make a little cash also.  One thing we had a chance to cover in much greater depth in this Canvas book are drawing, matrix transformations, and physics,. We also got to delve into video, sound, blitting (a must), game development, 3d, multiplayer, iPhone development and much more.

Anyway, we wanted to thank everyone who bought a copy of the Essential Guide To Flash Games, and please feel free to keep asking for help of any kind if you are stuck going through the chapters in the book.