Archive for the 'community' Category
February 19th, 2008 by savethedinosaurs
Hey reader, we’re broadcasting deep within the bowels of the bay area. We made another podcast last night, hopefully we’ll have time to edit it and maybe make another one. There’s so much to talk about with the IGS, we tried to hold it in as best we could until we could talk about it “fresh” on the podcast. So in lieu of an edited podcast we give you this gem. Man, ever since I learned how to spell that, it’s been open season on “lieu.” It has surpassed “purview” and “ilk,” at least in written form.
THE ALMIGHTY INTUITION DEVCAST WORLD PREMIERE
On the night of day 0, I decided to search out a mysterious beep that seemed to emanate from Ted’s bag. Apparently Josh captured my safari on camera.
Turns out it wasn’t the bag, or even in the room, but outside somewhere. Next day, we posed for our book-nook picture at IGS.
Later… lunch. Where we learned a crafty new way to make a cube out of 6 business cards unbeknownst to us that it would destroy them.
Then sushi and talk with Tyler Streeter, our mutual friend from the VRAC. He does research on A.I. specific to the human brain. He’s the one in the 2nd picture on the left, blurried. He’s brilliant. And married… sorry ladies!
Oh yea, bonus picture. We found a guy with a ghillie suit laptop mod/cover thing. Anyway… pretty cool. Hope you liked the podcast. We really tried to cut it down to a reasonable length, and well try to get out a real one soon.
November 13th, 2007 by torncanvas
Finally the day has come! Kongregate announced our game Dinowaurs among the first set of games for their Premium Developer Program. So far, we’ve been mentioned on Gamasutra, TechCrunch, next-gen.biz, and Gamezebo, and interviewed by IGN. It has been an amazing experience so far. As I’ve alluded to before when I talked about Indie Bootstrapping Opportunities, we think Kongregate offers a really good deal for indie developers looking for funding so they can bootstrap a game company.
After three or so months of holding it in, we can finally unleash the flood gates of development sharing upon the public. So stay tuned for frequent updates on the development of Dinowaurs.
Below is a snippet of a press release we sent out. Mike’s quote is my favorite part. 
Dinowaurs is a multiplayer strategic combat game where two innocent dinosaurs, armed to the teeth with bombastic weaponry, are forced to partake in a kill-or-be-killed fight to the death, where only one will survive. Because the dinosaurs are only focused on food, like cows grazing in a pasture, they are oblivious to the surrounding battle and are inadvertently causing their own extinction.
“We’ve always loved dinosaurs ever since we were kids,” said Josh Larson, Intuition’s Chairman of Markerboard Doodling. “We are excited by the idea that we could express that love through video games, one of our generation’s most popular art forms.” Mike Boxleiter, Vice Chair of the Wheat Advisory Committee for Intuition added, “As children, our knowledge of dinosaurs was limited to our imaginations. But as we grew older and learned the stories of our parents’ youth, we were able to gain deep insight through their first-hand accounts of the terrible lizards that roamed the land in those days. Now, we’ve finally been able to pass those on.”
Intuition Games formed around the idea of the game, when in May 2007, Ted Martens and Greg Wohlwend had an idea for a dark and humorous cartoon dinosaur fighting game. The dinosaurs were actually unaware of the fact that they were fighting since they only cared about food. Josh and Mike had been brainstorming game ideas on an internet forum and met with friends Ted and Greg to hear about the idea. The group hit it off and developed the Dinowaurs idea into a multiplayer combat game with a unique strategy element of villages that produced the weapons for the dinosaurs.
“Dinowaurs is a fantastic concept that plays off the incongruity of innocence in a dark and violent setting,” said Chris Pasley, Director of Games at Kongregate. “We’re really excited to be working with Intuition to develop this as one of our first premium games.”
October 20th, 2007 by torncanvas
We’re here and we’ve cracked open the laptops. It’s time to begin. I’m going to set up a chat in this post for those who are participating remotely and anyone who wants to “stop by” and say hi.
(Game Jam is over, chat removed)
October 9th, 2007 by torncanvas
In some form or another, Intuition has been around for 25 weeks. Woohoo! A lot has happened since then, and a lot more is about to happen. The last 3 weeks or so have been quiet on the surface, but it’s really the calm before the storm. We see the skies getting dark, the pressure building, and we can feel our hair stand on end.
That hasn’t stopped us from getting a little work done, though. Aside from some random business things, we’ve done a little work on Dinowaurs in the form of more sketches, a little back-end prototype work, and setting up the Dinowaurs website. We thought we’d show some images and stuff there eventually.
We’ve got our eye on the skies, though. And when she comes, we’ll be ready.
September 22nd, 2007 by torncanvas
Friends from thatgamecompany have been busy working on a game called Flower. Derek Yu from TIGSource puts it best: “it looks quite evocative, although little is known about how it actually plays.” I would like to add that the visuals look to be inspired by Boring 3D (a GOOD thing). That guy freaking rules, and I think he should at least get some props in the credits. The teaser tailer for Flower seems to suggest that the player will be some form of organic matter doing something related to pollinating flowers, though one can’t be sure.
Ever since I watched the anime series Last Exile in May, I’ve wanted to make a game where the entire experience took place in a peaceful, endless field. Well, I also love walking through the grass with my bare feet on, so that could have something to do with it, too. Apparently TGC is one step ahead of me. If that’s the case, I know exactly what their next game after Flower is going to be.
September 20th, 2007 by torncanvas
It’s slightly old news by now, but I just found out about Metaplace today, the project that Raph Koster and the rest of Areae has been working on all this time.
The website claims that you’ll be able to explore these easily-created virtual worlds without having to download anything. I’m guessing what they mean is without having to download anything if you already have some existing clients installed. Unless it uses the Metaplace client that is, which it probably will for 3d stuff. But otherwise, the platform can piggy-back off of some existing client, which is great. That kind of accessibility will definitely give Metaplace some long term chances of succeeding.
I’m really excited to see where this project goes. At the very least, it’s a cool thing to use for prototyping some online gameplay. However, if it was a decent platform, it could allow people to quickly make successful multiplayer games or generate cool online spaces. And it could bring in revenue, too.
If the performance and security is decent, it could be another alternative to SmartFox for a server-side solution to Flash multiplayer games.
August 24th, 2007 by torncanvas
In preperation for the future, and as an unfortunate necessity, we got together on Wednesday to go over business stuff and set up some things for a press kit. Part of the press kit was a group photo, so we tried to have as much fun as possible having a photo shoot. Here are some of the results:
(From left: Greg W, Ted M, Mike B, Josh L)
We found a sweet beat-up VW Minibus that had been sitting in that spot for the last 10 years. Of course we wanted to get our picture taken with it. While we were taking pictures, a man who worked at the car shop nearby offered to sell it to us. It needed more love than we were willing to give it, though.
The day before, Mike was showing us the iconic James Bond poses that each Bond actor had adopted. It was really entertaining. Randomly, someone mentioned we should strike a Bond pose, so because we’re dorks, we gave it a shot. This is probably our favorite photo of the whole group.
We figured the abandoned factory would be a great setting for our photos. So this photo is meant to show it off. My favorite part is the fact that every vehicle in the background is at least 10-15 years old. It makes me think of Eastern Europe.
Not an official press photo per se, but appropriate enough anyway. Currently, only Mike lives in Ames, and since that’s where we met, we crashed at his place. It was unseasonably cool that night, so Ted and I wrapped up in our blankets. We looked pretty silly, and that inspired a group photo with all of us snuggled up on the couch.
There’s still debate about these two. We all admit they’re kind of rock-band-pretentious, but the debate is over whether that can be a good thing or not. 
Our lawyer told us that apparently, it’s a good idea for legal reasons to have official titles for your LLC. Something about the government and documents, blah blah blah…
Well at Intuition Games, we see ourselves as equals, with no person having authority over anyone else. It’s just that different people have different roles they take on. We applied that mentality to choosing official titles by drawing names out of Ted’s trumpet case to decide who would get which title. And we forced Ted to play his trumpet between each draw.
Ted is well-known for his creative genius when it comes to seating posture. If there was ever a competition for most interesting position while working at a computer, Ted would win hands down. Here’s a good example:
Despite some draining business discussions, the whole thing was quite fun. Maybe someday the press photos will actually be put to use. Nah…
August 14th, 2007 by torncanvas
This weekend was the first Iowa Indie Game Jam, and it was a great success. Its beginnings were humble and spontaneous. Andres came down to Des Moines to see the coolness that is going on here - this weekend it was The Grey Market. While visiting, he proposed having a game development jam session. I thought it was a great idea. So, since he didn’t have his laptop and my apartment was about 85 degrees, we decided to head up to Ames to his parents’ place.
Our original goal was to make an asteroids clone that created background graphics after you destroyed asteroids with a continuous laser that could reflect off of other asteroids. And it was going to be done in ActionScript 3.0. Well, we soon found out how different AS 3.0 is from 2.0, so we sent out an S.O.S. to Mike B. to save our butts.
(from top-left clockwise: Josh L “torncanvas”, Mike B “fucrate”, Andres R “monkeyscience”)
To our surprise, Mike H. showed up on his way out of town to visit some friends. He ended up staying the whole time.
(from left: Mike H, Mike B “fucrate”)
Thankfully he had a camera to document the event. Soon after, Mike B. arrived and proposed creating a 50-lines-or-less Flash game, inspired by a recent competition on the Kongregate forums. After some discussion, we decided to make a dungeon crawler with this restriction. That proved to be quite the challenge…
Everyone got pretty sucked in, which was great, and eventually we worked into the wee hours of Saturday night. The aftermath:
We had breakfast together the next morning and came back to work on more of the game. Pretty soon Greg showed up to join in the fun, too.
(Greg W “aeiowu”)
Not long after, I had to leave, but the IIGJ continued as everyone worked in true indie fashion on an old school favorite: the dungeon crawler.
There’s already talk of the next Iowa Indie Game Jam. Rock on, independent game development.
April 18th, 2007 by torncanvas
So I was talking to Andres about marketing yesterday. I’ve been debating a lot about whether or not it would be a good idea to share a lot of the development process with the community. This would include posting WIP stuff. We both agreed that most people don’t understand WIP postings. Because of this, it’s a risky thing to do marketing-wise. But you know, I think that’s why I want to do it. I think it would be cool to try to educate the community about game development. This would include showing people what game development looks like in-process. If we could educate even one future producer that it’s ok for a game to look a bit ugly in the early stages, I think it’d be well worth it. And think of how great it would be to educate current producers that it’s ok! Plus, I still think the advantages of being open and allowing the community to form a closer relationship with the development team would greatly outweigh the disadvantages of people who are uneducated about game development thinking the game sucks while it’s still a WIP.
Another cool thing about sharing development process is that people will get to see how the product is evolving while it is evolving. I think this could create a more emotional attachment to the project, which would result in people being more interested in it.
