Archive Page 3
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!
March 22nd, 2008 by torncanvas
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. 
March 17th, 2008 by aeiowu
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.
March 12th, 2008 by aeiowu
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.
March 10th, 2008 by aeiowu
Mike and I have been chipping away at a little weekend side project of ours for a month or so. He’s got a prototype up and running, and while the swimming mechanic is similar to PP:AFAA, we’ve added some cool new stuff that I think will be pretty compelling gameplay wise. Basically it’s a very simple deathworm-like, where you command the likes of a studious Boto (amazon river dolphin) and fight the evil river-polluting humans on their way to refineries and such. With the aid of schools of flesh-starved pirahnas, you summon the power of the riverbed to take on impossible odds.
I’ve mainly been working on the logo, (this is actually a school project, so the logo was our first assignment) but have started in on the rough art style to help me finish the logo. It’s pretty close to done, hopefully we’ll have an alpha posted up here pretty soon.
March 5th, 2008 by torncanvas
A friend of Greg’s just linked this to him: “My Paper Mind,” an animation of paper stencil cut-outs, using a technique referred to as “Stratastencil.” The interesting thing is that the stencils are layered on top of each other, and photographed and lit such that the previous frames are visible behind the current one, receding into space and shadow. The effect is mesmerizing. Visit Javan Ivey’s My Paper Mind page to view the video.
Now obviously, if you’re a game developer, you’ll likely think “oo, I wanna make a game like that!” At least that’s what I thought. The easiest thing design-wise would be to copy the same visual effect, where the game world is a stencil, with previous frames in the background. It might take some graphics trickery to do the lighting such that it looks realistic. Or you could just make a sheet for every possible combination of object locations. Heh.
But what if you made a game based on the abstract concept of this, instead of the literal visual effect? What if you could see your previous actions in the distance, and that affected your current choices? What if you could go back to those frames to alter the current one? How could you design interesting gameplay by showing the past and the present at the same time? One draws parallels to something like Braid, but let’s think past that.
Imagine the space that exists from the front frame to the back frame. What happens if you collapse that space? What happens if you connect it, creating a 3-dimensional form from that space? How do you explore such a space?
I think exploring some of the later questions could lead to some interesting game ideas.
March 1st, 2008 by aeiowu
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.
February 22nd, 2008 by savethedinosaurs
Celebrate.
Here is the high detail raster version of the logo…..that I wasn’t supposed to make. It’s mainly for the title screen and posters if we ever decide to make any. I felt that it was really important to work the logo more for those things. I’m really happy with it.
And yeah, I paid for that piñata picture. It was worth every penny.
February 19th, 2008 by savethedinosaurs
Hey reader, we’re broadcasting deep within the bowels of the bay area. We made another podcast last night, hopefully we’ll have time to edit it and maybe make another one. There’s so much to talk about with the IGS, we tried to hold it in as best we could until we could talk about it “fresh” on the podcast. So in lieu of an edited podcast we give you this gem. Man, ever since I learned how to spell that, it’s been open season on “lieu.” It has surpassed “purview” and “ilk,” at least in written form.
THE ALMIGHTY INTUITION DEVCAST WORLD PREMIERE
On the night of day 0, I decided to search out a mysterious beep that seemed to emanate from Ted’s bag. Apparently Josh captured my safari on camera.
Turns out it wasn’t the bag, or even in the room, but outside somewhere. Next day, we posed for our book-nook picture at IGS.
Later… lunch. Where we learned a crafty new way to make a cube out of 6 business cards unbeknownst to us that it would destroy them.
Then sushi and talk with Tyler Streeter, our mutual friend from the VRAC. He does research on A.I. specific to the human brain. He’s the one in the 2nd picture on the left, blurried. He’s brilliant. And married… sorry ladies!
Oh yea, bonus picture. We found a guy with a ghillie suit laptop mod/cover thing. Anyway… pretty cool. Hope you liked the podcast. We really tried to cut it down to a reasonable length, and well try to get out a real one soon.
