The crazy color palette couldn’t been seen from a screencast so I decided to record it on my iPhone instead.

Testing out the Rocket Power Up. Most of the things are placeholders, but the game is coming along great!

Enter the Omega Box

My first game of 2011, Omega Box, surprisingly was a huge hit. I intended it to be a small project just to flex some brain and muscle, but it ended up racking 1,000,000 plays. It was also featured on Kotaku, JayIsGames, IndieGamesChannel, and for the first time I got on the front page of Kongregate and NewGrounds, a great achievement for any flash game developer. Much thanks to AddictingGames for licensing and publishing.

The Zombie Apocalypse

Zombocalypse — The best project I’ve yet to work on! I loved working on the new mechanics, and doing all the sound design — I’m very meticulous not only about small details but that the sound is good enough to immerse the player in the world I’ve created. I worked with the very talented Apatheria who did the infamous voice acting for when you pick up weapons, and Mike Puncekar who just blew everyone away with his artwork, and much thanks to Dan for publishing and licensing Zombocalypse into the ArmorGames pantheon.

This game was the pinnacle of IronZilla’s brand, racking up over 3 million+ plays, being featured as the daily and weekly game for NewGrounds (and winning various trophies) and reviewed by JayisGames, hitting frontpage on Kongregate, bringing in over 5,000 likes to IronZilla’s Facebook page, and spreading like wildfire everywhere else. It’s hard to fathom that I created a game that received this amount of love.

Professionalism

One of the most difficult things I’ve ever done has to be pledging and crossing into a professional business fraternity, AKPsi. It’s more of an organization than a fraternity, as people confuse fraternities with hazing, parties, alcohol, etc. All of that is illegal, since it compromises being professional and composed.

I had to keep a professional demeanor at all times, prepare and partake in interviews under a high pressure environment, give speeches and presentations, and manage and interact with groups of people to set up events. This definitely polished my business game, and allowed me to grow in confidence with my leadership abilities. To me, it’s important to be a good developer, but you’ll also need to be business savvy.

A great amount of sacrifice, determination, commitment, lack of sleep, and energy drinks pretty much sums it up! (Big thanks to my brother from another mother Steven Dizon for really urging me to go through with the pledging process)

And Some Goals…

I have a bunch of personal goals, but here’s some I’d like to achieve for IronZilla:

- Make 3-4 games this year, and 1 big sellable game
- Make a connection with the 5,200+ fans on our Facebook page. I’d like to get to know you guys more as John, and not just as some developer who makes these crazy games!
- Keep frequently posting on IronZilla.com, at least 1-2 times a week
- Grow IronZilla’s fan base, and expand the brand
- Set up more collaborations with talented people
- Attend The Flash Game Summit, and if by some kind of divine miracle, attend GDC.

And a BFTY!

Thank you all for supporting me and IronZilla (obviously since you’re reading this post), as well as the 5,200 fans on our Facebook page. It’s been a pleasure, let’s make 2012 awesome!

- John

Yesterday I was on campus at San Francisco State University from 8:30am until 10:30pm. The sad thing is, that’s how most days are for me – with some days far worse. I’m a full time college student, I work for myself and run my own business, and I’m pledging for a professional business fraternity which in itself takes up an extraordinary amount of time, but an investment worth having if it means I’m to become a more polished and better leader.

Simply put, my life is not easy. Nor do I choose for it to be easy. In fact, I believe to reach our full potential, we have to push ourselves past our limits, past our comfort zone. Only then, can we see what we are capable of, and only then can we see how much further we can go.

This is what Steve Jobs did. I read a biography of his life, titled iCon, back in high school. I’ve been a die hard fan ever since. He and Woz were relentless in the pursuit of their dreams. They’d work late into the night — wake up, code, eat, knock out, repeat. Sleep wasn’t an option. Failure didn’t exist. And obstacles were ran over. This kind of work ethic, this kind of passion, truly inspired me, and put my own drive  in perspective. Whenever I thought my life was hard, I’d think how easy it was compared to Steve Jobs. By now you all know who the man is, what he has accomplished, and why his life is so monumental.

Thanks Steve for being an inspiration to not only me, but for countless others. Your story was an extraordinary one, and you proved that from one vision, an empire can be fostered and the world could be changed.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

- John

Download your template here for Flash CS4: http://www.mediafire.com/?0xlcxrgjch1lm4k

Hopefully this is something that can be used as a standard and professionally by the Flash dev community. Of course the ESRB rating is a placeholder for our own type of ratings (it’s most likely illegal to use it) but hopefully we can also set up a rating system, in support of FGL. I know NewGrounds has a rating system (teen, mature, everyone, etc) that should be able to be used on the box.

> John

*puts feet up on desk*

*puts feet back down*

What an awesome vacation, time to get back to work. The next project in development is pretty epic. Not epic as in “OMG 100+ hours of play, millions of weapons, punch enemies in the face and they die -”, but epic as in “This is what all you IronZilla fans have been waiting for.” And apologies for not remaking and perfecting it until now. Major hint right there.

I’ll be working with renown flash animator / artist Jimp on this project, with hit games under his belt like Sushi Cat, Elephant Quest, Zomgies 1 + 2, The Lance, and more. I saw his artwork, and I automatically knew his style was the one! (Glad to have you on board Jimp!).

[Elephant Quest developed by Jmtb02 and Jimp, produced by ArmorGames]

A Zombo Postmortem is due in the near future, explaining what went right, what went wrong, and the development of it all, from conception to product. The project team was extremely talented, and I’ll give Mike and Apatheria a round of applause in advance – great work guys! I’d love to post  it asap, but I’ll have to test my patience so I can get the statistics right when Zombo has gone 100% viral.

I’ll also be working on another project, with the latter involving destroying cities from space. Doesn’t that sound fun?

That’s all ladies and gents! Now, don’t hate me for disclosing absolutely nothing about our next few projects save for a few tid bits here and there. Come back soon for enlightement :]

> John

9/ 19: To celebrate hitting 1,000 Facebook fan page likes, getting a review on JayIsGames, and getting the Daily Feature award and front page feature on NewGrounds, some new cheat codes have been released!

9 / 11: The latest version has been updated on ArmorGames. To play the latest version, you’ll have to erase the cookies / cache then refresh your browser. Sorry everyone, this will delete your saved game. Use the cheats below to recoup your experience even faster.

Secret Cheat Codes

Most of you have found this secret section, kudos to you! If not, then keep looking, it’s really in plain sight. Type in the cheat codes all in lowercase, and click activate to use them.

valkyrie – Kill Combo sets to 100, giving you the Attack Chopper (Once per round)
pantheon – GodHand equipped (Once per round)
doom – MFG equipped (Once per round)
rambo – Minigun equipped (Once per round)
adrenaline – Fully heal your health (Once per round)
super saiyan – +3000 exp points (Once per game)
i am legend – Start the round at 3,000 kills (once per round, no experience gain)

ijohnf – Equip John’s head (restart the round to equip)
wtf – Equip The All Seeing Eye (restart the round to equip)
zombified – Equip Zombie Walker head (restart the round to equip)
team meat – Equip Super Meat Boy head (restart the round to equip)

There are still more cheat codes and head unlocks to come in updates to this post!

HD Wallpapers

These are illustrations handcrafted and made available by the very talented Mike Puncekar. You may have seen him on Kotaku featured for his infamous realistic Super Mario series.

Menu Art: 1780×1024   http://www.mediafire.com/?ng1xoxrlo5iyviu

Game Introduction Art: 1790 x 1024 http://www.mediafire.com/?97kt075u66wdp5y

Come back soon for more extras!

- John

The next few updates will be very important, as we’ll be releasing a teaser image of our next project, and some cheat codes for Zombocalypse. Yeahhh, cheat codes. You love us.

Anyways, check it out tomorrow, and thank you in advance for rating it a 10/10.

> John

FGL Review Information:

UPDATE 9/7/11:

Sorry but there’s been some delays! There is a chance I may push back the release date to ensure that Zombocalypse launches completely finished and of the utmost quality.

> John

What a surprise today — Omega Box is featured on the front page of AddictingGames.com for their Summer Games Showdown contest. Check it out!

Zombocalypse just got approved by FlashGameLicense, so it should be going into public bidding mode soon. The game has already managed to grasp 60 developers to test it out, some playing for an hour at a time. So I think I’m on to something if other developers enjoy the game (we see how the sausage is made, so we don’t really like to eat it — wrap your mind around that analogy). Still in talks with some sponsors via e-mail — it’s a grueling process, with all the pressure and negotiating. Stuff like that preps you for the survival of the fittest business world.

But, I’m only getting older, so work has already begun on the next project. I scraped up a prototype in 30 minutes — working with particle effects and honing my skills at depth swapping techniques. Let’s just say it’ll be pretty epic. For me, sponsorships are getting your feet wet. It’s not a practical long term business model, however, it is viable enough to take further steps down the road (Fancy Pants, Castle Crashers, Line Rider, etc) . There is great benefit to it, but I’ll save that for another post.

The goal of all these flash games is to hopefully fund a full on premium game. Then those premium games will fund a publishing company. Then as a publishing company we can buy other game studios. Then we can move on to other things besides games. Then we’ll rule the world like EA, Valve, and Activision. But really, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s just take things one step at a time.

*sip ahhhhh*

> John

Once again I’d like to thank all the beta testers in Round 1 and 2. I read all your feedback and implemented as much as I could. When Zombocalypse hits the interwebs, I’ll be announcing our next project

Stay tuned!

> John

The Debut Trailer for Zombocalypse has been unleashed on the world. Turn the volume up and prepare for an epic score.