TomMannino.com

I’ve been doing a bit of soul searching recently re: being and/or wanting to be a “computer programmer” vs. an “artist.” This article caught my eye because I’m always wondering how qualified I am to be an ActionScript developer, according to other people

The interesting thing is, as a multimedia developer of any kind, you really frankly do need to at least ‘know of’ the capabilities of everything on this list.  The smaller the team, the more you will be expected to be able to do most/all of this stuff, especially as time goes by.

This is also why Flash is such an interesting animal, nowadays.  I think a lot of my abilities as a web producer come entirely from having to know ‘this list.’  Everything from estimating time to impliment features, the practicality of proposed features, working with artists, working with web developers and database people.

Lastly, this list applys completely to being a Flash/AS Developer; it speaks nothing of game creation.  That’s an entirely seperate list, probably an order of magnitute more involved, especially considering each and every type of game requires a different skillset.  Not only do you have to know how to use the tools to make the game, you need to know how to program the parts that your game requires; AI, logic, physics, hit testing, state engines, all that good stuff.

Going down this list is a little inspirational; stuff like this doesn’t really get represented well on a resume, it comes up when you’re in the trenches and a random question comes up, especially when working with data going back and forth to a server, or even database schemas.

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2009/07/flash_actionscr.html