Dinowaurs Beta (sort of) released, improvements abound

We’ve been hard at work continuing development these past couple weeks.  Our heads have been down as we sweat it out toward our next deadline - Dinowaurs Gold.  We finally released a Beta build to the existing alpha testers.  For those of you who had access to the alpha, the new link is at the Dinowaurs Beta Preview Page.  Make sure to login before visiting the page!  The testers have continued to help us out more than we could have asked for.  It’s crazy how much easier it is to find bugs and problems when you have a group of people as dedicated to testing and playing the game as we’ve had for Dinowaurs.

There are about 20 or so people that regularly come in to check out what’s going on, help find bugs, and help tune the gameplay.  Those people have been invaluable in making Dinowaurs a better game.  You know who you are; thanks guys.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to let in more testers quite yet.  We’re currently waiting for some shiny new server hardware before letting in the almost 3000 people who’ve said they want to beta test.  Check it out for yourself:  http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/8117

In the meantime, we’ve been busy doing a number of things, including:  polishing the main menu, improving our tutorials, bug fixing, adding more dino animations, adding a 3rd arena, improving performance, tuning gameplay, and preparing a bunch of sound effects and music.

For sound and music, we have been working with Joel Walsh of Studio 13 up in Canada.  We’re really fortunate to be working with someone like Joel.  So far he’s been able to find great stock music for our main menu (recorded in the 60s!), bring in professional voice actors for our villagers and dinosaurs, hook us up with composer Rohan Staton to do original 60s-psychedelic-style music for 3 of our arenas, and make great sound effects for the game.  In fact, just today we got a draft of a bunch of sound that we’ll be putting in the game ASAP.  We’re so excited to finally have great sound in there!

Another exciting thing that has been happening is related to performance improvements.  Flash is a great platform for building a little game quickly or for managing your content pipeline, but one thing it simply sucks at is performance for larger scale games.  We’ve had a lot of trouble getting the game to run smoothly with a couple scrolling backgrounds and just a couple dinos in there running around with weapons and accessories on.  But Mike - who has written all the client-side code himself - has been working diligently trying to get every bit of performance out of Flash that he can.  He’s made great strides recently in making the game a lot smoother.  And we hope to get even better performance in the next week or so.

We’ll continue to press on toward finishing up the game.  For those who are waiting to get into the beta:  as soon as we get that new hardware and get it set up, we’ll open up the floodgates and let you in.  Until then, just make some doodles of the Best Day Ever.