What skills are a flash game programmer/art designer expected to have?

I was wondering what skills are required of a flash programmer? Do they generally just know actionscript and have the art designer deal with the art/animations? Or does the programmer know both actionscript/animations and the art designer only makes static pictures?



I see a lot of duo collaborated projects for games with one programmer and one art designer. I was just wondering what are the specific tasks that they do. Thanks a lot!What skills are a flash game programmer/art designer expected to have?
I have worked on a team before where we built an online game which used flash. So maybe I can give some insight.

Usually an art designer doesn't need to know much about flash. In fact they can literally know nothing. But to collaborate with a programmer it always helps if they know how to do simple animations in flash or have used the program before. This just makes the communication between the 2 much simpler.

For example an image that rotates in a full 360 degree circle. If the art designer made an image with a ton of frames where the image rotates a full 360 degrees and hands it in to me I would say "You know I can just rotate that image with smoother animations through AS3. Just send me the one image next time." Having someone who knows the program will avoid things like this as an art/graphics designer.

So to answer your question, as a programmer you will definitely need to know how to do animations. Especially if you are not using frames but using timed animation. Timed animation is, in my opinion, a better way of doing animations in games. You can add more complexity to things like bullet time (matrix style). Basically decrease the distance per second which will slow all animations on screen. There are much more advantages but I won't go through them now.

There is a lot of books that can help you build games using flash Action Script 3. They also go over some instances where a programmer will have to work with a graphic designer and the problems that may come up.

Here is the book that helped me in the past available on amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/ActionScript-3-0-G鈥?/a>

(I actually used the edition before this one but they go over similar stuff)

Here is that books website:
http://www.flashgameu.com/