Armor Games is proud to announce that Shift 2 has been nominated and entered into the 2010 Best App Ever Awards! Make sure you click here to cast a vote for shift 2! Also, make sure you click here in order to buy Shift 2 in the iTunes app store right now.
Lifehacker just released their top 5 destinations for free games and Armor Games made the list. Now you can help us become number one by voting for us at the bottom of their article. Check it out: Five Best Resources for Free Games
Our first release of the AGv3 Private Beta is live. If you are interested in joining the beta testing team you can navigate to http://beta.armorgames.com and sign yourself up. We look forward to your participation and feedback.
Thanks!
Armor Games is excited to say we have released our first edition t-shirt for sale in our store! The AG Shield Tee is available in royal blue and it features our new Logo. For now, all of our shirts are sized in adult. Go to the store and purchase them while you can! Click here!
We’ll be rolling out additional Shirts and a few other surprises over the coming months, so keep your eyes posted.
-Team Armor
I’ve been lurking in the Armor Games Community forums a lot more than usual over the past few weeks, and have been seeing a lot of users posting rumors and questions about the next version of the Armor Games web site (our third overhaul of the site, known internally as “AG3″), asking whether it was actually real. One user even called it a myth, so as an avid MythBusters fan, I just had to pose the team for a photo and ”confirm” the myth that AG3 is absolutely underway.
The web development team, or “webdevs” (or “web n00bz” as John would call us ’cause he’s jealous of our secret club), is made up of three people, led by Larry “Why isn’t the Titanium in my leg magnetic?” Root, with myself, Ian “Cormyn” Douglas, and our newest team member, James “Mr Tea” Lee. Larry’s the guy on the left in the photo wearing James’ glasses to look more like Adam Savage, James is in the middle, and that’s me trying hard to keep a straight face while wearing a beret. James and I worked together at a previous job, and the whole AG family is excited to have him on board!
Back to AG3, yeah?
I’ve seen a lot of questions like “will AG3 do ____?” or “can you add this feature?” or “why can’t we do ____?” I obviously can’t cover every question here in a blog post, but you will hear more from me as we work on AG3, shape it to our vision, and incorporate ideas from our users. I would, however, like to give you a brief idea of what’s in store.
If Dan had to sum up AG3 in one word, it would be “Attainment.” We want our users to experience as much fun as possible interacting with the games, each other, earning achievements, and to share those activities and what they’ve attained with each other. We’ve been allowing users to unlock items inside games for the last 6-years, whether it was through hidden characters, in game emblems or other methods of attaining notoriety. In the future, attaining accomplishments in game or on the site will know be tied to your Profile so the whole world can see how great a gamer and AG member you really are.
So, one of the biggest things we’re building is a new comment/feedback system, where you can share which games you’re currently playing, whether you’ve achieved a high score, and your achievements of course. Your friends can comment on those news bits, “like” them, and more. We’ll also have news feeds for each game so you can see who’s playing or leaving feedback, and so on. We’ll be building several layers of user connections, beyond just the “followers” system we currently use. More on that another time.
The biggest question I see in our forums, and on our feedback site, is what will happen to Armor Points. I can’t go into too much detail here because some of it hasn’t been completely discussed or worked out, but do know that it’s important to us that users don’t feel disappointed with our decisions. As we have more finalized details to share, you’ll hear from me.
Another feature that several users are asking for is a better search system, especially for usernames, which is definitely something we’re building. Some users have asked about forums, which we may exclude from the site during beta, but we’re still working out some of those ideas, too.
A lot of users ask about changing their usernames, which is being considered for AG3 but impossible for AG2, and we may allow users to upload custom armatar images to share with friends.
A user posted on my AG profile wall this afternoon asking when AG3 will be finished. Unfortunately, in the Internet world, if you give users a deadline, they hold you to it. 
) Our current plan is to start inviting a limited number of users to use the beta site before the end of the year, and to launch the full site in 2011. As the beta progresses, we’ll send out more invitations. In the mean time, all user data and game data is already being migrated from our current site to the new site, so beta users will see current data right away.
On behalf of the webdev team, thanks for your patience. We’ve been working hard on AG3 to give you the best casual gaming experience, and look forward to sharing more details with you soon!
See you in the game,
Cormyn
Armor Games would like to welcome Daniel to our team. Daniel is a game developer from Canada who is working with us through the summer on an internship. Daniel is currently working on a stealth type game that he says is a mixture of splinter cell meets 2D. Be on the lookout for Daniel’s up and coming games that will be released on Armor Games.
As part of our ongoin effort to bring you closer to the people behind Armor Games we sent off 10 questions to Larry Root, the Head of Web Development (Armor Games user lroot). He was kind enough to provide the following responses. We hope this helps shed some light on his role here as well as provide a small glimpse into the future of Armor Games.
Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little about what you do at Armor Games?
My name is Larry Root and I am the Head of Web Development at Armor Games. This role basically means that I am responsible for the technical development, maintenance and architecture of our online services. This includes the website, in game services like high scores & game shares as well as new online features still in development.
What was the first programming language you learned and how were you exposed to it?
The first language that I was exposed to was probably BASIC. My dad was, among many things, a programmer and we always had a computer in the garage (not sure why it wasn’t allowed in the house). He would purchase programming magazines that would contain the source code for simple games written in BASIC. I would copy the source code by hand into our old Intel 8088 DOS PC and eventually with a little luck and a lot of debugging I could play these games.
I would not say I ever “learned” BASIC I was not capable of writing anything from scratch. The first language that I officially learned was probably ADA when I attended Fullerton College. I haven’t used it since but that was my first real introduction to structured programming concepts and object oriented principles.
When did you realize web programming was something you wanted/would do?
That was something I decided on while attending college in San Francisco at the Academy of Art University (I transferred from Fullerton College). Growing up I had always been drawn to both computers (system moding, gaming, BBS’s) as well as the arts (drawing & illustration). Discovering photoshop brought both of these passions together and I new that a creative, digital medium was something I wanted to do. So off to San Francisco I went.
My major at the time was called “Interactive Digital Media”. It was a broad study of creative digital media including desktop publishing (illustrator, photoshop), Video editing (SGI Oxygen systems), Director (and advanced Lingo programing) as well as a relatively new class at the time called “Web Design”. The web class fascinated me because of its newness and its immediacy in publishing and broad reach. Before this I figured I would specialize in CD Rom development of some sort. But the web class changed all that. I started freelancing outside of school doing web projects and eventually landed a job at a small company as a web designer/developer and never looked back.
When did you start working at Armor Games, and how do you like it so far?
My first day at Armor Games was January 26, 2009. Up until this time I had worked for interactive consulting firms for over 10 years doing web development for all sorts of companies and brands (cat.com, nissanusa.com, mazdausa.com, snow.com to name a few). Leaving the consulting field and joining a small team of passionate and inspired gamers was thrilling to me. Being able to work to work directly with the team to shape and implement the future of Armor Games online was both a daunting and exciting challenge. The first few months were busy. Being the only person in house that did web work meant that I did everything. That includes fixing spelling errors to reworking the entire caching strategy for the current site to stabilize slow pages. All in all its been great and I am still as excited as I was when I first started.
You have created many additions and improvements to the site and system so far, what are some of your favorites?
Looking back over the past 1+ years since I started quite a bit of work has gone into Armor Games. The first job was to stabilize the current armorgames.com website. There were many issues with slow pages, especially within the forums section. A rewrite of a some code and a new caching architecture (using Memcached) helped us accomplish that. Armor Games has some ambitious plans so I began architecting and developing a new web platform that would better meet our requirements for the future. The first tangible result of this platform for our users was our in game services which we dub the “AGI” (Armor Games Interface) which of course is a play on the acronym API (Application Programming Interface). This brought High Scores and Game Sharing features into some of our most popular games. We have accomplished quite a lot since I first started and these are just a couple of my most memorable so far.
Do you have any new features planned for the website?
Absolutely. I cant give everything away but I can certainly share a few things. Look for more improvements and features to our AGI (ex: Authentication & persistent game data & stats storage cross browser). Also don’t expect the AGI to be limited to just Flash games either. We are looking to rollout a completely revamped multiplayer platform with new multiplayer games to follow (and yes this includes updating the current Colony multiplayer system). Finally some of you may have seen glimpses of our new brand here and there or have discovered this peculiar site http://beta.armorgames.com. Stay tuned…
When you are not busy working at the office, what are somethings you like to do for fun?
Outside of work I do enjoy spending time with my family (my wife Laura, 3 year old son Owen and 5 year old daughter Amanda). I am also a pretty big computer geek as you might imagine so I do spend quite a lot of time on the computer. I also play ice hockey, something I got into as a kid. I usually play a couple games a week. However recently I suffered my first major injury so I have been off the ice for a bit.
Could you tell us a little more about the Hockey you play? What is your favorite NHL team?
I play most of my hockey at Anaheim Ice, the same place where the Anaheim Ducks practice. I play on the Chiefs. The name was taken from the team in the movie Slap Shot. I would also have to say that I’m a pretty big Ducks fan.
What’s your favorite Flash game? What are your kid’s favorite Flash games?
One of my favorite flash games of late is Crush the Castle Players pack. I spent many hours building all sorts of structures in that game. It was very addictive. Owen is still a bit young for flash games, however Amanda loves just about every game on the Nick Jr.’s NOGGIN site.
Whats are some of your favorite websites? (Besides ArmorGames.com 
Most of my social needs are satisfied with:
http://facebook.com
http://twitter.com (@lroot)For all my geek news and gadget cravings:
http://lifehacker.com
http://slashdot.org
http://boingboing.com
http://gizmodo.com
http://engadget.com
http://digg.comSome of my web development favorites include:
http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.phparch.com
http://highscalability.com
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.
We are looking to add another web developer to our team.
You can check out the details here! http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/5771
While Armor Games staff was not in attendance, we were very surprised to find out we were featured in the Keynote of day 2 for online Flash gaming at the MAX 2009 conference put on by Adobe. The specific moment of the feature was to talk about EA and Pogo, and their involvement in using Flash for their casual gaming division.
Cheers Adobe for the plug!
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