Real-World Flash Game Development

5MANAGING YOUR ASSETS/WORKING WITH GRAPHICS

While code is certainly a huge part of most games, the assets the code manipulates (art, sounds, text) are usually equally important. Unlike most programming languages where such resources reside as individual files separate from the code, every Flash file has an associated library that contains all the assets that will get bundled into the SWF at compile time. Once you have imported an asset into your library, you no longer need the external file unless you make updates to it. This allows for easier access by multiple developers, since someone who needs to work on a Flash file only needs the FLA in most cases. While you could arguably create a SWF that was all code and loaded in all of its resources ...