I tried to do this prematurely. I didn't fully understand everything about ActionScript, I was just trying to finish projects to finish this Independent Study. This was done through a lesson at Cartoon Smart and I learned quite a bit about the use of ActionScript, even if I didn't fully understand everything that was going on. This was the first ActionScript lesson I took from CartoonSmart, and I noticed that he didn't declare his variables, and yet it still worked. So, actually, this was where I discovered you didn't have to. Though, after finding that out I went back and changed the scrolling text and found out that I really didn't have to! I don't know, I just thought that maybe for what I was doing there I had to for some reason. But it was through CartoonSmart that I saw how to really use ActionScript and the advantages. I did learn some new commands such as "onEnterFrame" and learned the beginning of using "this." and "_parent" and _root", but I learned more in the tutorials I took later. The main thing that I really learned was the use of the random function. If you notice, the ball is dropped randomly from the top of the board after it gets to the bottom.
I didn't really face any challenges since I was led through the process step-by-step in the tutorial. One thing that was frustrating was that how he was showing to do the animation for the ball hitting the bumper was something that only Flash 8 could do (at least as far as I could tell) and I have Flash 7. So, I had to improvise with my own animation.
Just as a sidenote, all of the artwork below (except for the light-up animation) was done by Justin from CartoonSmart.com.
I'd gladly show the code I used for the lesson, but I purchased the tutorial so I doubt that Justin would like to see me showing the code he taught on the internet for free. Also, it'd be difficult to show becuase it was spread out throughout the program in different objects.
