Quadradius is a two player, head to head, internet game designed in Flash. It communicates over a network, and allows both strangers and friends to easily challenge one another to a battle of skills, strategies, and luck, in an industrial setting arena. The acquisition of varying Powers that your squadron can receive in the game drastically adds to the innovative ways you can defend against or attack your opponent.

Quadradius is originally based on a game that Jimmi Heiserman made for a High School project way back in 1995. That version was programmed in Pascal, and was boringly titled “Squares”. This was due to the fact that the games nomenclature had never developed beyond the simple filename that was used to save the source code. His marketing department was asymptotically close to zero and he had a creative spark to match.

This version, titled Quadradius, was made using Macromedia Flash 7. Jimmi decided to write it using the Flash environment because he was interested in learning the language known as ActionScript and figured it was a great opportunity to hone his skills. He was also drawn in by the platform independence and growing robustness of Flash, the ease of using 2D art and animation with Flash, and the absence of end users having to download any executables. These combined issues made the creation and distribution very favorable to him.

Most of the art was done by Brad Kayal. His graphic design skills and art direction helped bring a sense of theme and environment to the game. He utilized Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash to create the art. He decided to keep the game 100% vector based, so it retained a sense of style, consistency, optimization, and most importantly, so it would look good whether scaled to any size in a browser window.

When we started talking about the design of this new game, Brad wanted the Flash artwork to not look like other Flash games. This lead to the dramatic lighting and shadows in the game as well as the very analog looking interface. He also had to deal with the problems of building an interface that was easy for new users, but also not overbearing for returning players. The whole process became a really interesting challenge from a design perspective (He doesn't even like to imagine the programming challenges as just the thought of it gives him a headache).

In the end, after 2 years, hours and hours of phone and email conversations, cases and cases of soda and beer, and multiple missed imaginary deadlines the game is now working and public. Nevertheless, Brad still plans on making design tweaks well into the future as he deals with certain OCD tendencies and insomnia.

We normally compare Quadradius to a hybrid mutation of Chess, Checkers, Battleship, Scorched Earth, Go, and Magic the Gathering. It is a two player, head to head, networked, turn based, strategical, futuristic, digital board game. Some of our fans have suggested short and concise descriptions for the game, and our favorite (and most widely used) tagline is Checkers on Steroids.

As for the more tech side of things, the SWF clients communicate with a socket server Jimmi wrote in Java. It coordinates communication, direction, and gameplay. This makes the transmission of data possible between Flash programs, whose basic security restricts them from operating as a peer-to-peer network or server. He learned many facets of Flash communication from the website moock.org. They have great samples and source code to play with.

During the development of Quadradius, Flash Player 8 was released, and new security restrictions broke the communication with the server. After reading the white papers on the new specs, and a few hours of coding and testing, Jimmi found a security policy file technique that had to be implemented to play nicely with Macromedia’s new security measures.

Jimmi also wrote his own version of a Dynamic DNS tool in PERL to overcome the obstacles of a static DNS provided by ISP’s. This helps ensure uptime for the communication portion of the game in the event that his IP address were to change and leave the Java server severed from the world. We are not guaranteeing five 9’s in network uptime, since the server is running in a less than perfect environment; Jimmi's bedroom.

During the creation and development of Quadradius, we found many websites helpful and inspirational:
ferryhalim.com/orisinal for its beautiful, playful artwork, character animations, and causal gameplay.
bit-101.com for its clever use of physics, AI, and simulations using Flash.
moock.org for its sample code of Flash and socket server communications.
actionscript.org for its community and database of Flash ActionScript programmers and examples.
livedocs.macromedia.com for its help pages and moderators who pointed out bugs with the environment and language, workarounds, and basic examples of ActionScript.


Email us. We love to hear your input.
Concept Design and Programming: jimmi@_REMOVESPAMTAG_quadradius.com.
Art Design, Illustration, and Sound Design: brad@_REMOVESPAMTAG_quadradius.com.


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