We recently had a contest for Hedgehog Launch that had an interesting outcome, and I thought I might share it.  A few users discovered methods of “channelling” which is not only brilliant but totally needs to be explained, along with a breakdown of my game, which I thought might make an interesting article.

If you have never played Hedgehog Launch, it is a strategy/skill/luck game in which the objective is to shoot a hedgehog into space in as few days as possible.  Players can reach higher ground each game by buying upgrades, and you are awarded cash based on your ability to collect coins and hit springboards while in midair.  At the end of each level, players get an additional bonus based on the length of the time and the height of the launch.

How This Works

The game seems infinite in each direction, but because Flash can’t create infinity the game has to create a world as you go.

The game breaks up the world into 1,000 pixel areas (called Segments) horizontally in each direction.  Every Segment is an area where a number of coins and platforms are loaded.  Each time your player moves across a Segment, a new Segment will be added.

In order to keep Flash performing up-to-speed (it lags when too many coins and platforms are around), the game will only generate a new Segment only when you are traveling into a new one.  That Segment is generated after the one you are entering, so if you kept moving forward you would always hit more Segment.  In addition, it will destroy a Segment behind the one you are exiting, as it is far behind you and probably forgotten at this point.  This way the game won’t have millions of Segments loaded.

So to make things easy, there are a few Segments always active… the couple in front of you, the couple behind you, and the one that you are in.

Now players have figured out that this loading system can be manipulated to an advantage.  Even though the Segments are invisible and hard to distinguish in-game, they can be guessed and found.

So by running back and forth over the Segment boundry, they can easily manipulate the game to generate a ton of content in a Segment over and over again, essentially creating a wonderful wall of coins and platforms.

By default, the current values are assigned to a single Segment:

• 10 Blue Launchers
• 2 Green Launchers
• 2 Yellow Launchers

• 40 Bronze Coins
• 20 Silver Coins
• 5 Gold Coins

Which means that these players could generate nearly 100+ gold coins in an area quite easily, especially if they used the parachute.

So easily I could classify this as a bug, since I should have been destroying Segments far earlier (like after you leave one), but as this glitch is far too subtle for the common player to find I haven’t even recognized the problem until now.

Which brings me to my apology to DragonSoul and SP3000.

When these users presented videos of massive amounts of coins and platforms in very small areas, I asked, “How is this even possible!?”  I dismissed it as a “variable hack,” which is a method of hacking in which you take the Flash file and edit some variables (like how many coins and platforms are loaded) and then have a shopping spree.

But after watching the videos again, I noticed that the users indeed manipulate the Segment loading, which was completely in-bounds.  An additional email from DragonSoul confirmed the tactics used, and in the end, once again, DragonSoul and SP3000 took first and second place, respectively.

I’ll be sending the top three prizes, so I’ll be emailing you guys soon.

-John

*UPDATE*
We have some additional video verification going on from protested scores, stay tuned (John, 10/21)

Whew, Summer was busy.  So busy that we forgot to judge the contest!  Fear not, here are the results!

Congrats to Jordon for his $2,940,000 run!

After verifying all the entrants, it was determined that some of the gamers here decided to tweak a few variables ;).  There are limits in the game to how many of specific platforms appear in certain areas, and for some users videos they had to be disqualified due to the game rendering too many platforms of a certain type.

Congrats to the runner-ups as well!

Jcat - 1,900k

EDM - 989k

Silverfire - 937k

Gabriel - 858k

Now that it’s Fall we’ll have more time to do some more timely contests, so stay in touch!  We might have some level editing competitions, maybe another Compulse competition?  We’ll see!

This blog post is a little over-due, but here are our photos from PAX 2008!

Click Here

Highlights Include
*Sightseeing with my beautiful and amazing wife!
*Getting to hang out with John (Head of Game Developer) and Carlie (Talented Community Manager)
*Seeing Tom Fulp
*Meeting Pixel Jam
*Hanging out with Jerm and Bryan (Winners of our first Gaming Competition and Creators of popular titles such as Marvin Spectrum and Transmigration)
Hopefully next year will be just as fun!

Money Magazine recently came out with an article of the 100-best places to live in America. Number 4 on the list was Irvine, which is where the Armor Games offices are located.

If you are an experienced Flash Game Developer or talented Graphic Artist and want an exciting job making games for a living, check out our jobs page and send us your resume!

We look forward to hearing from you.

-The Armor Games Team

After several years of Flash/web game production, for the first time ever Armor Games has launched a game… somewhere else!  Our first iPhone game, Phit, recently launched for the iPhone and iPod Touch.   Phit is a notch above it’s predecessor with over 100 levels of aggravatingly challenging puzzles and a nice facelift of graphics and features.

The premise of Phit is simple:  Drag blocks around the screen to fit them into the shaded region at the bottom of the screen.  This is simple at first with just a few blocks and a few different possible arrangements.  But as the blocks become smaller and more tangled it definitely becomes a challenge.  Personally, by level 22 I was beginning to feel the pressure.

On a personal note, it was really interesting to see the dynamic difference a touch interface can make for a game like this.  The game feels much more controllable with finger-based controls instead of the mouse, and being able to shove tons of blocks around with multiple fingers is much more intuitive.

Phit is avaiable via iTunes and works on the iPhone and iPod Touch.  If you have either, you can purchase the game for $1.99 via the iTunes Store (link).  It’s definitely a treat and something that works perfect on the iPhone/touch for bus rides or on your lunch break.  I’ve probably spent about an hour on it already just from small game breaks from doing my own programming.  I’m sure you’ll enjoy it :).

I’ve never really felt the need to beat other players at my own game.  Maybe it’s that feeling that “I created the game, so I shouldn’t really be a contender at it.”  But now I am thinking to myself that maybe once, just once, I could be best at my own game, Hedgehog Launch.

So I am issuing a global challenge.

Post a video to youTube of yourself beating my high score and everyone else’s on a single-run for Hedgehog Launch.  Record everything from launch to score tally.  I want to see of you can beat my score, and if you do, don’t worry, I’ll be right behind you to beat yours.  I’ll update this thread as things change.  No, don’t post images… I don’t trust your Photoshopping skills.

Winner with the single highest-scoring run (out of everyone of course) gets stickers, balls, pens, business cards, and whatever else I can fit in a manila envelope that’s sitting around the office.  I’ll ship it anywhere as long as it’s legal, including you Australians who dominated our last contest.  And if I end up winning this I will happily take the prizes for myself.

Official Rules

1. You must play using the “Hedgehog Launch” game found on armorgames.com, unmodified and in it’s current working condition.

2. Post a link to the youTube video confirming your feat via this thread.  The video must account for everything including the launch sequence (the pulling back of the hedgehog launcher) to the tally of the score for your launch.  Please make sure your video is decent quality, I will reject video that is poor quality, stutters a lot, or is ridiculous in some manner.  You can record either via a good screen recording software (need free recording software?) or a handheld video camera.  Please do not send screenshots or still images.

3. Any indication of cheating will be detected. Don’t do it. We have ways of finding out. We reserve the right to take away a prize in the case that cheating has a occurred (ask us if you are unsure what cheating is).

4. The one player with the greatest amount of money for a single-day run will be declared the winner.

5. The current leaders will be updated in this thread as entries come in.
6. If you have any questions feel free to ask in this thread or email me at John@armorgames.com!
7. Deadline is July 31, at 11:59 pm PST.

Side Note:

I have come to terms with the fact that people annihilate my scores.  The difficulty of my games have always been based on my own ability to beat my own games, and I use that as a measure to tweaking the difficulty up or down.  I would think I would have an advantage over the common player since I wrote the code and know every single nuance from the get-go, but maybe that is not the case.  Many people come back immediately after playing my games and destroy all my high scores on their first playthrough. Very disheartening, I assure you.  Time to claim my revenge.

CURRENT CONTENDERS:

Silverfire: $937,345.50

Gabriel: $857,556.00

Chuck: $459,000.00

Maxil:  $446,212.50

John:  $312,606.52

Phit Beta Testers Needed

Phit is coming back in Style and we need your help to make it happen. If you’d like to get a sneak peak at the new version of Phit and help make sure it’s ready for prime time, just send an email to phitbeta@jeffwofford.com with the subject “Sign me up!” We’ll add your email address to the list of Beta testers, and send instructions in the next couple of weeks on how to play the Phit 2.0 Beta. We won’t use your email address except to tell you about the Phit Beta test.

We use Adobe Flash so anybody with a PC or Mac and a web browser can participate.

If you liked Phit you’ll love Phit 2,9, so come help us make it a reality by joining the Phit Beta.

Happy Gaming!

We’ve met before, I introduced myself as Chris from Con Artists Productions. Now it’s Con of Armor Games. It’s confusing I know, but just call me Con. It’s easier that way. Bottom line is, I’m that guy who made those zombie games.

So I’m to announce that I’m now a part of the Armor team and will be over here making games full time for one and all. That’s fantastic and exciting you say, well it is, but this is something that isn’t new to me, in fact I came from a very similar world and while The Last Stand was my first Flash game it was actually far from it. Long story short, been making games since I was a kid, school, university, leave university to work for big american games company, worked in advertising, learned Flash & Photoshop there, became a producer on Flash games there, left there to make games again.

For the long version of that story, I did an interview with a director friend of mine last week which I’ll share with you all once it’s been cut together.

In the meantime, I’m happy to be on board and look forward to producing more work for everyone. I’ve started on my new project and will show off some bits in the coming weeks.

- Con

So we have our winners! After analyzing all the data from our top six contestants, we have the following winners for each category:

+++GRAND PRIZE
Zonker (61 Tiles)

• 1 I-pod Shuffle (1GB)+ $25 Itunes Gift Card
• 2 Ball Revamped Squishy Balls
• 25 stickers
• A certificate to hang on the wall, indicating your elite skills
• Something random we find in the office that will fit in the envelope

+++First Place (Runner-Up)
SP3000 (61 Tiles)

• 1 I-pod Shuffle (1GB)
• 2 Ball Revamped Squishy Balls
• 25 stickers
• A certificate to hang on the wall, indicating your elite skills
• Something random we find in the office that will fit in the envelope

+++Second and Third Place
Sogtulakk (62 Tiles) and Fermium77 (62 Tiles)

• 2 Ball Revamped Squishy Balls
• 25 Stickers

+++Fourth and Fifth Place
Tim Ward (62 Tiles) and Strop (64 Tiles)

• 1 Ball Revamped Squishy Ball
• 10 stickers

While there were other users that did get a score of 64, per the OCTourney rules the first person to send in the score won, but still congrats to Eldaerin, Nab, and Radley for their scores of 64! Winners will be contacted tomorrow so that we can figure out where you live and what we can send you.

This tournament ended up being a huge success. We were never expecting to get over 200 entries and for people to dedicate an amazing amount of time to playing this game, and we are really thankful to all the people who came out and gave it their best.

I think more tournaments like this should happen on Armor Games again. We’ll pick a different game for next time, probably we’ll continue to do puzzle games that have a sandbox style to them. Keep an eye out on the blog, we’ll keep you up to date on the new contests rolling through here and the Armor Games site.

Feel free to post any awesome level designs you guys came up with. I’m sure you have some.

Random Statistics

• Average Score: 86.45
• Total Entries: 233
• Total Tiles Submitted: 20,143
• Average Tiles Per Level: 2.88
• Emails Spammed to my Inbox: 468 (22/day avg)
• Average Number of Email Resends: 2.01
• Lowest Score Possible (Among User Submissions): 59 Tiles

Rankings

(If you didn’t give me your AG screen name I put in your email address name)

Winning Design by Zonker, score of 61 (Forgive me if I copy and pasted this wrong):

1. R88×75|
2. L480×76|U239×156|
3. L423×243|
4. R295×103|
5. L442×233|U46×301|
6. R265×148|
7. U74×363|R61×108|
8. R13×433|
9. L291×197|
10. L240×90|U205×94|
11. R128×293|U115×285|R445×184|
12. R77×408|U185×424|
13. R57×69|U263×128|
14. U484×293|R483×357|R122×120|
15. L78×242|
16. R212×387|U462×284|
17. L417×174|U433×222|
18. R189×351|U531×248|
19. U470×185|L231×121|
20. U184×411|R48×273|R301×194|
21. R112×99|U56×118|
22. U130×341|U511×341|U333×341|R16×162|
23. L467×397|U343×431|U260×261|
24. L286×450|U69×275|
25. L246×318|U451×391|U456×379|
26. R272×263|U136×375|
27. U320×380|L29×460|L406×275|
28. L451×93|U485×108|
29. L491×289|
30. L515×308|U286×293|U105×186|

Oh where has the time gone?  Just a few weeks ago I was posting the Obsessive Compulse Tournament blog post and now we are reaching the homestretch.  We currently have 200+ entries and a ton of fantastic scores.  The tournament ends tomorrow, but there is still time to enter if you haven’t gotten your game mastered!

So I am getting many scores today, but the deadline is May 7th, 11:59 PM Pacific Time… which means you have until the end of the day tomorrow (or today, if you are reading this a day late).  We will take NO late entries.  The email must be in my inbox by that time for the score to count.

We’ll judge the top entries after May 7th to determine if the scores are acceptable.  By May 14th we’ll post the final scoreboard of how everyone did, and announce the winners of the prize packs!

So get your stuff in.  If you want to check out the Obsessive Compulse Tournament, click here.  There’s still some time to enter.

Oh, and by the way… the average score in the tournament as of now is 86.89, and there are 64 entries under 80.