PresidentialPrizeFight.com is one of the more interesting (and challenging) projects I've worked on recently. It was a lot of fun discovering techniques to make a fun and hopefully challenging boxing game. Most 2D fighters allow for much more flexible movement (jumping, flipping etc...) but for boxing movement is pretty much just back and forth and attacks are limited to your gloves. This certainly made the enemy AI easier to program but made achieving enjoyable game play a bit harder.

Of course, the boxing was just part of this game. There's the whole electoral map/multiplayer issue as well. Google App Engine is used as the data store for all the state data, so we shouldn't have to worry about traffic issues if we happen to get dugg.

The coolest thing about the whole experience is that we actually utilized every production person in our studio on the same project (a first).

The goal in creating Presidential Prize Fight was to create a fun way to learn about the electoral college and to give you a chance to punch that "other candidate" in the face. I think we've achieved that. But don't take my word for it, pick your candidate and win the map!

P.S. It appears that more McCain supporters are fighting for this map than Obama supporters... if you support Obama you need to win a few fights (hint: focus on "battleground states")

Drag your mouse to look around.

After several grueling nights of hard labor, we've officially launched our Post Apocalyptic Robot Game (PARG) onto the interweb. It's certainly not bad for the time frame that we launched it in... about a week of after-hours "work." The environment and most of the character artwork is by Justin Gerard. The "Boss Bot" is compliments of Cory Godbey and other bot designs we're contributed by Zach Franzen, Hallie Gillett. The site design is by Matt Mantooth and the rock-your-face-off theme music is by Ben Kammer. It was cool to see all of the contributions come together into one solid product. It was also a pretty good development challenge. This is probably one of the most truly-collaborative projects we've ever worked on. Now we just need to get someone to pay us to do this! And oh yeah, here's the link: Play Parg!

Next Friday, you, yes you, will be called upon to defend the earth from the upcoming "robocalpyse."

At Portland Studios, we are all about productivity and "bizzness" but between all the productivity and insane profit-margins myself, Justin Gerard, Cory Godbey and a few others have been working on an apocalyptic-robot-themed flash game. It's going to be epic.

Here's a little of the flash motion based on a sample robot from Justin (click to explode):

And you also may very well end up being attacked by Cory Godbey's DOOM BRINGER ULTRA ULTRA 

For more details on next Friday's post, be sure to check the Portland Blog.

Pirate booty that is. Continuing in the tradition of office-wide, Friday blog posts here's my latest entry:

This "mini-game" was created after lunch on Friday so it could certainly be more polished. I may post an update version with a tutorial for how to create a simple Flash game using Actionscript 3. Stay tuned.

You can check out the rest of the swashbuckler-themed entries over at the Portland Blog.

Today at Portland Studios we had an official cowboy-themed blog post in which all of the office was invited to prepare an entry. There we're a few guidelines, it had to be cowboy themed, it had to be done on a 4X6 card, and it should only be minimally "photoshopped." Well my entry violated almost all the guidelines but got posted anyway (thanks Zach!). My entry pulls "cowboy tagged" images from Flickr and rolls them across a western landscape. Weird, I know, but here it is:

You can view the rest of the entries over at the Portland Studios Blog