A couple weeks ago we started a plan to do maptesting three times a week on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 6pm CST. It’s going pretty well so far, but I wanted to send out another call for the private beta testers to show up at 6pm Central today so we can continue testing and also have a tournament.
For those who haven’t been around much lately, we have trophies you can earn, several major bug fixes, performance improvements, and even an integrated chat system (triggered by pressing Return) so you can trash-talk your opponent. :) In addition, we’ve set up our own chat server using Mumble so that anyone interested can voice chat, if you’re into that sort of thing.
To use Mumble, download and install the software, then when you start it up, make sure to tune your audio settings using the wizard, which should pop up automatically. You can turn on push-to-talk through a combo-box in the Audio section of the Preferences, and choose your talk key in the Shortcuts section. Create a new connection to a custom server, set the host to www.intuitiongames.com, leave the port the same, choose a username (preferably the same as your Kong username), and then for the password type in the name of our game in lowercase letters. If you have troubles, feel free to ask in the Dinowaurs Game Chat on Kongregate. We hope to see you there!
The third Iowa Indie Game Jam was a great success! It was held this weekend October 17-19 in Cedar Falls at the apartment of Andres Reinot, an 8monkey Labs co-founder. He hosted an artist from Phantom EFX, several hobbyists and ISU students from Ames, four members of our company Intuition Games, and some friends and co-workers who stopped by just to wish us well or participate for a brief period here and there. Unfortunately, there was no internet access at the apartment, so this is a recap (it could probably be seen as a blessing in disguise :P).
This time there was a specific theme, which was “2d vs 3d.” The goal was to decide on a concept and make interpretations of the concept in both 2d and 3d. Most of us showed up on Friday night, socialized for a bit, got a sneak peek of the graphically-impressive Darkest of Days, and started brainstorming. The concept we came up with was exploring what it’s like to fly and be sensitive to wind patterns through the mechanics of grasshopper flight. You’re a grasshopper, and you can jump, fly/glide for a brief period, free fall, or dive bomb. You travel throughout a world and must deal with changing wind patterns in different areas of the sky. Joe made a really fun joke about how the player could be searching for a female grasshopper, and when he found her, he’d say “nice legs.” It went over well enough that everyone agreed the project would be named Nice Legs. That’s our Joe!
Brainstorming on an HDTV was nice.
The 3d team - composed of Andres from 8monkey Labs, Paul from Phantom EFX, and Ken from ISU - were going to use 8monkey’s Marmoset Engine and its tools as a foundation from which to build the game. The 2d team - composed of Joe, Mike, Greg and myself (Josh) from Intuition - were going to use Box2D, Joe’s partially-developed tile engine, and Flash as a foundation. Kira from ISU was going to illustrate a grasshopper, which could be used by both teams if need be.
The 3d team presided in the living room to the right. The 2d team was in the kitchen at left. Pictured at center holding the laptop is Mike Holtan. He joined us for a large part of the game jam working on his own version of the concept, which was a one-on-one grasshopper jousting game using physics based on actual grasshopper anatomy (think Toribash with grasshoppers and jousting). He was using the game to teach himself Box2D and Flash.
We split up into our teams and got to work. It was fascinating to see how each team went in their own direction. The 3d team, headed by Andres, went in a more flight simulator route by focusing on realistic flight physics and tuning the controls to an Xbox 360 gamepad. The 2d team went in a more platformer route by getting the tile engine up and running, and focusing on creating sections of the sky that acted as wind patterns.
Here’s Mike, who’s birthday was Oct. 6, enjoying some belated birthday cake. Thanks to my wife for making me enough cake that I’d have leftovers to share with Mike.
The end result of our game jam was two sandboxes in which we could explore the mechanics of our game, and both seemed to provide some good promise that a fun game could be made out of them. Neither team was able to complete a finished game, but everyone seemed pretty inspired to keep working on the projects after the weekend was over. Thanks to Andres for hosting us!
In the next post, I’ll upload some screenshots of the 2d and 3d version of Nice Legs and go into more detail about each one. In the meantime, feel free to head to the iowa indie game jam photo page to see the other photos.
On October 18th, some friends at 8Monkey Labs are hosting another Iowa Indie Game Jam with us. This will be the third in about the span of a year and will take place in Cedar Falls, IA. We think it’ll be the best yet! Basically we’ll all get together for a weekend and try to come up with a game or two. Working together in spirit, yet competing against each other with the ferocity of one hundred glaciers, one on the 2D side, and another on the 3D side. This will undoubtedly decide the ultimate question: “2D or 3D, which is better?”
If you’re a developer in Iowa, or around or the MidWest, or just happen to want to come and participate in the jam, email us at team [at] intuitiongames [dot] com. If you’re a player, we’ll be posting pictures and tomfoolery here during the jam as well, and then when the game is out and about, we’ll post that here too. If any of you guys have ideas for a game, post them in the comments, maybe it’ll sprout more ideas or make for a good base for whatever we cook up.
Things have been characteristically churning along behind the scenes. And for our next trick, we’ll be getting together some of you to participate in the some map/gameplay testing. Aside from the usual bug hunting, we want to test out a crap-load of maps with you awesome testers. Three nights a week we’ll be hosting a variety of brand-new maps to see what everyone thinks, as well as plug in some gameplay shifts in weapon power/cost and etc. Basically your duties as a Dinowaurs Map Test Fest participant include making the game as fun as possible. So here’s to announcing our DMT Fest. And what’s that? A Wolly Mammoth? o_O
In addition to all that… each Saturday we’ll be holding a Dinowaurs tournament. We’ve got brackets setup for 16 player tournaments and those will be open to Map Test Fest participants first and foremost. If there is more widespread interest in the tournaments we can open up multiple tournament sets if need be.
Ok, so for this to work out, we’re going to need a dedicated bunch of testers. Also, we’re going to need to synchronize our schedules every Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday. We made this scheduling sign-up to help everyone find the best time of day/night to hold the Map Test Fest. Please select all the times you are available (green) and all those you are not (red). Note: The testing will go on for multiple weeks, so understand you’re signing up for the best time of day, not any specific date. Also note: If you are annoying and signup a ton of times, you’ll be banished from signup.
Once enough folks have signed up, we’ll post on the blog who’s in and the times that we’re going ahead with for each of the days. Don’t worry if you can’t make it for every single session each week, it’s all part of the plan.
Hey every seven of you! We’ve officially opened up the Dinowaurs beta to the first wave of the Kongregate community. We’ve been floored by the response from everyone and we’d like to thank everybody for their interest and excitement for Dinowaurs.
In other news we’ve hit 1000 commits. I even recorded a video of the whole boring process, but turns out, it was more boring than youtube could probably handle, so instead we bring you this much more exciting “Speed-paint” of Mike coding up the Dinowaurs menu from about two months ago. Now Feast!
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.
For the last 10 days or so we’ve been preparing Dinowaurs Beta. It’s almost here! We even have a nice little banner on the front of the Kongregate website to coax people to sign up in the forum thread.
What are some of the changes? The first thing one would notice is a brand new main menu. Main actions are organized into tabs. Dinowaurs has persistence, which means you can create up to 3 dinos and give them accessories. These settings are then saved so they’ll come back up the next time you play! We currently have 3 tutorials that teach people more and more about the game until they’re ready to fight a dino controlled by another player. This can be done in the battle tab, where battles take place in either the snowy Alps or the Mexican desert.
Sleepy the Stegosaurus, complete with top hat, is enjoying the new Mexican desert arena. Go get that tier 2 village Sleepy!
We’re super pumped for Dinowaurs Beta. Mike is currently working on some bug fixes, and then we’ll be ready to release it to the wild. If you’re interested in signing up for the beta, go to the Dinowaurs Beta sign-up thread. Make sure to sign up for a Kongregate account so you can post in the thread.
Also, Greg has been making accessories for the dinos. As you can see, the result is amazing. :) Check out this Intuition Forum accessory thread if you want to see more. Feel free to make suggestions, too.
Overall, progress on Dinowaurs is going well. We can’t wait to release the Beta. Go sign up and let us know what you think!
It’s been a big week for the whole team, but with largeness comes progress, and with great power comes great responsibility ~ Spiderman. sorry…
I’ve been working on finalizing as many weapons as humanly possible, and giving them some basic effects that we’ll prettify later down the road. We felt like the weapons just weren’t visually ridiculous enough for the concept of Dinowaurs and didn’t have much to do with their scaled power as each player progresses through the tier system. Plus with finalized weapon art in there and the basic motion and effects, Joel Walsh, our audio guru, can now work his sweet melodic magic. Here are the weapons as they stand today:
Beyond the art, we’ve switched the jetpack (now in tier 2) with the flamethrower (now in tier 3) and modified its function. The flamethrower now shoots out flames that persist on the ground that can damage any dino that is so brash as to walk atop them. These changes seemed to really work well during our Dinowaurs Alpha party that we held tonight. We had a decent showing, and there were plenty of epic battles; world rankings are even starting to emerge amongst the community showing the likes of cpasley, milskidasith and pachuco near the top. Head on over to the forums to check out all the strategies, newest updates and trash talk amongst the testers. That game is starting to get pretty fun and we look forward to polishing it. It’s been a long, agile road but now it’s all starting to pay off.
The past couple weeks have been crazy busy, and even a little overwhelming. We’ve had an early build of Dinowaurs up on Kongregate’s website, and testers have been playing the game to help us find bugs.
If you’re interested in testing Dinowaurs, drop us any e-mail with your Kongregate username, and we’ll add you to the list!
Despite the commotion, it’s really exciting to see that people are enjoying the game! All of us at Intuition Games get a certain warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that people out there are actually having fun, even when the game can be pretty buggy and annoying sometimes.
Kongregate has a feature built into their Flash-based chat where you can post a bug report, and the text entered goes directly to the developer. This has been incredibly valuable to us, since it’s really easy for players to do and we’ve been getting a steady stream of bug reports as new people test the game for the first time. Most of the bugs have revolved around the same few major issues and several minor ones, but it’s insightful to read through how players perceive the same problem in several different ways. Keep those reports coming!
KongBR, a Brazilian blog dedicated to Kongregate and its many cool games.
We’ve even been mentioned on the Brazilian Kongregate fan blog KongBR. Thanks to WillianGallis for a brief mention, followed again by a more detailed feature article. You guys rock! We’re really excited and blessed to have such great testers and players so far.
If you haven’t been over to the Intuition Games Forum yet, you should stop by. Most of the members so far are testers themselves. In the forum, you can find some more detail on Dinowaurs, including controls, rules, weapon descriptions, and even some new concept art by Ted. Introduce yourself, suggest something for the game, or even just say hi. We’d love to have you.
We hope to continue building our community and serving it as best we can. If our experience so far is any indication, it’s going to be a great one.
Mike, Josh and I(Greg) scuttled down to Ankeny for a developer meetup that the DSMGG held at a local gaming place Cyber Ops Gaming Center. I got there a little late, but everyone’s projects were really cool and the whole tone of the place was really exciting. I suppose anytime you get a bunch of passionate, smart people in closed quarters together we start feeding off each other.
Like I said, I got in a little late, but I was able to catch the last half of David Duke’s presentation on his sweet trajectory shooter prototype, Mini-World Wars. It was super simple, but those can be the best prototypes. I keep seeing a bunch of these gravity-body mechanics coming out post Mario Galaxy, and it’s really interesting to see the influence that’s had. It’s definitely a good thing. David’s prototype was sweet because not only did it involve mass-based physics but also took into account the mass of the orbiting moon, which affected me in my trousers as well We all want to play ASAP!
Later we were lucky enough to run a few play testing sessions with the guys that were able to stay longer. It was certainly an interesting experience, it being our first run through of the game with other people. I would say overall, while it wasn’t what I hoped for, we uncovered a few new bugs, some UI issues, and a consensus amongst the room about the villagers. We’ve got a fair bit of work ahead of us, but that’s good, we’ve built the stone now it’s time to shave it down to a pretty marble dino. Hopefully the next time we play test we’ll be to focus more on the fun and intricacies of the gameplay itself.
It was great to get some of that inspiration last night. Sometimes living in Iowa you feel a little isolated from the “happenings” of game development, and while there’s TIGSource and RPS and so on, there’s no substitute for real human interaction with developers. Just the slightest bit of someone else’s project, or hearing about real development issues others are facing can help a great deal. We all left pretty wide-eyed and ready to plug in for another go ’round.
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 
We all want to play ASAP!
