The joy of building an online community

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.

Back in 30 minutes….lunch.

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!

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.

Des Moines Game Dev Meeting == Totally Cool. Dinowaurs play testing

Mike, Josh and I(Greg) scuttled down to Ankeny for a developer meetup that the DSMGG held at a local gaming place Cyber Ops Gaming Center. I got there a little late, but everyone’s projects were really cool and the whole tone of the place was really exciting. I suppose anytime you get a bunch of passionate, smart people in closed quarters together we start feeding off each other.

Like I said, I got in a little late, but I was able to catch the last half of David Duke’s presentation on his sweet trajectory shooter prototype, Mini-World Wars. It was super simple, but those can be the best prototypes. I keep seeing a bunch of these gravity-body mechanics coming out post Mario Galaxy, and it’s really interesting to see the influence that’s had. It’s definitely a good thing. David’s prototype was sweet because not only did it involve mass-based physics but also took into account the mass of the orbiting moon, which affected me in my trousers as well We all want to play ASAP!

Later we were lucky enough to run a few play testing sessions with the guys that were able to stay longer. It was certainly an interesting experience, it being our first run through of the game with other people. I would say overall, while it wasn’t what I hoped for, we uncovered a few new bugs, some UI issues, and a consensus amongst the room about the villagers. We’ve got a fair bit of work ahead of us, but that’s good, we’ve built the stone now it’s time to shave it down to a pretty marble dino. Hopefully the next time we play test we’ll be to focus more on the fun and intricacies of the gameplay itself.

It was great to get some of that inspiration last night. Sometimes living in Iowa you feel a little isolated from the “happenings” of game development, and while there’s TIGSource and RPS and so on, there’s no substitute for real human interaction with developers. Just the slightest bit of someone else’s project, or hearing about real development issues others are facing can help a great deal. We all left pretty wide-eyed and ready to plug in for another go ’round.

Glitch art, tiny taste of Dinowaurs

Hey, just wanted to post a piece of “glitch art” we stumbled upon during alpha. Enjoy!

Hopefully soon, we’ll have some real screen-shots with updated art and less explosive diarrhea.

Progress Update #2: Intuition has a Podcast

“Hey, we’re back!”

No, it’s not Dr. Katz, but instead a much drier, less-squiggly version here to bring you our next segment: way more recent stuff. We haven’t been showing as many pretties as we should, so above, I give you the very unofficial, unfinished Dinowaurs logo. It’ll probably resemble something like that above.

Design Changes
Throughout development we’ve tried to implement the agile attitude into our process. For those not hip, we’ve loosely interpreted the milestone system into what many would call a bastardization, but it’s been working. By staying loose about the design and not adhering to waterfall type milestones, we’ve allowed ourselves freedom to completely change the design of the game. Now this doesn’t come without a price, and it may kick us in the behind, but we think that this is the way to go in the web-games space. Iterate and push until we can convey the best version of our game’s high concept possible within the time-frame given. Credit Johnathan Blow’s recent speech on Conveyance and Pushing at the Nordic Game Jam.

Now onto the changes to Dinowaurs. Basically since hitting “alpha” we’ve decided that too much of the game goes on in the middle of the map in the very first encounter, ultimately leaving the other, stronger tiered villages to collapse given the upgraded weapons awarded to the player overtaking the first, and their fourth, village. To aid this, we’ve decided to change a number of things. This makes our third complete overhaul of the game’s mechanics, and each time we’ve done this, we feel better and more excited about where this game is going. Change is good. For our country too

1. Resources - They’re back and they accumulate at a rate based on the amount of villages the player has (represented by “gold” or the like).
2. Tiered Weapons - Tech tree for weapons is now based on the village the dinosaur is at, instead of the amount of villages taken.
3. Village Tiers - Each construction site is intrinsic to it’s original tier level. No other level village can be built there.
4. Ammo - Ammo is no longer unlimited, but tied to the resources and charged against the total value with each shot, at a value determined by the ammo type.
5. Weapon Production - Weapons are purchased with resources (e.g. gold) when the player chooses to produce them.
6. Upgradeable Village Guns - Villages can be equipped with more guns (or maybe upgraded existing guns) to propagate more of a defensive strategy.
7. Shooting - Removing the pause after shooting a weapon. The shot can cost resources now, forcing the player to consider each shot carefully, and besides, it will speed up the game.

Also, we’ve been talking a lot about weapons since a great portion of the game’s fun factor relies on them…

Four basic weapon types, upgraded with tiers (keep controls/weapon properties fairly consistent throughout tiers)

1. Trajectory - hold to power-up, let go to fire
2. Strike - hold to choose spot along terrain, let go to fire/drop
3. Deploy - launch from dino
4. Jetpack - use trajectory control to “launch” the dino and then float down
5. Special - One special weapon, chosen as a dino’s “special move” in the profile menu. This will be available via the third and final village tier.

Jetpacks!
Well, we were hesitant to add this feature, but quickly swayed after playing Off-Road Velociraptor Safari and noticing the community response to a casually-mentioned, fictional game “Jetpack Brontosaurus.” The monocled raptor screen shot and a few posts on the TIGSource forums convinced us that this feature would not be too intensive and would add a much needed, mobilizing function to gameplay. After thinking for a handful of milliseconds, Mike came up with a way to use our current system to power the jet pack, which should work just like any other trajectory based weapon. We are in the process of implementing this now, but we’re all excited to see our favorite Gov. Skittles, the stegosaurus, careen through the air dropping grenades o’er her enemy windmills!

Podcast
Lately we’ve found ourselves tossing some ideas around the ol’ water cooler (”What’s the scuttlebug?”) about Indie Dev podcasts, or lack thereof. All of us love listening to podcasts, mostly NPR and game industry stuff, but nothing that sates our thirst for independent game development.

Nothing official just yet, but we plan to cover the latest in indie dev news, indie games we’ve played and loved, and anything those topics might spawn. We like tangents, those were always our favorite teachers in high school. Not the circle kind, you know, the kind that go off on an unrelated subjects only to find themselves lost in a wood with no lesson plan to guide them.

We’ve recently recorded a dry-run podcast, testing how the recording setup works and getting our feet wet with talking like we know things. It’s harder than you may think, but in the safety of our own homes, the insurance policy of audacity’s editing power, and Mike’s sexy chocolate vocal chords, we’re going places. Maybe not fancy places, but places nonetheless.

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 Website Launched

The Dinowaurs website has officially launched. There’s a brief description of the game, a note about the release, and some of our early concept art.

More will be added as we go along. Enjoy!

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.”