In keeping with my goal of keeping you all informed about every little detail of the creation process — which you readers probably don’t care about but my writer followers might — I had to create a Flash ad for The Darkening Dream this week. On Tuesday it became apparent that I could really use one posthaste to get a campaign going on Goodreads.
But my attempts to find a contractor who was willing to turn something out in a day or two fell flat and I just bit the bullet and handled it myself. I’ve been doing this a lot on this project. I program and design the website. I did a lot of layout work for my covers and interiors. Anyway, during my Flektor years (2006-7) I did a whole bunch of Flash programming but I never really used the animation tools. So I cracked open the documentation webpages and skimmed the minimum I needed.
The result (a day and a half later):
[swfobj src=”/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/GoodReads.swf” width=”300″ height=”250″]
I don’t think it’s half bad considering I’m not an artist. But I am a programmer, this SWF has a 9k load footprint! It’s perhaps a hair “flashy” and I couldn’t figure out how to fade the text (if anyone knows, tell me in the comments). The alpha channel disappears on text objects. Probably I have to convert them to movieclips or something like that. Flash has all these weird internal concepts like movieclips and symbols that never made a lot of sense either from interface or the API standpoint.
So tell me what you think. And don’t miss out on my Goodreads paperback giveaway either:
Goodreads Book Giveaway
The Darkening Dream
by Andy Gavin
Giveaway ends March 01, 2017.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.