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.
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.
This wee bug was no “gomez” or “zaphod” but he certainly was a worthy $@%#ing adversary. BG Bug, we salute you and pray for your safe return to Hades.
We opened the doors to private alpha testing on the Kongregate forums on April fools day. Some we’re skeptical, but the rest were excited. So far only a handful of dedicated troops are testing the game now, and doing a great job of finding bugs galore. The experience has been a little overwhelming, but totally awesome at the same time. The response to the game has been better than we expected, and we’re looking forward to having more fun with it as we open the doors even wider.
Willian Gallis, a writer from KongBR (A Brazilian Kongregate blog) has written a Portuguese article on the Dinowaurs alpha. He’s an alpha tester. Luckily I have a few latin-language friends who helped me read the comments, we hope Brazil has plenty of fun, we tried to make it as globally accessible as possible.
If you are one of the OG testers that sent us an email last year, don’t worry you’ll be in on things soon enough, we’re sending you out special invites today sometime and then we’ll get you fixed up with some delicious dino-ing. We’ve found Kongregate’s chat and bug reports to be invaluable
throughout this process, and we’re really excited with the progress
even after a couple of days. Here’s a shot of the alpha, to whet your palette.
We only have 4 players playing right now (5PM CST) but tonight that should rise with a big load of new invites. Great job testers! (Maybe we can find a better “team name” for “the testers,” post something in the forums guys.
One final note, we’ve been getting some questions on the Kongregate forums about if the people who signed up last year will be getting invites too. Don’t worry your invite is in the mail, you just need to send us your Kongregate UserID in an email. Thanks for sticking with us, and enjoy your dino-ing.
Website Engaged (fiancé-kind)
Sorry Blogger, Wordpress has been flirting with us and she finally broke up with her boyfriend, so we did what any indie nerd would do. Propose marriage.
The website isn’t completely perfect just yet, (nobody is, we learned that in our college relationships) but it’s functional and way easier for us to manage and keep updated. Flash was another girlfriend of ours (in websites) and she was really hard to talk to, things got complicated. Now we have the best of both worlds and hopefully the wedding goes well, you’re all invited!
Over the course of development at Intuition Games, Dinowaurs has gone through several design iterations. It’s quite a different beast than when we started. This post is an attempt to explain the new Dinowaurs design in a nutshell.
Premise
Dinowaurs tries to recreate the childhood joy of dinosaurs fighting each other. In the game, two opposing teams of villagers attempt to gain each other’s land by strapping crazy weapons to dinosaurs and forcing them to fight each other. The dinosaurs themselves are actually oblivious to the fact that they’re fighting.
Gameplay
Dinowaurs is a free-to-play multiplayer online combat/strategy game played in real-time. It has MMO-like persistence and character customization, and can be played in your web browser if you have Flash 9.
You play the game by (indirectly) controlling a dinosaur that can be equipped with weapons meant to destroy the enemy’s dinosaur and villages in an arena. Each village produces gold and allows you to buy and equip weapons there using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
Once your dino is equipped with up to two weapons, you can go out and attack the enemy. Be careful of enemy villages, since they’ll attack you with some of the same weapons you have. The other player will of course be trying to do the same to you. If you kill the enemy dino, it will hatch out of a new egg at its nearest village.
If you destroy an enemy’s village, you can build your own village there instead. Once you capture all the villages in the arena, you win.
Villages and their Tiers
Each village has a different tier rating tied to its location. The villages in the middle are tier 1 and allow you to only buy and equip the first 3 weapons. The villages outside of those are tier 2 and allow you to buy and equip the first 6 weapons. The outermost villages are tier 3 and give you access to all 9 weapons.
At tier 1, you start off with trajectory-based weapons, allowing you to shoot arrows, cannonballs, or rockets in an arc at your enemy. As you get access to higher tiers, you get access to more interesting weapons that allow you to create a strategy for attacking your enemy. Maybe instead of using a trajectory-based weapon, you’ll use a tactical strike weapon to “drop the hammer” on a village deep inside enemy lines, crippling your enemy’s gold production.
All of this is wrapped up in a cartoon dinosaur game that can be started and finished before your lunch break is over.
Here is the high detail raster version of the logo…..that I wasn’t supposed to make. It’s mainly for the title screen and posters if we ever decide to make any. I felt that it was really important to work the logo more for those things. I’m really happy with it.
And yeah, I paid for that piñata picture. It was worth every penny.
Josh found this sweet music today while sifting through some dusty bookmarks of his. It’s freely distributed music (under the creative commons license) and would work for our game if we wanted it. Mostly it’s just kick-ass and old school, and we listened to it all day. Check it out.This one too. The recording label, Monotonik, has other cool compilations that have albums beyond the Amiga stuff.
Internet Archive rocks, it’s easy to forget about; but so is Mike, so we forgive you.
