FAMES or AMES for Flash development? Open source alternatives to Flash CS4?

Question

Hi,

A brief preface: I'm in a game design class where our project for the next 4-6 weeks will be to create a Flash game. The group is 5 people, one of whom is a digital artist in another department. Our digital artist will be supplying images/music where appropriate, but won't be using Flash CS4 (probably Photoshop or another image editor).

Has anyone used FAMES/AMES to create Flash movies? Our instructor has basically given us that as our best option. It's an open source project that aims to allow developers to create Flash movies without spending a lot of money. You edit the ActionScript code in Eclipse, as far as I can tell. The documentation for it is very sparse, and I'm hesitant because I haven't heard much about it.

Is Flash development going to be very difficult by just using image files and music? We're all very new to Flash, but how is sprite creation going to work if our artist creates images and we create code? I know that in CS4 everything is very integrated, and sprite creation and project management is relatively straightforward.

Are there any better alternatives to FAMES/AMES? I've heard of FlashDevelop, but I don't really know how it integrates with our problem of using images from an outside source. Are there any suites that allow for Flash development at a low cost, or is there a group of tools that our team can use to better produce Flash?

EDIT: I've found that Flex Builder 3 Pro can be obtained for free as a student license. How is Flex Builder for developing Flash games?

Answer 1

Depending on your comfort level, FlashDevelop is probably your best choice. FlashDevelop is actively supported by the community, and there's a bunch of tutorials out there on how to use it for game development. Flixel and Flashpunk are two game libraries that are pretty popular right now, and both can be used via FlashDevelop. Check the forums for both of those sites, even if you don't want to use either library, they can walk you through how to embed assets, etc, etc.