Xander Davis

In 2005, by day, I worked as Creative Director and Flash specialist of an Internet media agency in Indianapolis. By night, I was pushing Flash into the realm of games.

So of course I started small... with making a full-blown RPG. I was inspired to produce a game much like my childhood favorite, Chrono Trigger, but with HD graphics.

I contracted and directed a team from around the world: two professional anime-style concept artists, a Japanese linguist and voice actor, a music composer in Montreal, and Yasunori Mitsuda (music composer of Chrono Trigger) in Tokyo to create the game's original main theme song. I directly worked on everything else.

I then built a proof of concept in Flash, consisting of two rooms, a player, NPCs, and a dialogue system, all created in HD graphic fidelity. My next goal was to produce a battle system. The bulk of the work was in pre-production: world building, characters, story development.

For a Flash game in 2005, I'd like to think the project was ahead of its time, but my lack of free-time made it difficult to push the project further.

In addition to the game design, I performed extensive world-building, and story / character development:

In another star system, a tyrannical young king detonates the sun to harness its energy and become a god. His plan backfires when a black-hole forms, sending him back in time. Realizing the error of his ways, he hides his identity and sets out to stop his past self before the solar system is destroyed again.

The hero and the villain are the same person, in a coming-of-age story about redemption and responsibility.

While developing Novabound, I had a vision for turning browser-based games into a true commercial gaming platform.

I designed several concepts for an in-browser 'Web Games Console' to manage user accounts, saved games, stats, and sales, and planning on launching Novabound within it. Later, the web console would've been opened to third party developers too.

I first imagined what it would look like if Microsoft themselves did it for a web-version of Xbox Live. After that, I iterated with several re-skinnings for my own brand, Dreamseed.

I spoke with key individuals at Macromedia and Microsoft to see about getting DirectX gamepad support built native into Flash, so Flash games could be played with an Xbox 360 USB wired controller through no additional drivers or software. Five years later and Flash still doesn't offer this, despite its takeoff as a gaming platform.

Years later, a website gaming platform 'Kongregate' was launched, which set out to do many of the things I had concepted prior. In late July 2010, Kongregate was bought by Gamestop.

In 2006, I had a vision of a top-down shooter where the world rotated and moved around a screen-fixed player to simulate a 3D third-person shooter in a 2D environment. I built an engine prototype over a month of spare time and began re-skinning the project upon revisiting it in 2009.

It was purely an engine prototype and didn't include final art. Inspired by another childhood favorite of mine, Bungie's Marathon 2: Durandal, I wanted to bring a similar feature-set and experience into a top-down Flash engine.

In 2009, I re-invented the concept from the ground up in a more straight-forward view and control scheme, writing in the new ActionScript 3.0, now a true programming language. Prototype 2 was my first attempt at using AS3's exciting Object Oriented Programming structure.

I started over again in 2009 using the Flixel ActionScript 3.0 framework, ditching the Flash IDE for a code-only development environment with Adobe Flash Builder. This time, I wrote an actual Game Design Document, which ended up fairly extensive.

Flixel was by no means a plug-n-play solution, but it did handle a lot of grunt work to speed up the engine building process. Prototype 3 ultimately proved the most robust and stable engine design for the project yet.

I stopped development on the Evolver Engine when I was hired at High Moon Studios (Activision) to work on Transformers: War for Cybertron for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Windows.

In 2009, while working on Evolver for Flash, I set out to build a game for Xbox Live Community Games on the .NET XNA Framework in C#.

I first established the total game concept:

Mechs vs. Monsters in 4-player Xbox Live Co-Op!

Aliens have invaded ancient Greece, introducing high tech to the surviving city of Athens. Centuries later, after the minds of Socrates and Plato were cybernetically grafted into an Athenian mainframe system, the Empire of Athens grew to global domination. Teams of giant mechs and power-suit foot-soldiers (known as 'the Alloy') are deployed against the second wave of alien invaders in the ancient world gone terribly wrong.

I contracted an excellent programmer, Spencer Putt, and within a few nights of spare time, we had a playable test level on an Xbox 360, powered by his code and my art/design.

Like Evolver, Alloy had to go on indefinite hiatus when I accepted the position with High Moon Studios (Activision) to work on Transformers: War for Cybertron, relocating across the country to southern California. Because of this, work on Alloy lasted only a couple of weeks of spare time!

In July 2010, I decided to start XSMB, a NES Super Mario Bros. clone in Flash using ActionScript 3.0 and the Flixel Framework.

To me, Super Mario Bros. for NES is square one when it comes to this era of video gaming's classic game design. I decided to take on the challenge of reproducing it for a great learning experience.

Like all of these examples, it is a work in progress done in limited spare time, but currently ongoing and the fastest I've built a Flash game yet.

I'm now increasingly adept at ActionScript 3.0 OOP and the ever-updating Flixel framework.

Flash Game Dojo was very recently started by the creators of Flixel and Flash Punk, by setting up a new wiki database for learning their programming frameworks. It's much more efficient than going to the forum and asking other developers to teach users one-on-one. This way, learning is more automatically open to everyone.

I regularly help out by organizing and writing articles, edits, tutorials, and code snippets for Flixel there, helping others to more rapidly learn Flash game development and grow the Flixel community.

To date, I've contributed in over 80+ articles.

"Xander is a very talented Artist. He is a positive influence on the people around him and an asset to any team."

-Matt Tieger
Game Director
High Moon Studios (Activision)

(From Xander's LinkedIn Profile)

"Xander is an incredibly talented artist with drive and passion to match. Xander is a consummate team player who will find ways to contribute beyond the expected. I highly recommend Xander to any creative and driven organization."

-Peter Della Penna
President
High Moon Studios (Activision)

(From Xander's LinkedIn Profile)