On October 18th, some friends at 8Monkey Labs are hosting another Iowa Indie Game Jam with us. This will be the third in about the span of a year and will take place in Cedar Falls, IA. We think it’ll be the best yet! Basically we’ll all get together for a weekend and try to come up with a game or two. Working together in spirit, yet competing against each other with the ferocity of one hundred glaciers, one on the 2D side, and another on the 3D side. This will undoubtedly decide the ultimate question: “2D or 3D, which is better?”
If you’re a developer in Iowa, or around or the MidWest, or just happen to want to come and participate in the jam, email us at team [at] intuitiongames [dot] com. If you’re a player, we’ll be posting pictures and tomfoolery here during the jam as well, and then when the game is out and about, we’ll post that here too. If any of you guys have ideas for a game, post them in the comments, maybe it’ll sprout more ideas or make for a good base for whatever we cook up.
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.
We’ve posted an article previously about free music on the Internet Archive. But I’ve recently found something else: music you can use in your games through a collection on the Internet Archive called Open Source Audio.
Much of this is music, and it’s licensed for some sort of free usage, depending on the licensing terms selected by the artist who uploaded the work. Most entries use various Creative Commons licenses, and some of them can be used commercially in your games.
If you’re looking for music for games, there seems to be 3 general directions you can go: custom music created by professional musicians (most work in the tv/film industry), stock music created by professional musicians, and recorded music created by musicians (often times amateurs doing it for fun). In the first two cases, someone is making music specifically for a purpose, and that purpose is either decided by you or the musician, respectively.
However, in the last case, the musician is just making the music he/she/they wants to make, and then recording it. This sometimes results in more expressive or artistic music, which can do a great job of influencing a game with the same goal. I think the music in the Open Source Audio collection tends to fit this third case, and best of all, it’s free! Check it out here: Internet Archive Open Source Audio.
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.
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?
Wild & Free: A True Story (“WNFats”, for those hip to the beat) released today. Mike & I (employees at Team Yessss!) have been dedicating a night or two each week to take time out to give Boto a home. He’s mostly happy, at least now when you’re not playing, otherwise causing massive oil tankers and speed boats to spawn magically atop the Amazon waters. Those tankers whirl him into a tirade of mystical proportions, summoning forth the guttural calls of the tree mother deep within his soul, thus gathering the young and noble piranha for a feast more glorious than the mystical proportions themselves.
Play it Now! If you want… sorry to be so exclamatory, but we’re excited!
Now for a little back story behind the concept of WNFats in case you missed this post, or this one… & this one too. Basically we started out with wanting to do a Porpoise based Deathworm that we dubbed Professor Porpoise: Adjunct Faculty Advisor to the Apocalypse. We did this in the Summer of 2007 on the side while we were looking for a home for Dinowaurs, it was a good bit of fun, but then PP:AFAA got a bit dusty (remember, porpoises shouldn’t be dusty, they are aquatic) but then a boy named “Boto” dazzled us with flips and tricks beyond compare. We followed the mechanics of PP:AFAA and Deathworm, taking some parts of the Dinowaurs code, Mike did some new flocking stuff for the piranhas and I implemented some new art. Before long we had a prototype with the new piranha flocking mechanic.
That was awhile ago… Since then we’ve been polishing the look and features of WNFats, I’ve changed the art for the boats three or four times, and Mike has hit his fist against the wall a few times. All in all, a fun time, and it’s neat to finally see this beast come together. I hope you all enjoy it, we’ll probably be adding, tweaking and changing things as we go, but for now we hope you enjoy yourselves!
For all the Kongers, we posted Wild ‘n’ Free on Kongregate as well with high scores and all the trimmings. See you there!
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.
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 
