I just typed this up...I hope this helps...Merry christmas:
99.9% of all users on this flash use Macromedia (Adobe) Flash. It is very expensive software, but you can try it out for free. Unfortunatly that is only the 30 day
trial and to buy the whole thing costs $700 or so. But if you are a student (in college, highscool, I think even middle school) you can
get an educational version. It will be about $250. But if your school computers have flash on them, you might be able to ask one of
the teachers for the disk, if they are nice enough and if you ask politely, you might get it for free. The down side of using the
educational version is that you can't (legally) make money off of it or flashes you made with it.
Now that we have that down, there are also some other programs that can produce .swf's but of course, none of those are quiet as
good as flash.
Here are some of the alternatives to flash:
LifeSWF - Free
SWISH Max - $100 or you could download the Free Trial
Anime Studio - $49 (Or for the pro version:
$179) or, you could download the Free Trial
SoThink - $85 or you could download the Free Trial
ToonBoom - $399 or you could download the Free Trial
KoolMoves - $59 or you could download the Free Trial
After you've gotten flash, your going to need to learn how to make animations, games, use actionscript, and a bunch of other stuff.
It takes a while to get good, so don't give up right away, stick with it and you'll eventually get better!
Some tutorials and learning references are:
The Newgrounds Flash Tutorial Section
AS: Main
Animation: Main
Kirupa
AS Dictionary
Tutorial Collab '06
FlashWiki
gotoAndLearn();
ActionScript.Org
Epic 800 Page Tutorial
But remember, if you ever get stuck on something, you can always press F1 in flash and look through their help.
If you are stuck on something, you look through those, and don't find the answer to your problem, you can always ask us. Most of
the time we are going to see an swf or your code. If you need to post an swf your going to have to upload it somehere.
Here are some places where you can upload it:
NGup (Currently Down)
Spam The Web (5-10Mb, they took the # off)
UCAAHUCAAH (15Mb)
Swfer (50Mb)
MegaUpload(500Mb)
Plunder (30Mb)
SaveFile (60Mb)
PutFile (200Mb for video, 25Mb for audio, and 25Mb for flash)
SWFup(10MB I Think)
Rapid Sahre(100Mb)
St1k's Uploader (Unknown size, it doesn't say)
Media Fire (100Mb)
Some other things you might want/need to make a flash:
A Preloader (Very Important)
Newgrounds Raw Materials
Flash Tools
Thanks to UnknownFury for almost all the links (well all except 1) for the tutorials and ALL the links for flash
alternatives...Thank you me for all the uploaders and extras