West Coast Baby!

We got into SF last night and got to our hotel room at about 11:30, watched "They Live", and went to bed. See quotes below.* A pretty easy day overall, we didn't get on the plane in Des Moines until about 7:15 but got to Denver on time. Greg did get cavity searched at the security checkpoint, but he's pretty used to that anyway ;-)

So, the flight was uneventful and gave me a lot of time to puzzle it out with my new pal Layton. I bought the game yesterday just for the flight, and everyone crowded around through the entire flight, trying to solve the puzzles together. All in all a fantastic little game and perfect for the flight.

San Francisco is an awesome town so far, just as an example we walked out of our hotel this morning and found we were directly next to a sushi place. And a crazy Chinatown gate thing was not 20 yards up the street. Now we're at the Orbit Room Cafe, drinking fresh squeezed juice on these concrete inverted cone table things with a great view of Market Street. And we're working on user stories for Dinowaurs :P

Here's a horrible picture:


Anyhoo, back to work I s'pose. We're going to head toward the Moscone to register early later on and then hopefully grab some sushi.

* "Life's a bitch, and she's back in heat."
* "I'm here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. I'm all out of bubblegum!!!"
EDIT [Greg]: We weren't sure if "They Live" was the origin of this gem since we've heard it in other places, markedly, Duke Nukem. If anyone has further information on this matter, please contact poison control. Or comment.

Super Mario Galaxy co-op is better than you think

On all these podcasts, reviews and critiques I keep hearing about how the co-op option in Galaxy is "girlfriend mode." This may seem so at first, but it would appear that these people, many of them game critics, never pressed the A button while the cursor was over an enemy or over Mario himself. The A button can hold enemies in place for the other person to bop them on the head or what have you. Alternately, the 2nd player can be a playful (and sometimes maddening) type of nuisance during the game. By hitting "A" whilst hovering over Mario with the cursor, you can make him jump, and this will most often result in either Mario incurring damage, or falling into a black hole. This gets particularly interesting while switching off every death with a friend when trying one of the more challenging levels in Mario. Since the other player will be tempted to exact revenge for their un-sportsmanlike conduct, and the cycle continues... Call it immature, but there's certainly much more to Galaxy co-op than just collecting and shooting star bits. [/rant]

When we discovered this (by accident) I asked frequent players of the game, and most, if not all, said they didn't know about this option. So, this is more of a public service announcement than it is a tirade against Nintendo's inability to explain all gameplay options in the manual, or the hasty judgements of the gaming media. Enjoy your "A" button Galactic Marioers.

In Search of the Oracle: Indie Developer Productivity Snacks and Calisthenics

Mike's parents were kind enough to bring us some developer rations on Thursday. None of us really eat very healthy in the office, except for Josh, who is all into flax seed. So here are our favorite bits of sustanence.

Daddy Ray's Fig Bars. This is one of Josh's staples, the rest of us still don't know where he gets them, but we think they're delicious.

2 lb. box of Pepperidge Farm Cheddar Goldfish - Whole grain if you can find it. This is a classic, and therefore manditory.

Sam's Choice Mountain Trail Mix - recovered deep within the belly of the beast, these precious nuts, chocolates and raisins are tainted with corporate shame, but are oh so fortifying.

Gatorade lime Rain, 64 oz. - Possibly the finest drink to ever grace the Earth. I'm really the only one who drinks it. But we use the old bottles for water bottles now.

Red curry rice and beans. I've got a recipe on my site, it's cheap and easy and can stretch a long ways over a large amount of rice. We have some form of it once or twice a week here at the office.



Oh yea, Nerf hoops are the new pilates...

Today's Office Tunes - Old School Amiga

Josh found this sweet music today while sifting through some dusty bookmarks of his. It's freely distributed music (under the creative commons license) and would work for our game if we wanted it. Mostly it's just kick-ass and old school, and we listened to it all day. Check it out. This one too. The recording label, Monotonik, has other cool compilations that have albums beyond the Amiga stuff.



Internet Archive rocks, it's easy to forget about; but so is Mike, so we forgive you.

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. :)

It's Biznass Time! - Business cards and the importance of a developer's identity

We're going to GDC! Come hell or high water, we booked the tickets, marked the calendar and laid out our nerd uniforms for GDC 2008. Now what? Maybe we're missing something...

Business cards!

As a soon-to-be card-carrying graphic designer--and by "card-carrying" I mean diploma-carrying--why not create our own identity, or any such materials we may need to promote ourselves? Really that's what graphic design is all about, visual communication for some end, and in a lot of cases that end has something to do with money. The identity system can be a very complex task, and cost a great deal of money to get it done right. This kind of work is reserved for large business who can hire a firm to overhaul their look completely, but being an indie dev, that just isn't going to happen. Devs are smart enough to figure this stuff out on their own, right? So I offer you this:

A cake! Baked with logos and typography. But really, this is just a rough recipe for that cake. There are always exceptions to these guidelines, but I'm going to assume that the reason you're reading this is because you need guidance, and if that's the case, then follow the guidelines. Get it? I know dev teams are made up of a variety of creative people, so if you have an artist, that will be a big help when designing the logo and just general aesthetics along the way.

1. A logo.
This needs to come first above anything else. The logo can be just text, a simple circle or illustration. The logo (sometimes called a "mark" or if it's text, "logotype") will inform every other decision you have about the identity, the typeface (font) you choose and the way it's applied to different applications (letterheads, business cards, stickers).

I'm sure you have all seen logos, and they seem simple enough, they are for the most part... However, since you're a developer, mainly promoting your stuff on the internet, the idea of doing a bad ass full-color raster (bitmap) logo illustration may seem like a really good idea. It's not. Most of the time. When it comes time to translate over to the printed page, you'll be faced with a disaster, and with little to no print experience, and even less budget for professional printing and file preparation assistance things will get messy. That being said, if a simpler logo can't express your indie spirit then so be it, go with the tattered warrior illustration scaling a dark and smoky mountain. Just remember the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode when Master Shake assumes the role of "The Drizzle" and has those t-shirts made with his "logo."

2. Color
Colors should usually be limited to 2-3. Our identity uses one color (pantone 297U) along with black. Again if you do the full-color illustration, at least leave one dominant color, in order to give your identity some direction when you design other applications. If you don't choose a color for the logo, then you'll have to decide on colors at some point, when you design the website and etc. so it may as well be now.

3. A typeface (font)
Typography separates professional from amateur design. It is the easiest thing in the world to slap some text down on a page, but if you do that, your identity may look like a middle-aged crafty housewife printed something out from her word processor. Don't make that mistake and pay attention to details!

A typeface should reflect the feeling and structure of the mark it will sit beside. If your mark is an oak tree, then perhaps a serifed font (times new roman, baskerville) would be best to complement the shapes of the branches. [Serif fonts have horizontal bars often terminating the vertical strokes of a typeface by linking the two with curves. Zoom in on the Baskervile or Times "T", and you'll see what I mean. If your mark is simpler, with less decoration or intricate shapes, maybe a sans-serif font (helvetica, verdana, univers) would be better due to its simpler shapes. If a shape-to-shape relationship doesn't do it for you, then perhaps what a typeface "says" would be more your style. Blackletter fonts (lucida blackletter, isn't the best, but it gives you the idea of what I mean by blackletter) can give a more medieval tone, or even a Latin or tattooed sort of look. Engravers, a font with very wide letter forms, can reference the early part of the 20th century. Even serif fonts in general can make things more traditional or older looking, while a sans serif can communicate a modern or clean feeling.

4. Setting the type
After selecting the typeface, it's important to continue scrutinizing the details. In graphic design, there are a few simple terms with weird words that refer to the layout of a typed word or group of words.

Leading:
The value assigned to the vertical space between two lines of text.
Tracking:
The value assigned to the width between a group of letters, for instance: a sentence.
Kerning:
The value assigned to the width between two letters. This allows for really detailed tweaking of letter-spacing.

When setting your logotype (the title of your company that will accompany your mark, if you have one) you can either convert the type to outlines and use a vector-editing program to maneuver the letters left and right, or you can use the kerning option in your chosen program. Most of the time, every word that is typed out based on the default settings of any program will not be optimal. Evaluate the spaces between letters and kern them so they appear even. Problems can arise with different letter combinations like "WL" or "AT." It's best to do this by hand and use your discerning eye, instead of with a mathematical process.

Finally, decide where that logotype is going to go in relation to your logo. Sometimes this can be really easy and logical, and others it can be a huge pain. Use your eye, maybe find a natural point of alignment running through your mark. Be open to alternative relationships, such as side-by-side instead of just below the mark, or even off-center.

4. Hierarchy and grids
Now you have your colors, your finished mark, logotype and everything ready to go. Now how do you put it on your business card?

Grids.

Yes, a grid can save you a lot of trouble. Instead of pushing elements like the block of contact info around incessantly, put down some straight grid lines, and decide on some conventions for the layout. For a business card, there aren't many options for layout, since you want things to be legible and your brand to be dominant. Hierarchy built into your grid in a business card can solve a lot of confusion when first laying things out. If you put section off a piece larger than the rest, that'll be where the logo goes. Then the remaining section can be divided once more to separate things once again, and that can be where the name, title and contact info will go respectively.

This is a completely oversimplification of grid systems. They are the foundation of any layout, and bad ones are easy to come by. Overall, err on the side of large margins, even spacing, and points of alignment. If your grid isn't working start over, maybe try some pre-made grids, like the golden section which I used for a layout of Intuition's business card.

5. Other applications
With other types of promotion, such as brochures, letterhead, posters and etc. things can get a lot more complicated. Frankly, with the knowledge imparted to your here, I would suggest not attempting anything without first doing more research. There are publications out there that can provide a great deal of inspiration. One such periodical, Before&After magazine is designed for novice to intermediate designers and provides electronic .pdf tutorials and will mail you a binder-buddy type issue as they are made available. Other than that, there is always the internet, but if you find yourself in dire need of a brochure, perhaps either need to evaluate that need, or find the money to hire someone to lay it out. There are plenty of starving graphic design students out there that would get wide-eyed with a chance to add a line to their resume.