What happened on November 7th, around 2AM? Only the dinos know… But it does appear that there is a growing alliance between the two clans: one winged, the other hooved.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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. 
I’ve been documenting this for quite sometime. I had a mini-intervention with Michael a few days ago, but it was brushed off with a smirk and a giggle. I feel this has grown into something bigger than Mike, bigger than us. I can only hope the internet will serve as Mike’s savior and purge him of whatever it is that’s on his hand that titillates him so.
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.