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.
Dinowaurs-wise we’ve been furiously working on performance to make a much larger private beta more realistic. We’ve done that. No word on when the beta will open up to the proportions it deserves, but it will likely be relatively soon. If you had problems running the game previously, definitely give it another shot. I can run it competitively on my P.O.S. PowerBook G4 1.67 ghz 1GB of RAM. Before these performance optimizations, I wrote off ever being able to even load the game up on my Mac, as I have plenty of trouble even doing that with the majority of Flash games. Someday we will find a pot of gold somewhere and I will be awarded an intel-based Mac that can play any indie game, ever. But until then, let us all congratulate Mike with a warm “hoooooray” [ala Pink Floyd] for kicking some ass on this one. It was painful, but that’s the name of the game. Perhaps he’ll go into some detail as to what was techincally going on, but for now, we just wanted to post this sigh of relief.
Hey everyone! Lately I’ve been working on more accessories, and… the coveted “tester” accessory.” We’re still not completely sure how it’ll work, but the second video is of that very accessory… the mammoth head. The first video is from like 2 months ago, and is one of many drawings that will show the “detail” of each accessory before you equip or buy it. Hope you like ‘em.
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!
This is my first time recording myself, so be gentle. I used Screen Record 2 from Mier Software, and given my extremely slow Powerbook G4, it performed pretty well. I think you’ll be seeing more of these from the rest of us as we go, including one of Mike coding. That’ll be riveting! Haha… programmers, who needs ‘em?
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.
My research materials have finally arrived from the Amazon. I’m
grateful they survived the journey in one piece. I shall soak them in brandy today to rid them of malaria, yellow fever, and evil spirits.
James Gurney is a badass.
Watercolor……I wish I was good with it. Maybe by the time we colonize Mars.
In other news: I drove by Claire Danes standing on a sidewalk yesterday…crazy.
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 
