In the miiiiiiiiiiiddle of the crunch…
November 6th, 2008 by aeiowu
And then a video was born:
Dinowaurs Accessories Preview!
October 31st, 2008 by torncanvas
Development on Dinowaurs is beginning to wrap up here at Intuition Games. Things are getting hectic. One thing we’ve been up lately is tying into Kongregate’s microtransaction system for Premium Game Developers, so that players will be able to purchase accessories. Not only that, they’ll be able to earn them for free! It’s really exciting to finally see our accessories in action and on the dinosaurs. Here’s a preview image I captured on the development site.
Isn’t he cool? I can’t wait to see the suits in action! I had the pleasure of taking Greg’s illustrations and Ted’s concepts and reworking them so they could be skinned on the dinos and animated. It was hilarious and endearing to see a dinosaur wearing a business suit, or space suit, or tanuki suit.
Also, special thanks to Nimblebit for adding us and our semi-public Vimeo videos to the Game Developers group on Vimeo. We can’t wait to see how Zero Gear turns out!
Dinowaurs Maptesting update, Tournament today at 6pm CST!
October 25th, 2008 by torncanvas
A couple weeks ago we started a plan to do maptesting three times a week on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 6pm CST. It’s going pretty well so far, but I wanted to send out another call for the private beta testers to show up at 6pm Central today so we can continue testing and also have a tournament.
For those who haven’t been around much lately, we have trophies you can earn, several major bug fixes, performance improvements, and even an integrated chat system (triggered by pressing Return) so you can trash-talk your opponent. :) In addition, we’ve set up our own chat server using Mumble so that anyone interested can voice chat, if you’re into that sort of thing.
To use Mumble, download and install the software, then when you start it up, make sure to tune your audio settings using the wizard, which should pop up automatically. You can turn on push-to-talk through a combo-box in the Audio section of the Preferences, and choose your talk key in the Shortcuts section. Create a new connection to a custom server, set the host to www.intuitiongames.com, leave the port the same, choose a username (preferably the same as your Kong username), and then for the password type in the name of our game in lowercase letters. If you have troubles, feel free to ask in the Dinowaurs Game Chat on Kongregate. We hope to see you there!
Iowa Indie Game Jam #3 success
October 21st, 2008 by torncanvas
The third Iowa Indie Game Jam was a great success! It was held this weekend October 17-19 in Cedar Falls at the apartment of Andres Reinot, an 8monkey Labs co-founder. He hosted an artist from Phantom EFX, several hobbyists and ISU students from Ames, four members of our company Intuition Games, and some friends and co-workers who stopped by just to wish us well or participate for a brief period here and there. Unfortunately, there was no internet access at the apartment, so this is a recap (it could probably be seen as a blessing in disguise :P).
This time there was a specific theme, which was “2d vs 3d.” The goal was to decide on a concept and make interpretations of the concept in both 2d and 3d. Most of us showed up on Friday night, socialized for a bit, got a sneak peek of the graphically-impressive Darkest of Days, and started brainstorming. The concept we came up with was exploring what it’s like to fly and be sensitive to wind patterns through the mechanics of grasshopper flight. You’re a grasshopper, and you can jump, fly/glide for a brief period, free fall, or dive bomb. You travel throughout a world and must deal with changing wind patterns in different areas of the sky. Joe made a really fun joke about how the player could be searching for a female grasshopper, and when he found her, he’d say “nice legs.” It went over well enough that everyone agreed the project would be named Nice Legs. That’s our Joe!
Brainstorming on an HDTV was nice. 
The 3d team - composed of Andres from 8monkey Labs, Paul from Phantom EFX, and Ken from ISU - were going to use 8monkey’s Marmoset Engine and its tools as a foundation from which to build the game. The 2d team - composed of Joe, Mike, Greg and myself (Josh) from Intuition - were going to use Box2D, Joe’s partially-developed tile engine, and Flash as a foundation. Kira from ISU was going to illustrate a grasshopper, which could be used by both teams if need be.
The 3d team presided in the living room to the right. The 2d team was in the kitchen at left. Pictured at center holding the laptop is Mike Holtan. He joined us for a large part of the game jam working on his own version of the concept, which was a one-on-one grasshopper jousting game using physics based on actual grasshopper anatomy (think Toribash with grasshoppers and jousting). He was using the game to teach himself Box2D and Flash.
We split up into our teams and got to work. It was fascinating to see how each team went in their own direction. The 3d team, headed by Andres, went in a more flight simulator route by focusing on realistic flight physics and tuning the controls to an Xbox 360 gamepad. The 2d team went in a more platformer route by getting the tile engine up and running, and focusing on creating sections of the sky that acted as wind patterns.
Here’s Mike, who’s birthday was Oct. 6, enjoying some belated birthday cake. Thanks to my wife for making me enough cake that I’d have leftovers to share with Mike.
The end result of our game jam was two sandboxes in which we could explore the mechanics of our game, and both seemed to provide some good promise that a fun game could be made out of them. Neither team was able to complete a finished game, but everyone seemed pretty inspired to keep working on the projects after the weekend was over. Thanks to Andres for hosting us!
In the next post, I’ll upload some screenshots of the 2d and 3d version of Nice Legs and go into more detail about each one. In the meantime, feel free to head to the iowa indie game jam photo page to see the other photos.
New Cubed! New office, new update, new Dinowaurs Map Test Fest! schedule.
October 13th, 2008 by aeiowu
Lots of business going on here lately. We’ve moved to a brand new office in the ISU research park, released a new Dinowaurs update with lots of tweaks, plus we’re now poised to launch our Map Testing Festival Extravaganza thingy.
First up, thanks to all the testers who have signed up for the DMT Fest, we’ve looked through the doodle scheduler and it looks like 6:00PM CST works best for all days. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at 6:00PM CST! So be there! We’ll be sending out emails to those who signed up regardless of scheduling conflicts. And here’s a little poster thingy I made to make sure you remember, or if you don’t like reading boring blog texts.
Oh yea, and we put up some pictures of our move. In general chronological order. It’s all very scientific.
Hey, it’s another Iowa Indie Game Jam. 2D vs. 3D
October 9th, 2008 by aeiowu
On October 18th, some friends at 8Monkey Labs are hosting another Iowa Indie Game Jam with us. This will be the third in about the span of a year and will take place in Cedar Falls, IA. We think it’ll be the best yet! Basically we’ll all get together for a weekend and try to come up with a game or two. Working together in spirit, yet competing against each other with the ferocity of one hundred glaciers, one on the 2D side, and another on the 3D side. This will undoubtedly decide the ultimate question: “2D or 3D, which is better?”
If you’re a developer in Iowa, or around or the MidWest, or just happen to want to come and participate in the jam, email us at team [at] intuitiongames [dot] com. If you’re a player, we’ll be posting pictures and tomfoolery here during the jam as well, and then when the game is out and about, we’ll post that here too. If any of you guys have ideas for a game, post them in the comments, maybe it’ll sprout more ideas or make for a good base for whatever we cook up.
Dinowaurs Map Test Fest 2008
September 29th, 2008 by aeiowu
Things have been characteristically churning along behind the scenes. And for our next trick, we’ll be getting together some of you to participate in the some map/gameplay testing. Aside from the usual bug hunting, we want to test out a crap-load of maps with you awesome testers. Three nights a week we’ll be hosting a variety of brand-new maps to see what everyone thinks, as well as plug in some gameplay shifts in weapon power/cost and etc. Basically your duties as a Dinowaurs Map Test Fest participant include making the game as fun as possible. So here’s to announcing our DMT Fest. And what’s that? A Wolly Mammoth? o_O
In addition to all that… each Saturday we’ll be holding a Dinowaurs tournament. We’ve got brackets setup for 16 player tournaments and those will be open to Map Test Fest participants first and foremost. If there is more widespread interest in the tournaments we can open up multiple tournament sets if need be.
Ok, so for this to work out, we’re going to need a dedicated bunch of testers. Also, we’re going to need to synchronize our schedules every Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday. We made this scheduling sign-up to help everyone find the best time of day/night to hold the Map Test Fest. Please select all the times you are available (green) and all those you are not (red). Note: The testing will go on for multiple weeks, so understand you’re signing up for the best time of day, not any specific date. Also note: If you are annoying and signup a ton of times, you’ll be banished from signup.
Once enough folks have signed up, we’ll post on the blog who’s in and the times that we’re going ahead with for each of the days. Don’t worry if you can’t make it for every single session each week, it’s all part of the plan.
Hey! We’re Back! - Dinowaurs Beta back in full swing
July 18th, 2008 by aeiowu
Dinowaurs-wise we’ve been furiously working on performance to make a much larger private beta more realistic. We’ve done that. No word on when the beta will open up to the proportions it deserves, but it will likely be relatively soon. If you had problems running the game previously, definitely give it another shot. I can run it competitively on my P.O.S. PowerBook G4 1.67 ghz 1GB of RAM. Before these performance optimizations, I wrote off ever being able to even load the game up on my Mac, as I have plenty of trouble even doing that with the majority of Flash games. Someday we will find a pot of gold somewhere and I will be awarded an intel-based Mac that can play any indie game, ever. But until then, let us all congratulate Mike with a warm “hoooooray” [ala Pink Floyd] for kicking some ass on this one. It was painful, but that’s the name of the game. Perhaps he’ll go into some detail as to what was techincally going on, but for now, we just wanted to post this sigh of relief.
Internet Archive - free music for game developers
July 15th, 2008 by torncanvas
We’ve posted an article previously about free music on the Internet Archive. But I’ve recently found something else: music you can use in your games through a collection on the Internet Archive called Open Source Audio.
Much of this is music, and it’s licensed for some sort of free usage, depending on the licensing terms selected by the artist who uploaded the work. Most entries use various Creative Commons licenses, and some of them can be used commercially in your games.
If you’re looking for music for games, there seems to be 3 general directions you can go: custom music created by professional musicians (most work in the tv/film industry), stock music created by professional musicians, and recorded music created by musicians (often times amateurs doing it for fun). In the first two cases, someone is making music specifically for a purpose, and that purpose is either decided by you or the musician, respectively.
However, in the last case, the musician is just making the music he/she/they wants to make, and then recording it. This sometimes results in more expressive or artistic music, which can do a great job of influencing a game with the same goal. I think the music in the Open Source Audio collection tends to fit this third case, and best of all, it’s free! Check it out here: Internet Archive Open Source Audio.