Yesterday I launched a game called I Love Traffic.  Gameplay consists of moving traffic through an intersection without causing collision, backup, or running out of time.  Any and all lights can be turned any colour at any time!

There’s a bit of story behind why it was made.  In all honesty I hate traffic.  I get caught at every single red light on my way home and it is not because I am a bad driver.  It’s because my car is cursed!

My car has the amazing ability to turn traffic lights red.  Whenever the light is green in my lane the approach of my car will instantly flip it to red.  It’s some amazing phenomenon that occurs and others have started to see it too.  Even when other people drive the car they make note of its bizarre supernatural traffic light interaction.

So on my way to work one day, I pondered, “How can I make traffic and intersections more fun?”  And after a few brainstorming sessions I started building models of roadways and the ways cars interact while on the road.

I created some basic principles to apply to all vehicles:

A) Vehicles drive only as fast as the car in front of them.  If a vehicle reaches within 1 - 2 vehicle lengths away it will decelerate to match the speed of the vehicle in front.

B) All vehicles accelerate and decelerate at different rates.  Everyone has different ways of driving and different vehicle types to facilitate those habits.

C) Vehicles have a maximum speed and cannot go backwards.

D) Vehicles will not stop unless they have reason to (other vehicle, intersection, etc)

Since these principles apply to traffic lanes, it only made sense to make each lane function as it’s own little ecosystem.  Lanes then interact with each other through overlap and collision!

That’s where I found the game.

After sketching several lane layouts I built 20 fundamentally different designs that enhance different types of lane interaction.  Obviously there are traditional 4-way intersections, but the game’s flexible lane-by-lane style opened up new interactions.  One lane crossing several, like design #6 above, creates walls of car backup to deal with.  Meanwhile design #8 (above) deals with cross-traffic and watch multiple directions at once.

And from there the game was made.  Different vehicle types helped facilitate different experiences each time the intersection was revisited.  Trucks were made slow, police cars super fast, and motorcycles were made to accelerate faster than any other vehicle.

That said, the game is finished and out on Armor Games!  Go Play I Love Traffic, let me know what you think!

After playing Castle Clout we were inspired to make two things.  A really awesome remake and a really awesome trebuchet, all while using the word ‘awesome’ too often.  Joey and I spent the last half of our Friday making this really cool medieval weapon.

We started the build around 12pm.  We grabbed supplies and were back at the office in about an hour, and spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what final design we wanted.  Here’s what we bought:

20 feet of PVC
6 End Caps (PVC)
10 45 degree Connectors (PVC)
13 T Connectors (PVC)
2 4-Way Connectors (PVC)
Twine
PVC Pipe Cutter
PVC Glue
PVC Grease
Duct Tape

We decided on a standard design, nothing too fancy.  Simplicity works wonders.

After cutting a bunch of the pipe, remeasuring, and then recutting again, our design started to come together!

We forgot a crucial part of the trebuchet: the weight.  Luckily earlier that day we bought about 3 pounds of peanuts and other mixed nuts for the office snack bar, and were lucky enough to snag it in-time for the build.

We fired a few shots inside and magically it worked!  We then took it outside to see how far we could launch a Ball Revamped squishy.

With the peanut weight we can launch about 15-30 feet without additional manpower.  That’s pretty good for a 2-3 hour build.  After about 5 more tries we also discovered that the ball is the best item to launch.

Dan also had the idea of trying to push down on the trebuchet arm as fast as possible, and then we suddenly had a range of 30-60 feet!  It was a pretty awesome experiment, and we learned a lot of about Trebuchet physics to pick up and start this project.

And with that, here’s a screenshot of our newest game (click to embiggen).    We’re going for the Castle Clout style but we’re going to have a few more features and some new art style.  We have permission from the original artist, of course, so all due respect for his design is there.  I’ll let Joey update you on that news as it comes around, since he’ll be leading that project.

But seriously, trebuchets are fun.  Spend a couple hours making one, you won’t regret it.

Tony’s other child, Indestuctotank, turns 2 years old today.  He’s so overwhelmed with emotions that he managed 8 grammatical errors in only two lines of typing!

He made it a LONG time ago for an Armor Games game development contest and it did tremendously well.  He then went on to win more of our contests, and then eventually become a full-time game developer for Armor Games!  Since then he’s developed in-house titles like Shift and Shore Siege.

Cheers Tony!  Can’t wait to see a third, and no AE doesn’t count.

Hey everyone,

Joey and I have been working on this game for quite a while and we’re really getting into the nitty-gritty of testing and balancing the game at the moment.  But for now, we have a few screenshots of the gameplay.  The gameplay is very cannon-shooting-other-cannons, but the game is all real-time in-rounds so you have to keep aiming, shooting, and defending yourself as you go.  This isn’t turn-based combat!

Here are a few screens:

We’ll have this thing out in the coming days, so stay tuned.

Also, we won’t call it Bunkers.  We’ll find something better to name it :).

A couple Fridays ago we found a spider in the office and decided to ask you guys about it.  Being totally ignorant about types of spiders, it was only fitting that we asked our community (who probably has dealt with more spiders in their time) to figure out the make and model year of the spider.

Probably within a few minutes we got our first answer back, and for the most part everyone agreed.  So we decided to name it after our first ID’er, UberDead49.  Thanks to your help we can now be more careful about these Wolf Spiders instead of shooing them into cups with our hands.  I didn’t know they bite.  Good to know.

Now that we’re done playing with spiders, we hope to move on to more deadly things.  We’re hoping for some sort of snake or land shark next.

(This picture is small, click on it to see larger)

Joey and I are still working on our “Bunker Shooting Other Bunkers” game, but I just wanted to post the semi-finished store as it stands today . It’s a fairly large amount of info to squeeze into a single screen (720 x 400) and we’re pretty happy with it.  Buy items from the center column and then organize at will to give your bunkers the weapons and defensive items you want.

The weapons in the game will correspond to the weapons on this page making it much easier to remember what is what.  Also icons follow you throughout the game to give you further assistance in choosing and placing weapons.

Flash 10 is giving us a hand in 3d transitions as well, check the game out at the end of the month!  We’ll update with some in-game screenshots soon!

Know what kind of spider this is?  It’s about 1.5 inches in diameter and was found today at the Armor Games Office in California!  We’ll name it after you if you can ID it.

Otherwise we’re naming it Frank.  Please help him/her/it.

On the cusp of moving into the uber-geek status, Joey and I programmed a terrain generation feature in Actionscript 3 yesterday.  It’s for a new defense/offense style game we’re cooking up.  The game will have pregenerated levels however we really wanted to do an unlimited mode for the die-hard/got-too-much-time crowd who really wants to have some extended fun.

After a brief read of the Paul Martz article on how he generates terrain, we decided that fractal terrain is exactly what we needed especially for how we want to place objects on the terrain.  In essence, the article talks about how you take a line segment and keep cutting it in half and pushing up or down.  This way the terrain starts to form peaks and valleys.

We also experimented with a method that draws lines at random angles across the screen.  In the end we found this method draws really peculiar shapes and that even when you start the weight the line towards the center that it starts looking like a sine wave.

Overall it looks great, especially when generated 20 times like seen above.  But we’ll only be generating once so ideally we’ll need to polish up the mountains being made for the final release.

Upcoming blog post will talk about our game and what we’re planning, stay tuned!  It’s a smaller project so it’ll be a great little diversion from the massive projects.

I’ve made a lot of games.  Some of them are done in a few hours or a few months, but none has taken as long as our latest Super Mafia Land release.  We took our love and dedication to new heights on this one and somehow managed to carry out the goal to make this game a reality.  So while our scores may have been less than perfect our goals and ambitions on this game were nonetheless carried out: we really wanted to make a game that paid homage to (the best game ever made) Super Mario Bros 2.

We worked on this game for over eight months.  Granted, we weren’t working on it full time but we loved this game to death.  Both Nick (BoMToons) and myself are huge fans of Super Mario Bros 2.  In fact we both share the opinion that it’s one of the most unique and incredibly fun games we have ever played in our lives.  But to see so many online message boards and people filled with hatred against the game SMB2 seemed ludicrous to us. It’s not a traditional Mario game but it is one that really does a lot of amazing things.  After a bit of talking and reminiscing about how great this game was we decided to start on not a clone, but a game that pays homage to what we think (or at least what I think) is the greatest game ever made.  We wanted to show our love as only game developers know possible.

In May 2008 we started developing prototypes and initial artwork for the game.  I built a tile engine that got it’s workout in a few titles, including Maverick and Achievement Unlocked.  These tile-based games helped work out the kinks on the landscape hit detection and really made the tile engine kick into full gear.  The lovely thing about the tile engine is that it can generate a really nice level without being to strained on the processing.  It requires no hitTests, loops, arrays, or anything like that.  It reads in vectors and tile locations to determine collision and it worked well.

By then we also started to see the amazing artwork by Nick.  We never wanted to copy and paste the original sprite artwork like many other Flash Mario clones because it didn’t seem quite in-tune with our intentions to rip original artwork and drag it into our creation.  We redrew everything, reanimated everything, and even developed new characters with their own stats.  

We weren’t out to reap havoc in creating a Flash version of Super Mario Bros 2 but an entirely different setting and feel.  Sure, you can pickup enemies and chuck them but we wanted to add to make interesting things with that.  All the levels are brand new and designed and drawn by Nick.  Doors lead to special areas and interesting places and we really wanted the player to explore their surrounding.  Some enemies are similar to SMB2 but we really wanted to add our own flair and even our own unique end boss.  New music and characters were a start, and even our own way of making characters interact on the screen were important.

Character artwork is worth looking at all its own.  You probably didn’t realize this but the animation for a character in this game was 13 sprites per character per size, meaning 78 animated sprites just for characters were needed.  On top of that all the enemies and active parts of the stage were animated as well, such as the turnip plants blowing around and the ladybugs climbing the vines.

We settled for three characters, Guiseppe (a balanced character), Bruno (a buff but slow character), and Maria (a princess-like character with speed and less muscle).  The characters were developed as Italian gangster characters.

The levels are comprised of four levels of artwork and coding.

• The bottom BG layer facilitates all the parallaxing in the game (background moves slower than foreground to give that illusion of depth.
• The foreground layer facilitates all the artwork for the level, such as clouds, brick, or grass.
• The tiles/script layer manages all the important collision and action data.  Tiles are placed across the level to indicate solid vs. climbable, etc.
• The sprite layer works with all the characters and their movement, as well as any enemies or items on-stage.

By the time the levels were done and in place we realized that we had stretched ourselves and Flash a bit.  The game had levels reaching 18,000 pixels long and could barely be worked on in the Flash environment.  Numerous crashes and failures in the game engine due to extremities forced us to cutdown on initial level size and cut everything into fragmented level sections.  A beta of the initial engine tested by a few testers showed incredibly low framerates so we had to make those changes.

At one point the computer even couldn’t handle rendering the levels.  We upgraded the RAM in the system and started dumping parts of the files into test files so that we didn’t have to wait 5-10 seconds after each change we made to the file.

In response we spent nearly 3 weeks optimizing the engine for good speeds in the browser.  The game actually runs fairly smoothly in the browser although for some it may run a bit slow due to graphic complexity and such.

The complexities of coding a game like this are beyond troubling.  The interaction between character, enemy, and environment is far pass what many would recognize.  For example, how does the game react to a player carrying an enemy while riding a falling enemy while trying to access a door?  For this alone I can say that whoever programmed SMB2/Doki Doki Panic deserves many, many pats on the back.  These sorts of issues extend far and wide into the game and to nail all the issues and trouble spots is rough testing then even rougher debugging.

At points this game didn’t even look like it would ever see release.  Glitches in the Flash program caused the game to not function correctly, and then inadequate processing power by the computer drove the game to a halt.  Multiple bug issues arose and fell again as more features were added and then debugged.  The game chugged on some machines and ran fluid on others for no really good reason.  We were stumped for days at some points but managed to get through all the trouble spots.

By the end of the game we had all three levels done and the various enemies and obstacles in place.  It really was crunch time in the past few weeks getting this game ready to go.  I had sleepless nights and 16-hour coding sprees to get this game on its feet and ready for the world to see.  We worked hard.  Very hard.

We launched the game and got less than impressive results in user feedback, and while this was troubling for us there were many questions and points that were being raised that we never expected:

• Even though we could never ever top SMB2, our game is compared to SMB2 rather than other Flash games.  Because this game is automatically received as a Mario game many people forget its even a Flash game and just compare it to every Mario game they’ve ever played.
• This game is going to be compared to traditional Mario games even though SMB2 and SML are nothing close to those games.  A good portion of our reviews talk about Super Mario World.
• Some decided to not even talk about our game and rather talk about SMB2, as if it was a conversation starter.

So while we might not have a perfect score, we did have an amazing experience learning how difficult it is to make a game like this.  As Nick said, “It’s a labour of love” and I couldn’t describe it any other way.  We love SMB2 more than many and we’ll stand up for it even when the Mario purists come to bite.  We could have paid homage to Super Mario World but our hearts go out to a true black sheep in the series and we’ll continue to praise it as one of our favourite and most inspiring games of all time.

There is something to be said about the game development process.  It can be a long and difficult rollercoaster ride of bugs, features, and deadlines.  But sometimes we say to ourselves, “what can we do in X days” and we push ourselves to see what we can do.  Rapid game development is a fun challenge we have here at Armor Games and it’s a great way to really see what our developers can do.

While most games take weeks to months we sometimes set a 1-5 day challenge.  In this time we explore new concepts or generate great ideas and put them to the simplest use possible.  Like the concept of the Global Game Jam developers are given a topic and a certain amount of days to go at it.  It’s an invigorating, fresh way to game development.

For example, one my latest games, Run Elephant Run (pictured above), was a 2-day challenge.  The challenge was to create a game that involved a minor storyline and papparazzi, and somehow it came together in less than 16 hours.

Another game with an incredibly short development cycle was Scribble!  This game was developed in my dorm room at about 8pm at night and finished later that morning. It was less than a day in production!

The fun part about all this is that if the games work out we can develop them into possibly bigger sequels.  We love making games and pushing ourselves so these time crunches are a lot of fun.  Stressful towards the end, but for only a few days work it’s amazing how fast the brain moves to come up with simple game ideas.  Something about tiny gameplay ideas just make them flow through the development process.

We’re going to do another in-house game challenge sometime this year.  Stay tuned!