As the keen-eyed among you might have spotted, Dinolords made an appearance at the business-area of Gamescom along with our friends at Ghostship and the other projects they are publishing. The main objective was simple but intense: talk to as many press outlets as possible within a span of two days. In this edition of Dinolords Monthly we are going to dive into what that experience was like, and some of the coverage we have seen as a result.
On Tuesday the 20th of August, Michael, Ulrik and Kasra journeyed to Köln with a packed schedule ahead of them. To tell the tale of what happened, our Game Director and CEO Michael has written the following segment: We traveled to Cologne in Germany to participate in the yearly video game pilgrimage that is Gamescom. We were going as part of the Danish Games booth with our publisher. This was the first time that we were showing the game to outside people, and so we were naturally excited and nervous. We had 19 x 30 minutes of press briefings presenting the latest build of Dinolords. That is 9.5 hours of nonstop talking and showing off the game to journalists and let me tell you... it was crazy. The response in the room was very positive and we felt like most of the people we talked to really understood what we were trying to achieve. They were excited and full of praise for what they saw. Journalists see hundreds of games at conferences, so you're never guaranteed that they'll write anything after a demo. So when you get back from the conference you sort of just wait, and hope they do. This past week we've gotten some very nice articles on top tier outlets like Rock Paper Shotgun and Rolling Stone (!) calling it one of the best experiences at gamescom. It's been overwhelming to see our game resonate with so many people and it's confirmed to us that we're heading in the right direction. - Michael
So what were they talking about during all those hours in a small meeting room with press from all over the world? Firstly, and most importantly, we had spent some time making a small, tailored level specifically made to fit the time restraints of the press meetings; it had to take around 15 minutes to play from start to finish, and we of course wanted it to showcase as much as possible of the game. As you might imagine, this was no simple feat, but we ended up with a scene that did most if not all of what we wanted it to, and here’s a short video with some gameplay footage recorded straight from that demo level:
After Michael, Ulrik and Kasra returned home, we were all eagerly awaiting to hear about their experiences - they barely had any spare time to send a raven while they were down there, so we had lots of questions. And right as we were talking about it all, the articles started popping up and drew our attention. Here are some highlights, starting out with the English ones: “It’s an utterly stupid idea that shouldn’t work half as well as it does, but video games can get away with ridiculous concepts like dinosaurs in medieval times. It’s so dumb it’s brilliant.”
- Issy Van Der Velde for Rolling Stone “You could end up firing an arrow made from wood you collected, by the fletcher you recruited, to work in the workshop you built, using materials you gathered, and frankly that’s just as cool as any dinosaur.”
- James Archer for Rock Paper Shotgun “While it may sound like a daydream that's gone too far, Dinolords was one of the most refreshing games I've seen this year - and that's actually got very little to do with the premise.”
- Lloyd Coombes for GGRecon And one in Danish, translated quote: “‘But guys, Vikings did not ride dinosaurs in the past’, a sentence we all found entertaining, and even though it’s mostly true, it did not matter in the slightest because Dinolords was fun to play.”
- Kasper Pedersen for Arkaden
So while this has been sort of an internal milestone, going to Gamescom with something playable, we have also been working on the rest of the game. For the foreseeable future, we will be putting a lot of focus on adding more content for the game. We want a broad selection of interesting units, buildings and dinosaurs, but we also want interesting systems to interact with. This requires a bunch of things to be made, from 3D models that needs meshes, textures and animations, to the underlying systems that needs to support units with interesting abilities, different characteristics and the capacity to act and interact in meaningful ways on and off the battlefield. And finally, while we are not ready to expose the full roster of units and buildings just yet, we want to at least throw a bone and share a couple of ideas that we are currently working on. These are heavily subject to change still, so anything can happen. First up is AoE (Area of Effect) interactions; imagine a patch of flammable tar that spreads on the ground and slows units passing through. And if lit, it creates a damage-over-time effect to units stood in it. Or a toxic poison cloud that disorients units and allows for more tactical control over the battlefield. Well, this is currently something we are working on. Having modifiers that dynamically can alter the course of battle and create different interactions you have to navigate around, both friendly and enemy. And secondly, we have been looking at different dinosaurs (and especially the scale of different dinosaurs, since some of these were absolute units and we are in awe of the size of this lad especially). Lastly, as hinted in the screengrab above, we are looking at, eh, units that don't walk on normal solid ground. That being both flying and water-oriented dinosaurs. This is still incredibly early, so we are not even sure how this could even work, but we want to make sure we explore this properly. If we end up having either airborne or swimming dinosaur units, they need to make a net-positive contribution to gameplay. We have been bouncing some fun ideas around like what if a pterosaur-type could fly in, pick up a unit and either transport or lethally drop them somewhere else.
That was all for this instalment of Dinolords Monthly. We are still absolutely thrilled to follow the feedback we get from press, but especially also from all of you guys on the discussion board and over on discord. And while we are already having a lot of fun making Dinolords a reality, it makes it a bunch more meaningful to see that it resonates well with other people than just ourselves. So a big thank you to everyone who has written a comment, a thread, a message, on videos, articles, forums and chatrooms. We try to read everything, and know that we do read it and we share and discuss what we see a lot. Catch you in the next one. Steel and Scale.
-panxter