Having spent most of my time thus far developing Anthem with the Flash 9 Alpha, I hadn’t yet tried using Components (Because the Flash 9 Alpha didn’t support them), and I was hesitant to try them, because they seemed fairly complex for what I wanted to do with them.

I just did a bit of research, and it turns out they’re incredibly easy to set up, and incredibly useful for making levels.

It’s as simple as right clicking on a MovieClip in the library, going to “Component Definition…”, filling in the “Class” field, and adding some Parameters.

Once that’s set up, you can drag that MovieClip from the library, and with it selected on the stage, go to the Parameters panel and adjust any of the Parameters you exposed, for that instance.

For example, I can open up a level MovieClip, drag an enemy from the library on to the level, select that instance and adjust it’s health, move speed, reaction speed, damage multiplier, or whatever. And aside from making enemy instances unique, it’s very useful for setting up stuff like triggers, enemy spawners, and whatever else you can think of.

Might not seem like much, but this will make things a lot easier for both content creation, and programming. Wish I’d tried it earlier. (:

-Matt