Hello Crush the Castle fans!

The King is looking for some much needed feedback on all things Crush the Castle. Improvements, additions, subtractions, multiplcations, etc.  The King values each and everyone of your comments (good and bad), and looks to the future of the crushing castles.

To give your feedback, head to Crush the Castle Feedback and give him your one must HAVE feature as well as one feature you would like to see CHANGED or REMOVED.

The King thanks each of you for your feedback and wishes everybody happy crushing.

I just launched my latest game called Phage Wars 2, the sequel to Phage Wars. The game consists of genetically modifying a virus and competing against other viruses for total domination. The game is centered around fast paced strategy where you must take over as many cells as possible to eradicate all foreign life forms.

If you are unfamiliar with the original Phage Wars, here is a little bit of back story. When I was in college, I had to do a senior project before I graduated. After a doing a fair amount of research on what style game I wanted I came across this game called Galcon for the iPhone (also on the Mac). I loved the gameplay and found that I wanted to make something similar in Flash. I had previously built an AI engine from another project in college so I was already halfway there. The cellular life forms idea came from my professor wanting to see a game centered on microscopic life. Needless to say I got an “A” on the project and ended up collaborating with Armor as a sponsor for the game.

Phage Wars 1 was a huge technical challenge for me, as I really wanted to pit hundreds of viruses against each other. I ended up optimizing the game so much that I could get 500 viruses on screen and still have it run within a decent frame rate. I also found that the power of Flash 10 helped a little bit as well, which is why the original had such a large disclaimer for requiring Flash 10.

When I was tasked with Phage Wars 2, I wanted to do something different with the UI as well. Phage Wars 1 had hardly any UI, so I figured the sequel should have a lot. I also didn’t want to do the typical game menus that you see in every game either. Instead I wanted to create a testing environment where you run an experiment and see a bunch of data afterwards, kind of like a science lab. Going with that theme, I always remembered looking at the equipment scientists use and how old most of their computers were archaic and built on legacy software. I tried to replicate that as much as possible, harking back to the old Mac OS 6 and 7 for reference. I was lucky enough to collaborate with John on the UI, so that really helped a lot.

I also wanted to create new elements of gameplay that I wanted in the original, but never implemented. These are the new cell types and the Genome Sequencer. The sequencer came about from hearing Carlie talk about her biology classes and how the Genome is usually represented as a chart. This ended up being the perfect way to upgrade your virus over the course of the game. Using Gene Proteins to upgrade your virus, rather than the typical point based system.

Phage Wars 2 plays out more like a science experiment, than a typical game. I’ve added enough geeky things in it that I hope play to some internal geek in us all.

If you haven’t played Phage Wars 2 yet, check it out at Armor Games here. If you’ve played #2, but haven’t played the #1, check out the original here.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye! The King has ordered his people to build him as many castles as he desires.

Crush the Castle: Player Pack is coming and the king is looking for some more castles to crush. If you think you have what it takes or have the perfect castle, feel free to submit your castle here: Crush the Castle - Custom Castle Submission Form. Castles can only be submitted through this form, so no posting castles in the comments (The King will be very displeased). The final due date for castle submissions is 6/22/09 12:00AM PST. If you submit a castle and need to update it for whatever reason during that time, submit the changed castle code and put in the comments which castle this is an update for.

Feel free to check out Crush the Castle and Crush the Castle - Custom Castles Forum Post for some ideas on castles. However, you must be the sole creator of the castle you submit, as the King does not want plagiarized castles.

Some notes before you build your castle:

• There is no limit to the number of shots that can be fired.
• Castles must have at least one member of royalty.
• Castles cannot be impossible, as that makes the King very unhappy.

Happy Building!

Con and I just launched our latest game called Crush the Castle. I tackled code and Con did the art. The game consists of destroying castles with a huge Medievil Trebuchet. What more could you want?

Little bit of history on this game, just about every one at the office here loved Castle Clout by Liam Bowmers so we decided to make our own version. We were lucky enough to get permission from Liam as well.

To give even further inspiration, John and I decided to make our own Trebuchet in the office here with a fair amount of success. After terrorizing the town with it for a few hours, it was off to actual development.

I started doing some research on 2D physics engines, and I realized there are quite a few out there. One of the most prominent ones used in the flash community that I saw is Box2D. Now I did some tests with Box2D and it is very fast and powerful, but one of the things that bugged me was that it was a direct port of the C++ version and that it had very little done to it for Flash optimizations.

I did some more research and found another awesome engine that suited my needs perfectly. It’s called Glaze and it’s made by Richard Jewson and it’s fast. Really fast. I mean I was able to throw quite a bit at it before I saw any stutter. This meant that castles could be huge and menacing without a big drop in performance.

Anyways, once I got the engine figured out the rest was just making the actual trebuchet. With alot of testing and data adjusting, I was able to finally get a realistic looking Trebuchet working. The best part was making my first castle and realizing how much fun it was to just demolish it.

Knowing that, I built a castle editor so you could crush castles of your own design. Let me tell you, nothing is more satifying than building crazy castles and destroying them with bombs. We created a forum post so players can post their own castles and rate others. Check it out when you get a chance, and see some of the castles created in the office here.

The game is done and finished so check it out on Armor Games Crush the Castle.

Wow my first blog post on ArmorBlog! Anyways, John and I launched our first collaborative game today called Fox Fyre. You may have seen some earlier posts from John during it’s progress. Took us about a month to make and I’m glad it’s done. I had a blast working with John on it. Check it out here http://armorgames.com/play/3439/fox-fyre.

If you’re curious on how we did some of the special effects, post a comment about it. I might post on how we got the terrain to look so cool.

And here is a video showing gameplay of the final 5 levels, by Tass: