Welcome back to the second part of my “Top-Down RPG Shooter” flash game tutorial. In the last part, we set up a new project and linked it to an external Document Class, and we added the Player to the stage. In this tutorial, we’re going to program keyboard controls to move the player.

Step 1: KeyObject.as

We are going to make use of a really great open-source class called “KeyObject.as“. This class was written by a talented developer named senocular. It provides a really simple but powerful way to check which keyboard keys are pressed.

Copy and paste this class into a new .as actionscript file, and save it as “KeyObject.as” in the same folder as your main project:

package {

	import flash.display.Stage;
	import flash.events.KeyboardEvent;
	import flash.ui.Keyboard;
	import flash.utils.Proxy;
	import flash.utils.flash_proxy;

	/**
	 * The KeyObject class recreates functionality of
	 * Key.isDown of ActionScript 1 and 2
	 *
	 * Usage:
	 * var key:KeyObject = new KeyObject(stage);
	 * if (key.isDown(key.LEFT)) { ... }
	 */
	dynamic public class KeyObject extends Proxy {

		private static var stage:Stage;
		private static var keysDown:Object;

		public function KeyObject(stage:Stage) {
			construct(stage);
		}

		public function construct(stage:Stage):void {
			KeyObject.stage = stage;
			keysDown = new Object();
			stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, keyPressed);
			stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, keyReleased);
		}

		flash_proxy override function getProperty(name:*):* {
			return (name in Keyboard) ? Keyboard[name] : -1;
		}

		public function isDown(keyCode:uint):Boolean {
			return Boolean(keyCode in keysDown);
		}

		public function deconstruct():void {
			stage.removeEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, keyPressed);
			stage.removeEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, keyReleased);
			keysDown = new Object();
			KeyObject.stage = null;
		}

		private function keyPressed(evt:KeyboardEvent):void {
			keysDown[evt.keyCode] = true;
		}

		private function keyReleased(evt:KeyboardEvent):void {
			delete keysDown[evt.keyCode];
		}
	}
}

How do we use this class? Basically, we’re going to create an instance of it called “key” in our Player class (or wherever we need to access the keyboard controls). Then in that class, we can check the Boolean value of the keyObject’s isDown() function for specific keys. We can refer to keys by their unique keyCode. For example, if key.isDown(65) returns true, it means that the “A” keyboard key is currently being pressed.

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