Dinowaurs Private Alpha Testing Underway + New Website

Shhhh… We’re Alpha Testing, don’t tell anyone!

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!

Dinowaurs in a (new) nutshell

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.

"Wild & Free: A True Story" or how we forgot about Professor Porpoise: Adjunct Faculty Advisor to the Apocalypse and learned to love the boto

Mike and I have been chipping away at a little weekend side project of ours for a month or so. He’s got a prototype up and running, and while the swimming mechanic is similar to PP:AFAA, we’ve added some cool new stuff that I think will be pretty compelling gameplay wise. Basically it’s a very simple deathworm-like, where you command the likes of a studious Boto (amazon river dolphin) and fight the evil river-polluting humans on their way to refineries and such. With the aid of schools of flesh-starved pirahnas, you summon the power of the riverbed to take on impossible odds.

I’ve mainly been working on the logo, (this is actually a school project, so the logo was our first assignment) but have started in on the rough art style to help me finish the logo. It’s pretty close to done, hopefully we’ll have an alpha posted up here pretty soon.

Intuition & Dinowaurs Progress Update 1

It has been a little over 2 months since our last update. Many of you are probably thinking that the project has been scrapped or the company went under. Do not fear; we just took a blogging hiatus of sorts. Here’s a rundown of some things that have happened over the last 2 months:

Multiplayer Prototype
We completed our 3rd milestone - a version of the game where 2 people could play multiplayer versus each other. At this point we realized that every game would consist of the players building villages as they went along, and then as they got close enough, they would just dumbly fire weapons at each other over and over again. It was pretty boring, actually. Overall, it was a good thing, since we were able to see what changes would make the game better. Furthermore, the prototype seemed to confirm that the game had a chance of being fun.

The Triumphant Return of Greg
Greg returned from Rome!! One of our team was studying abroad in Rome, and returned over the holidays. It was the first chance Mike and I had to work with him since we were working on PP:AFAA in August.

Design Changes 1.0
Based on our reaction to the multiplayer prototype, and a few suggestions by our (awesome) producer at Kongregate, Chris Pasley, we had a brainstorming session and came up with some improvements on our game design. This particular session was an interesting experience. At the time, we didn’t really have any paper to write on, so we ended up using the backs of small, circular paper plates. Each idea was drawn on a plate, and then we’d discuss them. Those we didn’t like, we discarded to the side. The system worked surprisingly well; in the end, we made these changes to the game design:

• Object of the game
1. “Capture” all villages by destroying the enemy’s and building your own
2. Kill the enemy dinosaur with no enemy villages remaining
• Start of game
• Dinosaurs start in the middle of the arena
• All village zones are occupied by a village
• Each player owns all the villages on his/her half of the arena
• Dinosaur death
• When a dinosaur dies, it spawns at the nearest built, friendly village
• Delay for spawning
• Unlimited lives (as long as you have built villages left)
• Villages
• Villages attack enemy dinosaurs, causing enemy dinos to stay back and use longer-range shooting
• No more village modes (production/defense)
• Villages have more health and attacking ability increasingly toward the edges of the arena, represented by tiers of more advanced technology in weapons and village tower architecture
• Weapons
• Weapons split up into tiers, which are unlocked for each new village captured
• Delay between shots (dinosaur is dazed from firing)
• Unlimited ammo

Dinowaurs Alpha
Several important things were delivered for our alpha milestone. Here are the most notable:

• Persistent player accounts
• GUI menu content and interaction
• Accessory attachment system (!!)
• Design changes implemented

Its pretty exciting to see these kinds of things coming together. Players can create a dummy account, create their 3 dinosaurs, and all of the options currently available can be saved to their account. One of the most exciting things is how well the accessory attachment system works.

We’ll save the details for another post, but basically accessories appear to be attached to the dino, since they follow the same positions and rotations of the bones in the dinosaur’s skeleton. In our case, since the dino skeleton is not officially in our engine, we just export the movement of the bones to a file and load that up for each animation. It has become an industry-standard way to attach objects to characters for AAA games (pretty much since the days of Half-Life - thanks Valve!!), and we’ve adopted it to great success considering Dinowaurs is a real-time multiplayer dinosaur combat Flash game. In fact, Mike just finished up refactoring the weapons to use the same system.

Implementing the design changes got us closer and closer to a really fun game. As of now, it’s kind of fun, but we know that we’re still missing something. We can all sense that we’re getting closer and closer to the fun, though.

New Office Space

We finally moved into an official office! It’s on the east side of campustown in Ames, conveniently very close to our favorite Thai restaurant Thai Kitchen. It’s pretty comfortable for Mike, Greg, and I, and there’s even enough room for a microwave and mini-fridge. Surprisingly, we’ve pretty much outgrown the space after just a month of being there. More on why next.

Intuition’s 5th Member: Joe Bergeron
Greg and I have had several discussions over the past couple months about how we’re worried that the amount of programming work for a game of this size would be a lot for one person. There’s no doubt that’s true, which just goes to show how amazing of a job Mike has done as the only programmer on our game. He wrote the Melba Toast engine himself and was able to get most pieces of the game put together so far. Go Mike!

However, we’re now at the point where much of the game has been hacked together just to get stuff in. Most of the components of the game code need to be refactored in order to make it easier to do things like add new weapons and keep the game stable as we near release. With refactoring needed, added features still, and a couple bug fixes to help us test regularly, there are plenty of reasons why another programmer would speed up development to ensure a successful release.

Mike has been hesitant in the past to add a new programmer, simply because of the skill required to pick up Melba Toast and Dino Server (the implementation of our game that runs on the server) in a timely manner, and the time/money needed to find someone at all and then make sure they’re going to be a good fit.

However, one name would come up over and over again as the right man for the job, if he’d only be willing: Joe Bergeron. Mike has worked with him in the past on their game Codename: HSI, and Joe has gained a reputation for himself at VRAC as “the guy who wrote the OpenGL renderer for the Linux version of the Unreal 3 Engine.” At first we weren’t sure if he’d be interested in completely jumping in and joining us as a partner. We’ve actually been (half) joking with him about it for the last couple months.

When we sat him down for a slightly more serious meeting and asked him last week, he decided that now was the time. Welcome Joe!! Everyone is really pumped about it, since we all get along with him really well and he’s such a great fit in terms of skill set. To demonstrate, here’s a breakdown of our unique skills and interests to show how well each member of the team fits in now:

• Mike
• Game programming
• Gameplay prototyping
• Joe
• Engine programming
• Graphics programming
• Ted
• Drawing
• Concept art
• Greg
• Graphic design
• Creative writing
• Josh
• Technical art
• Business-y stuff

As you can see, that’s nearly every aspect of game development, especially Flash game development. Woohoo! We have a pretty well-rounded team now.

This is getting pretty long-winded, so it’s time to wrap it up. Next post: Progress Update 2, containing more design changes and a special treat for all you dinosaur lovers out there.

Dinowaurs the First of Six Games for Kongregate’s Premium Developer Program

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.”

Skeletal Animation Tools for Flash Games: A Prime Opportunity for Software Developers

The Opportunity

Like many who pay attention to such things, I’ve become convinced that web-based games centered around 2d, interactive vector graphics platforms like Flash and Silverlight are here to stay - at least for the next 5 years or so. Sites like Newgrounds and Kongregate are growing huge communities of both developers and players. You just can’t deny it - Flash games are popular. It would therefore be easy to assume that there will continue to be growth in both the number of games and the complexity of games for these platforms. If the complexity of games continues to grow, you can be certain that there will be a growing need for 2d character animation tools. I think this represents a perfect opportunity for a startup agile software developer with a keen design sense to come in and disrupt the market.

The Context

In video games (as of right now, mostly 3d games), character animation is usually accomplished using a technique referred to as “skeletal animation.” The idea is that game developers use a software tool, often developed by a third party, to create a skeleton and match up the character to that skeleton. This process of matching up the character to the skeleton is called “skinning.” When it’s done right, game developers can move the bones and bone helpers (collectively a “rig”) of the skeleton and the character will follow. Because the character rig can be created to match the proportion and arrangement of skeletons found in living things, this technique can lead to very life-like animations.

When planned correctly, this process, although complicated, actually saves time compared to the sweatshop-like manual labor of traditional cel animation “perfected” by Disney in the 60s. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why CG animation is so popular these days - all the animation houses can save labor, and therefore money, by using skeletal animation.

The Current Choices

So then if Flash games are so popular, there must be a lot of good tools that can do this, right? Well, what was surprising to us is that there aren’t a lot of tools that can do this. In fact, there are currently only two known tools that can do this: Animé Studio Pro and Toon Boom Digital Pro, retailing for $200 and $3000, respectively. After dropping a few grand on licenses for the Adobe Creative Suite, spending another $3000 per user isn’t that appealing. For many Flash game developers, it’s really Animé Studio Pro or nothing.

Now some could blame a lack of demand as a reason for this, which is a good guess. Many Flash games developers make games on a nickel-and-dime budget - like the cost of one license of Toon Boom Digital Pro! However, with the recent popularity of web-based MMOs, and the recent announcement of Kongregate’s premium games program, I think this is going to change. Flash games will start making money and growing in complexity, necessitating character animation tools that offer skeletal animation. Even before that happens, there’s plenty of room in the animation tools market for more competitors. And by that I mean more than two competitors.

The Solution

I challenge a struggling startup agile software developer to create a character animation tool that is targeted specifically to Flash/2d vector game developers. Here’s a list of things to keep in mind:

1. Include skeletal animation (preferrably support IK skeletal animation). For anything more than the really basic stuff, skeletal animation will save time and give a better result. It’s kind of the whole point of this post anyways. IK skeletal animation can be a big help for speeding up the animation process, so it would be very good to have that.
2. Look to established 3d software for inspiration. Skeletal animation for 3d characters has been 20+ years in the making. There’s a lot to be learned from existing 3d software - including what not to do.
3. Allow animators to edit their animation curves. Most animation can be expressed in software through curves and splines, referred to as “F-curves” by the animation community. The average walking animation will have the hand moving left and right in a cyclical fashion, which can be expressed with a sinusoidal wave. It’s common sense to allow animators to edit this curve directly so they can express different behaviors in characters. Despite that, Animé Studio Pro does not support this.
4. Keep the interface simple, stupid (KISS). Keep the interface simple and pleasant. Workflow is one of two main determining factors for how fast someone works, and making the software too complicated can ruin that. Painful to use not only means pain for the user, but also expense for the user’s company.
   
5. No drawing tools needed. Assume that a Flash game developer is going to use Adobe Flash, Adobe Illustrator, or a huge array of other well-established vector drawing tools, including several free ones. All you have to do is support importing vector files (and do it well). Anime Studio and Toon Boom can be painful in part because they have the burden of supporting drawing features.
6. No scene management needed. Scene management will need to take place within the game itself. Focus on awesome character animation and management first. Anime Studio and Toon Boom can be painful in part because they have the burden of supporting scene management features.
7. Export Flash-friendly SWFs. Ideally, the animation that is exported would include some Flash-friendly tweens, and wouldn’t just be a long series of individual frames, which Flash would treat as a separate object per frame. This would be really hard for skinned characters, since the end result would have to be tweened shape hints. It would be nice to at least support moving and rotating objects around, though.
8. Open part of the software up to the community. Animé Studio Pro, formerly known as Moho, is a perfect example of this. The community can write plugins for the software using the Lua scripting language. And the community seems more than willing to do so. Free development help is always a good thing.

Final Thoughts

Ironically, adding character animation tools to Adobe Flash itself would be one of the best solutions. The interface is already pretty friendly and well-designed, especially for those familiar with Adobe software, like most artists and designers in game development. Obviously, the output would be Flash-friendly, and the workflow would be simpler since there are less apps to juggle.

Still, it would be great for someone to make what would essentially be a Flash plug-in outside of Flash. And that way you could even support other vector platforms and allow community participation, too.

Taking it even farther, you could make the app in Flash itself, so that the character animation would be in-engine. In fact, someone’s already doing that. His name is Jim Armstrong and he’s working on some character rigging software as part of the Singularity library. It’s just one small step for man, but his work could definitely lead to a giant leap for Flash game development. Please don’t be mad at me for that one, I just had to…

Metaplace - MMOs and Virtual Worlds Made Easy?

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.

Contract Work As A Means of Inspiration

A lot of people who try to start their own businesses, especially in game development, talk about the dangers of doing contract work. It can be dangerous because, as a wise man, Adrian Sannier, once told me, “Contract work can become an IV needle stuck in your arm pumping cash right into your veins. Once you get that needle in your arm, it’s hard to take it out.”

His point was that you can get into a lucrative cycle with contract work, where you try to use it to raise money for your business, but really just end up continuing to do it since it’s more secure and cushy than starting your own game company.

However, as Mike and I have experienced in the last couple days, it has some great benefits that can be used for your game company. Besides the obvious extra money, the main one we noticed is inspiration for innovative game ideas.

Depending on the type of work involved, contract work can be a great means of inspiration. Mike and I have been taking a little time here and there to get going on a logo animation for Nate Beaird’s company Tri-Factor. Nate is a friend I met at Immersion here in Des Moines. He wanted an animation that involved some pixie-like particles swirling around to form his logo, which is based on a triquetra, an ancient symbol commonly used in Christianity to represent the Trinity.

I don’t really have access to After Effects or Motion, so I figured I could just use Flash to set things up. And of course Mike’s programming prowess would ensure the animation behavior was appropriately awesome. So Mike and I teamed up to tackle the project.

We’re very satisfied with the result so far (we’re not finished), which I’ve uploaded to our website: Tri-Factor logo animation. Please note that performance is a bit slow at this point, so change the quality to Low if you’re running into problems. Shown at left is some frames captured at full-screen.

Once things started to come together yesterday, Mike and I realized how great it would be to use this in a game somehow. I realized that doing small jobs like this could definitely help people come up with ideas that they wouldn’t normally come up with.

With this in mind, I’ve established some guidelines for choosing contract work that can inspire your game ideas:

1. Have enough time to finish the job (and do it well). This is a service for other people, so you should take it very seriously. It can be easy to get wrapped up with lots of other things, so make sure you’ve set aside time to work on it.

2. Keep the projects small. Yes, you want to set aside time to work on it, but don’t go too far. This is stuff you’re doing on the side to get inspired. The main goal is to create your art/product, so make sure your time is divided to represent that.

3. Keep the work relevant. If the work is going to inspire you, it should be somewhat relevant to your field, i.e. game development. In our case, the work is an animation, and we made it interactive. The interactive part is what can be the most inspiring.

4. Keep the work creative. A Flash website for an accounting company might be interactive, which is relevant, but it’s not the most creative work you can do. By choosing something creative, you are giving yourself the opportunity to solve problems in a more artistic way. This will exercise the right side of your brain, which you do when you’re trying to think of unique game ideas. In my experience, creative projects tend to inspire the most.

5. Get paid reasonably. You’re devoting time and hard work to this, so make it worth it. Besides, you’re likely poor and you need the money anyway.

Kongregate Now the Best Opportunity for Bootstrapping a Game Company

Gamasutra recently interviewed Jim Greer about the news of Kongregate getting $5 million in funding. Kongregate plans to spend most of that on Funding the Flash Renaissance, as Gamasutra put it. The games Kongregate will be funding will be “premium games” - those that are a step above most of the current games on the Kongregate website. Staying true to the heart of Kongregate, part of the game will still be free, but part will also be purchasable through microtransactions. This could include paying for levels as stated, purchasing items for characters, or any number of different things.

This just adds more to the cake that is independent game development right now. In fact, based on the numbers Kongregate has released, we think they are now offering the best deal for bootstrapping a game company.

When we decided we wanted to start Intuition, we looked at all of the options out there for bootstrapping a game company with no games in its portfolio. One of the easiest ways to look at game development is to break it down into platforms, which I see as a “horizontal slice”:

TV Console
Pros: High sales, high exposure/glory
Cons: High barrier to entry, sparse up-front funding, lose IP with funding?, royalties only likely in download space, harder development

Handheld Console
Pros: High sales(DS especially), medium exposure/glory, low-medium cost
Cons: Medium barrier to entry, sparse up-front funding, lose IP with funding?, no download space yet

PC
Pros: Low barrier to entry, low cost, cult indie glory, some up-front funding, easier development
Cons: Lower sales

If platforms are horizontal, then distribution channel is vertical:

Retail
Pros: High sales, high exposure/glory, well-established
Cons: High barrier to entry, sparse up-front funding, (probably) lose IP with funding, royalties extremely unlikely

Download
Pros: Low-medium barrier to entry, low-medium cost, some up-front funding, royalties likely
Cons: Variable sales, no handhelds yet

Web Browser
Pros: Low barrier to entry, low cost, some up-front funding, easier development, royalties probable
Cons: Variable sales, not well-established, only Wii for consoles

When you put these two together, you form a Game Development Bootstrapping Opportunity Matrix.

Based on these, we thought that the cell at PC and Web Browser was the best option for bootstrapping, because it’s relatively easy to develop for, the cost is low, and the barrier to entry is low. The only downside is that it’s risky; who knows what the sales will be, and it’s not a well-established way to make a living. Aside from the couple grand you can get by being sponsored, there’s not much living in it at all…until we stumbled upon two options a few months ago that looked promising: Adult Swim and Kongregate.

As we’ve mentioned before, Adult Swim has been commissioning games for their website. Someday I’d love to devote a post to why I think that is, but for now let’s just say they are. Here’s their deal:

Funding roughly $15k - 120k
No royalties
Single player game (for now)
Adult Swim owns IP

At the time we found out, all we knew was that Kongregate was sponsoring games. Now, everyone can be sure that funding is available. Check out these recently-announced stats:

Funding roughly $20-100k
70% royalties
Game must support a community
Period of exclusivity (1 year?)
Developer owns IP

So if you agree with the matrix above, getting funding from Kongregate for a premium game is a no-brainer. We’ve decided to give that avenue a shot; we’ll give an update soon on how that’s going; suffice to say for now, it’s going well. However, Adult Swim is still a good option for getting started. You’re getting paid to make a game, after all!

Text Message Game Development.

I was downtown at a cafe on game jam night, and since I don’t have a laptop I had to improvise which turned out to be a very unique game developing experience. I haven’t done any research on this topic or anything but I think I may have pioneered a new method which I am calling the Argentinian Bluepawed Dingo Craigslist Dungeon Esperanto Friendship Galaxian Handoff method (the ABCDEFGH method for short). Here’s how this Next Gen method works:

Step 1. Draw some stuff.

Step 2. Text message the coordinates to Josh’s phone.

Step 3. …and the programmers do the rest.

It’s advanced and you know it!

In all seriousness though, it was pretty fun and kind of felt like I was creating punch cards for computers in 1972 and sending the data with Morse Code…….Ooooo, we should try that next time.