Shockwave is one of the largest game sites on the internet, and its an honor to get one of our games featured on their homepage.

Make sure to send a big congratulations to John, the mastermind behind the project.

Want to Play?? (Click Here)

-Daniel

This RPG has been serious business, so I am happy to say that I am starting to wrap things up this week. I just have to problem-solve a few more things, as illustrated above, but for the most part everything is getting done.

Making this game has been quite a journey for me. It started as a raw concept involving trading, moving things around, etc. all sketched out on about 4 whiteboards, and has wound up as a game somehow. Each day I took the liberty to try to program a very specific thing… whether it was the exchange of money from the player to the selling engine, or the exchanging of diamonds for a new vessel. It takes a lot to do very simple transactions in this game.

Last week was all about the traveling, and the traveling went quite well. You can choose between seven different vessels to use, and depending on your vessel you get to employ other members of your party. The system has to be careful about who gets employed and the power they contribute to the party, so it was a challenge to make the game limit the power you can achieve while not completely nerfing the game so that you get killed easily. Balance is a tricky thing.

Overall, I think it is going to be a phenomenal game, I just hope I can live up to the expectations of the Flash community. RPG’s have long and far been a specialized trade, and my contributions have always been arcade in style moreso than anything adventure/RPG related.

So this is it! Time to wrap things up!

Slightly later than I intended, this post. But the good news is that SHIFT 2 is ready to play on Armor for the next few days ( until Friday) before it begins its rounds elsewhere on the net. Have fun

Hey, Dim here. The artist of The Super Flash Bros.

Thought I’d start off by shedding some light on the inner workings of my creative process - or rather, expose it for what it is!

The James the Zebra series has always been cute, simple, arcadey and fairly successful. But I’m noticing more and more that a lot of the elements I put into it visually are borrowed directly from other Video Games I’ve played. I’m not ashamed, I’m sure everyone does this! In fact - its nice to know I have all sorts of inspiration to draw from.

If you’ve played the games you’ll know that the Eponymous zebra is a simple 2D character with very little detail. Did you know his design was taken directly from another game, The Bounce , by monkokio and THEBBQ? Heres the proof!

Tom and I both really love The Bounce so we were proud to continue the giraffe’s legacy within James. The creators were kind enough to send us the vector art for the Giraffe when I asked them!

The next James game will be “James the Pirate Zebra” and its very nearly finished! Here’s a shot I did of a mockup of the game. Although the final game looks nothing like this you can see I had Mario Sunshine’s HUD in my head at the time…

And the clouds in the final design were very directly inspired by those of Monkey Island 3 (Which is one of the greatest games ever)

I guess I’m not always out to innovate…hehe. Anyway the final game is looking great, it has the best intro so far by a long way, you guys are gonna love it.

-Dim

Hey guys, Tom of The Super Flash Bros here, Dan has just given Dim and I permission to post here on the Armor Blog, which is awesome. If you don’t know us, we’ve been hanging around Newgrounds.com for about 6 years now, making movies and games, and working for Armor Games for over a year.

So, onto the topic of my first post -Object Oriented Programming, or OOP for short. Chances are, if you’ve been looking into programming for any length of time, you’ll have at least heard the term before. If you’re not already using it, then you’ll probably be using something akin to Procedural Programming (defining functions on the timeline and on MovieClips) or perhaps even Prototype-based Programming (adding functionality to Flash’s in-built classes with the prototype property). While it’s true that the best way to code is whatever way works for you, I’m going to show you some really neat uses of OOP and some very good reasons for using it.

Read more »

Every year 16,000 bikers gather @ 5:45a.m and ride the empty streets of Los Angeles before the LA Marathon takes place. The route is 23-miles, and it goes by fast. Theres nothing more satisfying than having the busiest streets in the city shut down, so we can ride our bikes on them.

This is the 2nd year I’ve done it, and I plan on doing it again next year. Anyone who lives close to LA should come out for the event next year.

Official Website

-Daniel

The RPG I am currently working on is definitely rolling well, but recently I got caught up on character development.  I pondered to myself, how am I going to draw, animate, and coordinate a whole slew of different characters?

I decided the easiest way to do this is to allow the computer to decide different outfits, based on a selection of different wardrobe items.  There are 15 different shirts, 17 different pants, 15 different hair/hat types, and 7 different racial tones.  While the main character is fully customizable, the rest of the other characters will be chosen automatically from the outfit selector.

Hopefully this will allow the RPG experience to not be held up by enemies that all look the same and function like duplicated robots!

I am at the halfway point of my RPG, and I am running ahead of schedule.  The game currently has 50 different cities spread across an entire continent, with a massive economic system based on several factors such as weather, climate, supply and demand, and technology.  This half of the game was extremely strenuous for me, but nonetheless interesting because I have never made a game like this before.  It’s fun when hard work results in something to be proud of.

The second half of the game will be focused on the traveling.  The game has two primary parts: trade and travel.  In order to get from one city to another, it requires traveling.  This makes the game a little more interesting  than just saying “I want to go here”.  There are many dangers and wonderful things that may happen on the road, and that is the part I am going to work on for the next two weeks.  Also, I am going to be working on the important goal of making an item synthesis section, which will allow you to create your own items based on using commodity goods.  This part should be interesting, because in order to give your character more power, you need to have a weapon and amass an army.

When I start getting closer to the battle engine, I’ll start to talk about that a bit more… but until then, it’s off to working on item customization!

I’m thrilled with the number of submissions I’ve received so far, and it’s reaching the point where I’m not going to be able to test them all if they keep coming in like this, so I’m setting a deadline of the 4th of Feb[Edit Whoops I meant 4th March] to get your submissions in if you want them viewed for inclusion of SHIFT 2. Cheers