My family has a tradition of dressing up for birthdays, and surprising the guest of honor with laughs and even sometimes humiliation. (All done in love Here are some of the past costumes. (I can’t quite decide which one I want to wear for Halloween)

You are only as old as your family makes you feel. (My 26th birthday)
Old Man

Say Hello, to my little friend. (Playing the Mob for my 27th birthday)
Mobster

Yo, Ho, Yo, Ho a Pirates Life for me. (Kidnapping my two brothers, sister and Dad for their birthdays)
Pirates

Real Life Mario Kart (Mario and Luigi do battle to be king of the Track. My 28th birthday)
Mario Kart

Long live the King (Dressing my brother up as Elvis for his 21st birthday)
Elvis

-Daniel

We play a lot of Halo 3 at the office after work. It’s a lot of fun, and we really take it semi-casually, semi-competitively. We strike a pretty good balance there, and it’s been enjoyable.

Per the Cyber Atheletic League website, a tournament has just been declared to find the best Halo 3 player on Planet Earth. When I first heard of this massive competition, the first thought that came to mind was, “Wow, everyone is going to be massively good at this game at that tournament.”

I then started to ponder what it would actually be like playing in a tournament like that. I play a lot of Halo 3, and by a lot, I mean about 2 hours a night. A lot of people work part-time jobs for that long, and here I am trying to master the Battle Rifle and running away from Spartan lasers. I then look at the people who have played nearly 6-8 hours a day since it’s release, and I realize that for them, Halo is more like a full-time job.

I then wonder what it’s like for the people in this tournament. These people must be the equivalent of those who sleep under their desk every night so that they can save time on their commute… those who will bring a pot of coffee to their desk so they can work three days straight.

Of course, what if? The top prize is $250,000 USD, which is nearly 6 times the average household salary. Maybe Halo 3 can be job…

My Halo 3 Record

… and I realized that I’m getting pretty good at the game. John, Luka and I were rocking it on ‘Hard’ difficulty, and we’d never even played the new songs. Then it dawned on me:

“I’m better at playing Guitar Hero than actually playing a real guitar.”

I guess it’s been an escapist obsession. My hands are huge, so learning how to hit the DARN B CHORD isn’t nearly as easy as picking up another star on ‘Freya’ expert difficulty.

Maybe I should go home and practice my chords tonight.

For the past few days, I have been aggravated by a bizarre bug that was popping up in Space Lasers. For some reason, interactive game elements that highlight when selected were not highlighting with every click. It was more like every other click… or every other, other, other click. Blargh! Nothing in my code seemed out of place, and I even tried to emulate it in a test file. No dice.

FINALLY… I figured out that if a TextField is at a higher depth in a DisplayObject’s display list and is “covering” a display object with MouseEvent listeners attached to it, the TextField absorbs most of the MouseEvents. All I had to do was adjust the display list order of my root DisplayObject to fix the glitch. HOURS OF AGGRAVATION over a ridiculous Flash 9.0 Player discrepency! Hooargh!!

I think I’m most frustrated that I couldn’t find anything like this in the Adobe KnowledgeBase/Forums.

Just another bump on the road to mastering Actionscript 3.0.

Grrr!

As you can see on our Blog, we’ve launched our new logo. This design will be used on the new ‘Armor Games 2.0′ as well.

Thoughts???

-Daniel

Here’s another screen shot of the redesign. Enjoy!

(This is how part of the archive pages will look)

-Daniel

On Friday the ‘Armor Office’ left early and headed over to K1-Kart Racing for some friendly competition. The Karts are compatible of speeds in excess of 80 mph but the track limits them to around 40 mph. You can see all our exciting photos here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danmcneely/sets/72157602786433247/

The smoke has cleared and in the end there was less than 3 seconds between most of the racers!

-Daniel

A few days ago, just getting off the heals of the Dark Cut 2 release, I started on a bizarre project involving particles, balls, and clouds. Seems like the sort of game I would make, given that Ball Revamped had these features as well. But this game is a bit different.

TBA (acronym definition to be decided) is a game of skill, timing, and quick-planning. The playing field is a vast array of different color-coded cannons, each with special firing abilities to launch your ball across the map. Like Ball Revamped, you start somewhere and try to get to another without hitting walls or other obstacles. The game solely operates on jumping from port to port as fast as possible.

To jump from port to port, it’s just a matter of using the only key in the game: the space bar. Seems easy, but as the ports start to move, the level starts to shift, it becomes a matter of mayhem and death! There should be a good 30 challenging levels in this release, each with a set par time to challenge your reflexes.

As always there will be plenty of particles to go around. My recent releases have been lacking in the amount of on-screen garble, and I hope to reintroduce a bit of my old style back into the mix. I love dumping as many particles onto the screen as possible; games like Geometry Wars make me giggle every time I play them.

Currently I am making levels and trying to find music. I have had a lot of problems with music on this one, because I am not sure whether I want to go for a more ambient or techno/dance style of music. The music will definitely set the tone for this entire game, and I want to make sure I get a good complement of gameplay and soundtrack. I wouldn’t want to end up with some hard-thumping tune that has people reaching for the mute button.

Keep a look out for it next week! It should be a lot of fun.

-John

The Armor Games Team (Daniel, John, James, & Luka) has been working hard on a complete redesign for ArmorGame . We are currently over a month into production and things are coming along great.

Each week we’ll be posting a new image of some part of the website. I’ll be posting two images. The first image will be concept and the second image will be the completed project.

*James was responsible for all the concept drawings and He did a great job in letting our designer know exactly what we wanted.

Concept

Finished Design

Enjoy!

-Armor Games Team

Here’s an image of my little production white board. It shows how I go about planning flash development projects. You can see how I’ve been planning the underlying container structure, the beam refection algorithms, custom keyboard control schemes, and mapping out the various game elements and their functionality.

I prefer visuals over text, so if I can have a drawing or a diagram of what I’m trying to accomplish, things go by a lot quicker and my code doesn’t start to spaghetti as much. I think I’ll post up as many of the white board pics as I can so that anyone who’s interested in flash development can get a little idea of the pre-production process. I’m by no means an expert in what I do, but still, I know that I would have killed for something like this when I was first starting off in game development.

Enjoy!