I can’t believe he called me down on not capitalising ONE letter ‘i’.

To be honest, I found this to be amazing, it’s nice to hear someone critisize you for somethign you did years ago and reflect on how much you’ve improved (debatable?).

Warning: Some bad language if you’re sensitive :p

Kudos to Mr Reviewer, whoever you are

And also, this is his only video, but his youtube name is Armor Games Reviewer, so who knows who is next!?

Hi there everyone, just thought I’d give you an update of what I’m just finishing up on - a single or multiplayer arena fragfest in the same vein as the super bomberman games for the Super Nintendo. Multiplayer you say? Yes I say! Sadly due to time constraints, the game is not online multiplayer, but can support 2 players sharing a keyboard (Arrrgh I hear you cry) or 4 players via Wiimote (Whaaa!? I hear you cry) in the Nintendo Wii browser (once the feature is fully tested). For those who cry out for some Solo action (or people without any friends), there’s 12 solo battle scenarios against AI opponents to beat to unlock medals and a custom game option for those who just want a drop in drop out ass kicking session to blow off the day’s stresses. The game acts as most shooters do, only with fast thinking strategy introduced. Whereas in bomberman you lay your weapons on a delay, in FF your player hurls fireballs in the direction he is facing. The strategy is introduced by the grid system the game runs on, to change your direction of fire, you must move one space. This means that in later levels Strategy is a must if you want to outsmart the AI or a skilled human opponent. Certain blocks can be destroyed to leave items which level up your characters rate of fire, making collection an important part of any battle. Anyway, I’ll stop yammering on about it and get back to work on it, here’s a few screenies for you

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Click for bigger image.

In other news, looks like someone is gunning for my job.

Please excuse how dopey I sound trying to teach her phonetic letters, but I’m hoping to have her replace me soon without Dan noticing, so she can do all the hard work while I reap the rewards!

Well thats all for now, I hope to make posts more frequently and get into greater touch with the Armor community hence forth

-Tony

What a day what a day what a day.

I’ve been busy all day finishing up the levels for the Assassin Bow Woman game, which should be ready soon, although a few snags have been hit, but this morning I decided to get the engine done for the other game I’d like out this month, a game that lends heavily from the “Match 3″ genre but then smashes it into the “Mouse Avoider” genre like there’s no tomorrow, it’s looking kind of nice, and more updates on that soon.

In slightly more infuriating news, my XBox decided to join the ranks of the other 33% failure rates of Microsoft’s PC/Console lovechild. Now I face the dilemma of Microsoft Customer Service or having a pop at repairing it myself. Time allowing, I’d prefer the latter.

And here is a pic of me, my Girlfriend Lucy, and daughter Ella showing off my Stylish Shift 2 Shirt I recieved for my 21st from my dear Mother. This is for those of you who would like to see behind the scenes for one of the Armor Staff, and chide him over how badly he needs a haircut.

I was also considering doing a proper Shift shirt design myself in high resolution, what would you guys think about something like that being available to purchase? Would you be interested? If not, suggest what *could* make you consider such a purchase.

-Tony

I arrived at my parents house today to see them for my birthday, I’m currently working out of my old bedroom which is very odd indeed. I booked tomorrow off with Dan to see my friends for my 21st birthday then its back to my house to avoid any further interruption to Armors busy schedule. This evening however, as they won’t actually get to see me on my real birthday (the 18th) They gave me a birthday cake. It’s probably the coolest cake I’ve ever been given - way better than the one shaped as Thunderbird 2 I got when I was 5.

Here is my Birthday Wiike in all it’s glory.

And how better to cut it than with a good old fashioned 10p CD-R :p

P.S. Thunderbird 3 was the best.

I haven’t made a post in a while here on the Blog, though I keep meaning to.

So I have a few things to make note of. First things first I’ve just been informed by Dan that Shift 2 was featured on the Fox program found at the link below. Continuing on the mainstream success of Shift, the UK’s largest PC magazine, PC Zone features an article on the original Shift, as well as featuring it on their Demo Disk. This is all great coverage for us, and its all thanks to our visitors
SHIFT2 ON PC&G

I’ve also recently released IndestructoTank A.E., on the one year anniversary of my first major successful game, IndestructoTank. You may remember it came second in the Armor contest before last, and begun the lad up to me joining this great work team at Armor, and I can vouch for it, if you are considering applying to the post’s advertised on this blog, you won’t regret it.

Speaking of recent releases, my other game, Scoregamites has been met with mostly praise, which I’m glad for, as it’s based on the people at my old university course, and a semi apology for me leaving them in the lurch for their last year :p

And what of the future? When Dan suggested last month that he’d like a kind of game in the same vein as a bowman title. As I’ve been looking for an excuse to resurrect my first game series, Sleepless Knight, by transforming her into a medieval sniper assassin in a sweet stealth type engine. Here’s a screenie

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

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

SHIFT Editor 1.1I’m proud to announce the release of the full-featured Level Editor for SHIFT 2! With this editor you can generate codes and playable levels to be included in SHIFT 2. And thanks to the generosity of Armor’s Main Man Dan, you could earn big bucks for your work! - Details at the bottom.

Here are some basic instructions to get you started.

• Check out the sample levels - these will explain a lot to you just by looking at them.
• Once you have a sample level open, preview and play it, then return to the editor.
• In the editor you can build your level with the tools at the bottom of the screen, these include everything you need to make amazingly awesome SHIFT levels.
• To Rotate the level (to give yourself a better idea of how it will play while still in the editor, press the Right and Left Arrow Keys.
• To Rotate the item you are currently using (such as spikes) press the Up and Down Arrow Keys.
• You can link keys to doors and switches to ‘CheckSpace’ in the sidebar which appears on the right hand side.
• Give it a go! - you’ll learn more about it by trying than by reading my rambling attempt at instructions :p .

Here’s the lowdown on getting paid for your designs.

Using the attached SHIFT editor, you design and build 4 quality levels and save the generated level codes in a text ( .txt) document using Notepad or your operating system of choice’s alternative.

Once you have 4 levels made and stored in this txt file, send them as an email over to me at tony@armorgames.com for me to look through along with your name, age and contact email if it’s not the same as the one you are using.

Here’s the interesting bit. If I decide to include one of the levels from your pack of 4 (or up to 4 of them if they rock :p) then you get paid $50 via Paypal.

You also get your name included in the credits of SHIFT2 as recognition that you contributed - Rock on!

There are some things to take into consideration however, if i suspect any foul play (copying level designs from others etc) then I reserve my right refuse to use and/or pay for it - so make sure you only use your own work. Payment will be sent via Paypal, so make sure you have access to an account if you’re included. These rules may be changed at any time to account for arising issues but I’ll do my best to be fair, so don’t worry.

Spread this around to as many people you know, I want tonnes of cool levels

Send it to 5 people - you will have a lucky day.

Send it to 10 people - your crush will ask you out.

Send it to 15 people - your fondest wishes will come true!

… not really on those last three points :p

I’ll keep this short, as Johns excellent post deserves some more time near the top of the blog, but this week in my spare time after working hours (Need I say I enjoy what I do?) I’ve been tinkering with he SHIFT2 Level editor. Level editors (both using and making them) are probably the best thing about anything in a video game for me, but how much do they mean to you people? Comment reply your opinions of level editors for games - Do you like them? Do you not bother with them? I want to hear your thoughts.

YinYangTest Source Files

For alot of budding Flash game developers, our times bring with them a choice: AS3 - To switch or not to switch.

For those who are learning from scratch, the choice is obvious, you should definitely learn AS3 to begin with, AS2 is old hat, archeic, “Grandpa’s Actionscript”. Ok, well it’s probaly not referred to as that last one anyhow. However those, like myself, who “Grew up” on AS2 may feel a fond affection for it’s warm, snuggly,forgiving style. AS2 will let you off with a whole load of corner cutting, if you don’t mind the odd messy segment of code or a slight performance decrease. I currently have three games in the pipes, one of them is AS2, the other two are AS3, and switching between them (I like variation in the projects I’m working on) can be a bit brain frazzling at times, and for what gain? I set out, in a spare half hour, to test the practical benefit of coding in AS3 over AS2, and will let you decide for yourself if you think it’s worth it.

The files attached to this post are the source files I have used for this test. They are both self contained with no external class declarations for ease of distribution. Both are coded to generate 4000 “particles” of a YinYang design consisting of 21 curves (So while not overly complicated, it gives a much fairer comparison to everyday usage than the many Bitmap data particle systems you can find on google that show AS3 as performing 10-15 times faster than AS2)

Once 4000 YinYang particles have been generated, the amount of time it took to do this is traced in the output box in milliseconds. I have chosen the method of controlling the particles by a set of three Arrays for 2 reasons. 1. It allows me to keep the actual code used 99 percent Identical in both the AS2 and AS3 versions and 2. Array Manipulation is very heavy on the performance of Flash. So with this experiment we shall see the results of a PRACTICAL (i.e. similar to conditions one would use while actually making a game) comparison between AS2 performance and AS3 performance. Not only is there heavy strain on loops to account for code processing, but an awful lot of screen redrawing at a practical 25fps.

Here are my own personal results (which may differ from yours depending on what machine/plugin you use to play the file)

Computer Specs:

Intel Core Duo 1.66 GHZ

2GB DDR2 RAM

Geforce Go 7600.

Results:

Actionscript 2 Average over 10 trials to generate 4000 particles: 18890 Milliseconds

Actionscript 3 Average over 10 trials to generate 4000 particles: 8344 Milliseconds

The conclusion is, as expected, the AS3 version was faster than the AS2 version, but only just over twice as fast. This indeed does present a necessity to upgrade to keep up with the ever increasing complexity of current Flash games, and the benefits of a few new features, but, in my opinion, a practical speed advantage of just over 2 is far from the promise of Adobes virtual machine speed revolution. It seems the promised 10 times increase in performance was only meant for those entertaining blogs which showcase the authors experiments in Flash, which, valid as they are, do not apply to practical Flash Game Development.

So do I recommend the upgrade to AS3? It depends. If you are still using a version of Flash which doesn’t support it, then I’d say for now that there truly is no rush to throw money at Adobe for an upgrade to AS3 (via a Flash CS3 purchase) However, if you’re dragging your feet for comforts sake, throw yourself in head first and try something new. Just keep in mind, will your game be running faster at the compromise of cut features due to inexperience in the vastly different AS3? If so, it bears well to remember, that a faster codebase does not equate to a better game.

Thanks for reading this hefty post, I’m sorry if you felt it was rather drawn out, but I think it’s an issue which has only been really addressed by the Flash Experiment community, not the Game Development Community.