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. :)

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. ;)

Logo. Done. (mostly)

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.

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. :)

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.”

Skeletal Animation Tools for Flash Games: A Prime Opportunity for Software Developers

The Opportunity

Like many who pay attention to such things, I've become convinced that web-based games centered around 2d, interactive vector graphics platforms like Flash and Silverlight are here to stay - at least for the next 5 years or so. Sites like Newgrounds and Kongregate are growing huge communities of both developers and players. You just can't deny it - Flash games are popular. It would therefore be easy to assume that there will continue to be growth in both the number of games and the complexity of games for these platforms. If the complexity of games continues to grow, you can be certain that there will be a growing need for 2d character animation tools. I think this represents a perfect opportunity for a startup agile software developer with a keen design sense to come in and disrupt the market.

The Context

In video games (as of right now, mostly 3d games), character animation is usually accomplished using a technique referred to as "skeletal animation." The idea is that game developers use a software tool, often developed by a third party, to create a skeleton and match up the character to that skeleton. This process of matching up the character to the skeleton is called "skinning." When it's done right, game developers can move the bones and bone helpers (collectively a "rig") of the skeleton and the character will follow. Because the character rig can be created to match the proportion and arrangement of skeletons found in living things, this technique can lead to very life-like animations.

When planned correctly, this process, although complicated, actually saves time compared to the sweatshop-like manual labor of traditional cel animation "perfected" by Disney in the 60s. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why CG animation is so popular these days - all the animation houses can save labor, and therefore money, by using skeletal animation.

The Current Choices

So then if Flash games are so popular, there must be a lot of good tools that can do this, right? Well, what was surprising to us is that there aren't a lot of tools that can do this. In fact, there are currently only two known tools that can do this: Animé Studio Pro and Toon Boom Digital Pro, retailing for $200 and $3000, respectively. After dropping a few grand on licenses for the Adobe Creative Suite, spending another $3000 per user isn't that appealing. For many Flash game developers, it's really Animé Studio Pro or nothing.

Now some could blame a lack of demand as a reason for this, which is a good guess. Many Flash games developers make games on a nickel-and-dime budget - like the cost of one license of Toon Boom Digital Pro! However, with the recent popularity of web-based MMOs, and the recent announcement of Kongregate's premium games program, I think this is going to change. Flash games will start making money and growing in complexity, necessitating character animation tools that offer skeletal animation. Even before that happens, there's plenty of room in the animation tools market for more competitors. And by that I mean more than two competitors.

The Solution

I challenge a struggling startup agile software developer to create a character animation tool that is targeted specifically to Flash/2d vector game developers. Here's a list of things to keep in mind:

1. Include skeletal animation (preferrably support IK skeletal animation). For anything more than the really basic stuff, skeletal animation will save time and give a better result. It's kind of the whole point of this post anyways. IK skeletal animation can be a big help for speeding up the animation process, so it would be very good to have that.
   
2. Look to established 3d software for inspiration. Skeletal animation for 3d characters has been 20+ years in the making. There's a lot to be learned from existing 3d software - including what not to do.
3. Allow animators to edit their animation curves. Most animation can be expressed in software through curves and splines, referred to as "F-curves" by the animation community. The average walking animation will have the hand moving left and right in a cyclical fashion, which can be expressed with a sinusoidal wave. It's common sense to allow animators to edit this curve directly so they can express different behaviors in characters. Despite that, Animé Studio Pro does not support this.
   
4. Keep the interface simple, stupid (KISS). Keep the interface simple and pleasant. Workflow is one of two main determining factors for how fast someone works, and making the software too complicated can ruin that. Painful to use not only means pain for the user, but also expense for the user's company.
   
5. No drawing tools needed. Assume that a Flash game developer is going to use Adobe Flash, Adobe Illustrator, or a huge array of other well-established vector drawing tools, including several free ones. All you have to do is support importing vector files (and do it well). Anime Studio and Toon Boom can be painful in part because they have the burden of supporting drawing features.
6. No scene management needed. Scene management will need to take place within the game itself. Focus on awesome character animation and management first. Anime Studio and Toon Boom can be painful in part because they have the burden of supporting scene management features.
7. Export Flash-friendly SWFs. Ideally, the animation that is exported would include some Flash-friendly tweens, and wouldn't just be a long series of individual frames, which Flash would treat as a separate object per frame. This would be really hard for skinned characters, since the end result would have to be tweened shape hints. It would be nice to at least support moving and rotating objects around, though.
8. Open part of the software up to the community. Animé Studio Pro, formerly known as Moho, is a perfect example of this. The community can write plugins for the software using the Lua scripting language. And the community seems more than willing to do so. Free development help is always a good thing. :)
   

Final Thoughts

Ironically, adding character animation tools to Adobe Flash itself would be one of the best solutions. The interface is already pretty friendly and well-designed, especially for those familiar with Adobe software, like most artists and designers in game development. Obviously, the output would be Flash-friendly, and the workflow would be simpler since there are less apps to juggle.

Still, it would be great for someone to make what would essentially be a Flash plug-in outside of Flash. And that way you could even support other vector platforms and allow community participation, too.

Taking it even farther, you could make the app in Flash itself, so that the character animation would be in-engine. In fact, someone's already doing that. His name is Jim Armstrong and he's working on some character rigging software as part of the Singularity library. It's just one small step for man, but his work could definitely lead to a giant leap for Flash game development. Please don't be mad at me for that one, I just had to...

ISU Game Dev Education Testimonial on Game Career Guide

It's been awhile, and I know you have all been clamoring for a new post, but we've been busy with business stuff, and I've been busy with Rome. If you're interested in my personal exploits in Rome and the surrounding area, check out my blog at my personal site.

In other news, Intuition squeaked out a little PR with a requested article from GameCareerGuide.com about my game dev education experience at ISU. You can read the whole article here.

Progress Update

Our apologies for the lack of posting over the last two weeks. Here's a rundown of what we've been up to.

After working on the press kit a little, we did some more business stuff to make sure we're going to be ok with Uncle Sam and protected from the "unknown unknowns," as it is referred to in The Boondocks. Our lawyer Rush Nigut has helped out a lot with that. Thanks Rush.

Mike has been working on Professor Porpoise: Adjunct Faculty Advisor to the Apocalypse, mainly as a means to continue developing features for Melba Toast. He managed to get a simple scoring and health system in, in addition to spawning ships, one type of which shoots at you. He also implemented some awesome explosions that we've made in the past, which even shake the screen. So PP:AFAA is now made of action-packed awesomeness.

Check out PP:AFAA here (pardon the debug lines). We've decided to treat PP:AFAA as a side project that we're going to pick at from time to time when we need a quick break. It will be developed more and more down the road. Hopefully we'll get to see some of Ted's awesome concepts in action.

An interesting side note about this early version: It's not fully optimized for performance yet, being so early on in development, but, yesterday I found out that Adobe has released a new beta update of Flash Player 9. I was amazed at the performance increase it has with PP:AFAA. Previously, with a few explosions going off at once, my Macbook Pro 2 Ghz Core Duo would drop down to 10fps or so. With the new beta Flash Player, the game doesn't get much below 24fps. I think game developers who are working on Flash games will really be excited when this new version gets released officially. I know I am.

Ted, Greg, and I have been spending much of the last couple weeks concepting, mostly for Dinowaurs. One of these days we'll compile stuff together and maybe post it up for all to see. Greg is now officially in Rome, too. It was sad to see him go, but sometimes you just have to let go. He'll be coming back to the nest soon enough. Be careful out there, Greg!

I've also been learning ActionScript 3.0 from a couple books, including an awesome one by Colin Moock, Essential ActionScript 3.0. His ability to explain the meaning behind things is great. Anyone who has a beginner-level knowledge of programming concepts or higher and is interested in learning about ActionScript 3.0 will really enjoy the book.

We're Like a Hot Dog In Search of a Bun

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.

Finding the Right Fit

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.

Levi, Model Dinowaurior #0001

Here are some pictures Greg took of Levi before we sent him out into the world. We miss you Levi! Let's hope Adult Swim is a good home for him. Man, Ted did such an amazing job with Levi. In fact, it turned out so well, I want to see more Dinowauriors! Maybe someday we can have a set of vinyl figurines. :)

"It's like sending your only child off to college"

Not that I've ever had to do that, but I imagine the experience would be very similar to today's Super Secret Special Shipment. That's right! Today we shipped out something so special and top secret that we can only refer to it by its Christian name: Levi. He's making his way due south to Williams Street, not for a sampling of Georgia's great golf courses, or Atlanta's rich history, but for his future; heck! for our future.

Ted and I spent most of the morning packing little Levi's things, taking pictures desperately trying to capture his final hours in Ames where he was born. Oh heavens, the memories! I remember when Ted (Levi's father) brought him into work to show him off to everyone, we all cooed with delight. Ted looked so proud. I know it's probably hardest on him, letting him go, off to explore the world on his own, but I remember hearing a song once about letting birds free if you truly love them and I take comfort in that, I think I'll record that on tape for Ted.

Little Levi (I keep calling him that, he's big now... he's big) has always been an inspiration to us. His leaving brings up so many moments, laughter, and even sadness. The annual swap-'n'-save we had at work a week or so ago. He brought me a beautiful pink sweatshirt (seen in my bio picture on our site) that was so festive and warm that I don't think I took it off for at least 5 days. It wasn't until just yesterday that I found out Levi had knit me that sweater from the wool of his first lamb in honor of our friendship.

That young Dinamo, he's persevered through a great deal and God bless Ted for all his love and grace in raising such a fine specimen. He won't be in Atlanta until 10:30AM tomorrow, but when he does get there, his driver has promised to email us with confirmation that he's arrived safe at William St. Godspeed to our little guy, and to all you readers down there in Atlanta, keep a lookout for our special one, he's probably a little sun burnt and needs your helping hand.

Website Updates, USPS Bullshit, though not in that order

He kids, thanks for tuning in. I just got done biking around Ames, which is pretty much all I have to do on a Friday night, and decided to update you guys on the current situation. I know you're all as anxious to hear how our pitch is going over with the Adult Swim guys as we are and I just wanna let you know that USPS is totally worthless, consider this my formal declaration of independence from that government run shit-house. We sent the package on 2 day mail Monday and still have not received notification of delivery. Ted is progressing nicely with the sculpey-dino and we are definitely NOT using USPS. Though I don't really believe the $352.88 Sonic-Air option is necessary per-se, I do know we'll be taking our business far, far away from the government lackeys.
In other news, the website is totally, and I may alienate some of our readers by saying this but I must, pimp. If you haven't checked it out in a while I suggest you stop by and see what's up, its more than just growing grass and 'shrooms now as I've gotten around to implementing some neat pop-up stuff and thumbnails with Greg's help on the visual aspect. We still maintain the data-driven model, so if anyone else ever gets the gumption to mess with the layout, as Greg and Josh has already done a bit on the team page, they may do it with a limited amount of XML experience and without needing to stomach the horror of reading any of my "codes". In reality I am disgusted with the actual "codes" controlling the website, as it's just a mash-up of various pieces of functionality, each one tacked onto the previous iteration. To put it simply, it is the embodiment of feature-creep despite its development time being limited to about two and a half weeks.
At the very least I recommend you check out the back page for our new thumbnail implementation, it was fun to create and we are featuring a brand new artist who joined the team despite him already being the main programmer. I drew some concept art of what I considered to be the best day ever and it just so happened to involve dinosaurs fighting with high powered weaponry while villagers streamed about them in some fanciful representation of worship. Almost like some kind of war... Maybe a Dinowaur?

And the Lisa Frank Genie Says: "Outlook Good"

The pitch has been submitted! Yessss. Working together on everything has been a blast. At one point, we were discussing how to present the pitch materials. We got to talking about how great it would be to put the materials in a cheesy grade school folder with dinosaurs on it. Greg and I agreed that a Lisa Frank dinosaur folder would be the coolest ever. We went through the internets (and the local school supply stores) in search of such a folder. Unfortunately, such things don't seem to exist. However, while browsing the Lisa Frank website, we discovered there was a games section. Naturally, we went to check it out. The first thing we found was a game called Ask Genie. It's essentially a magic 8-ball in the form of the typical obnoxious Lisa Frank colors and graphics that we were familiar with, but with an updated Bratz-inspired girl genie. Greg asked her "will we get monies?" (Now, it's not all about the money, but hey, we gotta pay the bills just like anyone else.) The response was "Outlook Good." Yes! We high fived and concluded that the matter was settled. Something good is going to happen.

Even though we couldn't find any Lisa Frank dinos, Greg's girlfriend Kym made us an image out of her love for dinosaurs (and Greg, presumably). It was so good, we wanted to use it for a folder, but concluded that the craft of a hand-made folder wouldn't hold up to our standards. So instead, all of you can be blessed with its awesomeness above.

What did we end up doing for presenting the pitch materials? Well, Ted found some folders he had saved from the time of Disney's Dinosaur. Thankfully, he recognized the value of them and had them stored away in a safe location. We unanimously concluded that the folder that said "Extinct This" with a picture of a Carnotaur screaming would be the one used for holding the pitch materials. So the pitch materials were added, stickers were put on the folder and packaging, and the package was sent to Adult Swim.

So far, the genie's prediction has been accurate. Nothing has seemed to go wrong with anything, yet. Our pitch isn't perfect, but everything is there and we feel it's of high quality. Hopefully our hard work will pay off.