Archive for the 'intuition games' Category
September 29th, 2008 by aeiowu
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.
July 15th, 2008 by torncanvas
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.
May 24th, 2008 by torncanvas
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.
May 6th, 2008 by torncanvas
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!
April 18th, 2008 by aeiowu
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!
April 14th, 2008 by aeiowu
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.
April 9th, 2008 by savethedinosaurs
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.
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 3rd, 2008 by aeiowu
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!
