April 5th, 2008 by torncanvas
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.
April 5th, 2008 by torncanvas
Website Down, a story of epic fail and glorious recovery
Back in 30 minutes….lunch.
This is a quote from a Bluehost employee in the middle of a live chat support session with me. Ponder the ridiculousness of that idea, and you’ll start to understand what kind of emotionally-excruciating experience it was trying to get our website back up, a pain which is best expressed through the webcam photo of myself below. This was all thanks to carefully following the directions Blogger gave me to set up our former Blogger blog to redirect to our new website. Obviously, in our case, it didn’t quite work.
While it’s true that I caused the site to go down in the first place, the site was only supposed to be down for a couple hours. However, due to our DNS configuration not getting changed back to exactly the same way it was before I caused this whole debacle, the site was down for an extra 24 hours.
And this whole experience is a perfect example of when giving less control to your users, because you think you know what’s best for them, isn’t always the best solution.
From what I could gather, Bluehost has to change the DNS config themselves because they don’t like hearing people complain about screwing up their own websites. So they decided to give less control to people and change the DNS stuff themselves. However, due to the nature of remote technical support - possibly one of the worst things ever in the history of mankind - a very human mistake was made by a Bluehost employee and our DNS config wasn’t changed completely back to its original state.
This represents the pains of tech support. Both for the staff, and the customer!
This kept our website down until the same tech that I’ve quoted in this title did something to help solve the problem: he gave me more control! He did this by giving me more information and by assuming that I could understand it. He pasted the exact DNS configuration of our website to me. I noticed that the address for our webserver was not pointing to what it should be and asked him about it. He noted that it was likely a problem, but in order to solve it I had to contact Bluehost in a specific way for them to change it.
So I contacted them, asking essentially “Isn’t this the problem? Plus I can’t even get the website using the IP.” And they told me why I couldn’t get the website working using the IP, not mentioning anything about the problem I was asking about. So I waited. Still down. Then I did something I’m sure every tech support staff member hates: I didn’t shut up. “The site is still down, just wanted you know, I’ll keep you updated, etc” But then shortly after that, someone else noticed hey, the problem is this, which was the exact problem I previously mentioned, recorded in text just posts above. Man, I feel just terrible for Bluehost. Remote tech support is the worst thing ever. Really it is. But the whole thing could have been much less painful if I would have been the one changing things, so I could know what was changed and change it back if things went wrong.
Thankfully, we’re back up and things are good. Enjoy the new site!
April 17th, 2007 by torncanvas
This blog can track our progress - a door into our minds if you will. The forum is up - it’s time to brainstorm some sweet game ideas.