Hey every seven of you! We’ve officially opened up the Dinowaurs beta to the first wave of the Kongregate community. We’ve been floored by the response from everyone and we’d like to thank everybody for their interest and excitement for Dinowaurs.
In other news we’ve hit 1000 commits. I even recorded a video of the whole boring process, but turns out, it was more boring than youtube could probably handle, so instead we bring you this much more exciting “Speed-paint” of Mike coding up the Dinowaurs menu from about two months ago. Now Feast!
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!
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.
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.
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.”
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!
After looking at this image and snickering for a moment, I quickly realized that we are the hot dog. We have a meaty game development substance to us, and are in search of a bun to present our meat in a way that is easy to grab and consume. Not only that, but we’re not sure exactly what kind of hot dog we are and therefore what kind of bun should hold us. We just stand there, intrigued by the opportunity we see before us.
So the search continues to find our proverbial bun. With regards to that, a lot has happened in the past couple weeks.
After Dinowaurs was turned down, we sent it over to Jim Greer and the folks at Kongregate. They seemed pretty interested in the idea, but were thinking more about the game being a multiplayer experience. Finding that out was exciting, because our original idea was for the game to be a multiplayer game. So now we’re working on editing the pitch to be multiplayer. Hopefully they’ll enjoy what we’ve come up with.
Then, all three of our pitches sent to Adult Swim were shot down. However, there was a glimmer of hope. They seemed to really like one of our ideas in particular - Hitchhikémon. As the name suggests, the game is based on the Pokémon franchise. In Hitchhikémon, you cruise the highway, picking up Hitchhikémon who seem like promising additions to the team and battling other Hitchhikémon masters. You must order your Hitchhikémon to fight from the roof of your speeding truck while avoiding oncoming traffic, road debris, and civilian drivers. Utilize strategic thinking to decide what weapons they’ll use in a given fight to develop their skills into a true killer.
So basically, the game is like Pokémon, but instead of walking around, you drive in your truck. Not only that, but you fight with your hitchhikers while you’re still driving - and you have to avoid obstacles. It’s every hitching stuntman’s dream game.
The problem with this game is that the name is a pretty big part of what makes it funny, and considering the ridiculous size of the Pokémon franchise, attempting an obvious parody would be pretty risky for Adult Swim. The good news is that we’re quickly closing in on the kinds of things Adult Swim is looking for.
Mike continues to work on Melba Toast. What is Melba Toast? I’ll leave the details to Mike, but for now I can say that it’s our highly-optimized Flash 9 engine. And it’ll rock your socks off. We’ve been debating on whipping up a really small game with it. Right now we’re thinking of trying to clone Tanks from Wii Play. Man, that’s such a great game. It has this N-type quality to it, where the mechanics are extremely simple, yet extremely well-tuned. Really, the game would end up a poor man’s Tanks because of how hard that quality is to pull off. Stayed tuned to see what happens with that project.
Well, Dinowaurs was rejected because it was “too cute.” While we really liked the idea, it’s not the end of the world for us. Thankfully, coming up with ideas isn’t too hard. Three new pitches have arrived at Adult Swim this morning. What if they still don’t like those ideas? Does that mean we’re just not the right fit for each other?
The concept of the “right fit” is an often neglected, yet very important part of game development. Adult Swim would essentially be our publisher. It’s very important for a publisher and developer to have like-minded goals in game development. Unfortunately, most of the time the goal of the publisher is to make money by bringing profitable games to market, instead of bringing games to market that create a certain kind of game experience. I don’t think this is the goal (at least not the short-term goal) for Adult Swim. The games on the their website are free after all. The short-term goal seems to be simply bringing people to the website by many different means, including original Flash games. What is the long-term goal? That is yet to be determined.
If we focus on the short-term goal, then we need to ask ourselves if the people Adult Swim wants coming to their website are the people we want to make games for. I think an easy way to find that out is whether or not Adult Swim likes our ideas. If we get rejected again, than it’s a pretty safe assumption that the people we’re focusing on don’t match up.
Surely there’s more to funded Flash development than just Adult Swim, right? Shouldn’t we not put all our eggs in one basket?
Enter Kongregate, an attempted “YouTube of Games” website that aims to bring Flash games to the masses. So far, they seem to be well on their way. In fact, they just recently started sponsoring Flash game development. So off Dinowaurs goes to Kongregate. Maybe it will be appreciated there. If only we could make another Dinowaurior…
What is the right fit for us? We’re still not sure. These are just two of many opportunities out there. Part of being a new company is wandering around trying to figure that very thing out. One thing is for sure, though: this is an exciting time to be in game development.
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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 
