Category / Video Games

Pathfinders is a platforming game created around a contest held on the whodouwant2b.com website. The object is to climb as high as you can while grabbing icons for points and answering trivia which earns you tickets in the raffle for prizes every month.

Play the game on WhoDoUWant2b.com

The characters were created and animated using flash and illustrator. The game engine itself is based in AS3 and an ASRA (A Simple RESTful API) deployment powers the MySQL backend and high score data/display.

SPOILER ALERT!

Against my better judgement, I am absolutely loving this game (on Chapter 14 right now and itching to play again already). I was a big fan of the difficulty scale on the first one and the second is just as (if not more) challenging. But for some reason the developers decided to be very very perplexing with the difficulty scale in this sequel. And not just because an enemy is hard; it’s more that they’ll just “randomly” kill you without warning. Case in point - the Armadillo battle in Chapter 7. As soon as you finish him off, he explodes in a HUGE fireball, killing you instantly. Running away does nothing…I tried being on the opposite side of the arena…dead. Firing off a Ninpo just before he blows supposedly works but again…dead. No, you have to block. That’s right, holding up your arms and sword saves your ass. You can be standing right next to the ‘dillo and not take any damage. But you didn’t know it was going to explode did you, so why the heck would you block when you just vanquished a boss? Thank you, Team Ninja ;)

As an avid video game music fan, I very much appreciate this response to a “best video game” music ever post such as that was huge on digg recently. Streets of Rage I (and II) had fantastic soundtracks and Mega Man 2 is easily in my top 5 of all time as well. I totally agree that no “great video game music” list is complete without some Uematsu (Final Fantasy). Can’t say I am the hugest fan of Symphony of the Night’s soundtrack, so I’d like to put forth some of my favorites. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of my absolute favorite games have what I consider the finest music as well.

WWE Rocker is a flash game created for the WWE Music Group and Columbia Records. Featuring wrestlers from the ECW show, the game pits you against them on 14 levels featuring each wrestlers’ entrance music. The object of the game is to time key-presses with the passing of the colored chairs over the “hit” point.

Besides the application as a whole, development included creating the game logic as well as the design of the effects and some audio production. The challenges in this project included figuring out an effective way to trap multiple key-presses at once without firing an event for each key and attempting to find workarounds for Firefox and Safari not notifying flash objects that they’ve lost keyboard focus (Event.DEACTIVATE does not work!) on Mac.

Quadrants is a tetris-like puzzle game where the objective is to control multiple playing fields at once, making matches with the colored playing blocks. Quadrants was built for The FORM Group as an example of the company’s ability to produce online games and initially based on my love for the Dr. Mario and Tetris Attack series. The premise of the game is the defense of your alien armada from the attacking creature, pairing them up to escape before the creature can pull them in. Chains and combos build points toward bombs which are used to disable the creature so you make moves to catch up.