How to Make UI Components for FlashPunk Games

It’s not easy to create the UI side of your game with FlashPunk, as it doesn’t include any UI components like buttons or text fields by default. This isn’t a restriction, though; it just means you’re completely free to create the UI exactly as you like. But you need to know how to do it first! This tutorial will teach you how to build some custom UI components, and show you the different ways you can customize them to exactly fit the style of your game.

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Final Result Preview

Let’s take a look at the final result we will be working towards:

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Step 1: Introduction

Many FlashPunk users tend to have problems with the UI side of their games. There’s no ‘easy’ way of making buttons and other interactible-elements like text fields or checkboxes, for example, in FlashPunk. No Button class.
That may seem of a restriction, yes, and many newcomers find it a little bit confusing at first… but there’s a reason behind that. Games, each one of them, tend to have a custom user interface unique to themselves, which design is related to the mechanics or theme of the game itself. You won’t see any good game (generally speaking) that has the default window buttons for its controls!
We could argue that, in this case, there could be some classes providen with the bare-bones of the functionality, the minimum required for some buttons to work, and leave the graphic side to the user… yes, that is true… but the generalization we would have to use in those classes would be either too big and confusing or too specific and not costumizable enough. (believe me, I was in charge of the semi-failed semi-working Punk.UI project.) We will learn how to code our own components instead!
So what this tutorial is going to show you is how to build your own UI elements for your game in FlashPunk, give them behaviour, and show some tricks to make their graphic part with the most used techniques… but remember that each of your games will need a different UI graphically-wise!
As the tutorial is really lengthy, it’s been divided into multiple parts. This first part will teach you how to build each component, without the eye-candy and costumization. We will introduce these later.
To code the example SWF with our UI, we are going to use FlashPunk, as this is a FlashPunk tutorial, and FlashDevelop for the IDE. If you feel more comfortable with another IDE, like FlashBuilder, you are free to use that, just adapt the specific parts of this tutorial.
Previous knowledge on FlashPunk is needed to follow this tutorial. This is not a general FlashPunk tutorial, this is a UI tutorial using FlashPunk. If you don’t know FlashPunk, you can take a look at the Introductory FlashPunk tutorials on Activetuts+ and also check out the official FlashPunk tutorials.
Read more: How to Make UI Components for FlashPunk Games