Prashanth Hirematada

Prashanth Hirematada, is the founder of Gamantra, a game technology company focused on Network engines and server platforms. Prior to founding Gamantra in 2006, he was a Chief Architect at Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd., where he was responsible for creating a common game development platform for all MMOG initiatives at Shanda. He joined Shanda in 2004 through Shanda's acquisition of Zona, Inc., a MMOG game technology company, headquartered in Santa Clara, USA. At Zona, as a Technical Chief Architect, he was responsible for server-side architecture and implementation of MMOG framework. Prior to joining Zona in 2001, Prashanth worked in various Silicon Valley based technology start-up companies developing software at various levels for well over seven years.

His master's thesis was a distributed implementation of the Message Passing Library (MPI) on a heterogeneous network of workstations including Solaris, HP-UX, OpenStep, and Windows-NT. He received his MS in Computer Science from the California State University, Sacramento, California, in 1994 and his BS in Computer Science from Bangalore University, Bangalore, India in 1992. You can contact him at prash@gamantra.com.

The book provides all the essentials needed to implement a fully featured multiplayer game in Flash. It begins by dissecting a basic hello-world example providing its code and an insight into each feature that is required. Following the book is easy because of the excellent illustrations and working code samples. Four complete game implementations with increasing complexity are discussed; each example is presented with detailed design, implementation code, and screenshots.