Howdy soldiers,

We wanted to take a minute to let all our players know where the game is currently and where we’re headed in the immediate future.  We’ve just had a nice Daily Deal on Steam which was a great boost to the game but as always there’s a lot of work ahead of us to really make Dino D-Day a success.

First, a big thank you to all of our veteran players who’ve stuck with us through thick and thin.  Your input into the ongoing development of the game is greatly valued and your comments and suggestions have made Dino D-Day better and better.  We also want to welcome our new players and encourage them to do the same.  It will be great to have a fresh set of eyes on the game in its current form and see what players who have just begun their Dino D-Day career think.

Our forums over at Steam are the best place to post your thoughts as we regularly communicate with everyone over there.  Here’s a link just in case you want to visit:  Steam Forums.

A Brief History of Dino D-Day

With all that in mind, let me take a minute to describe where the game started, what we’ve done so far, and what we’re planning in the immediate future.  As some of you know, Dino D-Day shipped in April of last year and had a bumpy introduction.  The game had its share of rough edges and was not well-reviewed on its release.  But we chose to accept this constructively rather than retreat into isolation to lick our wounds and curse the mean old gaming community for not liking us.  We got the message and the message was simple:  make a better game.  So we started working on that.  The first piece was the T-Rex update which we shipped in July of 2011.  This added the T-Rex to the game of course but also the Stygimoloch and Trigger, the Allies only dinosaur at the moment.  We were able to get a nice Free Weekend promotion out of Steam for this and to this date that’s still the high-water mark as far as player count goes.  Not surprising since it was free that weekend.

After the dust settled on the Free Weekend we started work on the Compy/Microraptor update.  This was designed to give the Axis a couple more dinosaur classes to play with – specifically, small dinosaurs which we thought would be a lot of fun to play as.  This update was shipped at the end of October 2011 and included a new map and game mode (capture point) as well as some alternate weapons for a few human classes.  The last content update was back in December which coincided with Steam’s Christmas Sale.  We shipped the Snowy Park map then which tied into a themed Christmas achievement.  This update also added full stat tracking to the game integrated with Steam.  We also did a major overhaul of the game’s UI at this time…something that we’re still working on.

In between all of these major updates are many smaller patches that address game balance, bugs, and so on.  The vast majority of these fixes came from feedback that players had posted or communicated to us in one way or another.  Customer Service is not always fun but it’s something we’re committed to so keep that feedback coming.

Time to move on to the good stuff…where we’re headed!

The Immediate Future

One of the major complaints over the past few months has been the Compy.  With that in mind we are preparing an update that we hope will address some of the frustrations people feel.  In doing this we are being extremely careful not to break the experience for the player that is the Compy.  We feel playing as the Compy is pretty fun and don’t want to introduce frustration on that end.  However, getting killed by the Compy feels “cheap” to many players and is a major source of frustration and complaints.  To that end, we’re hoping to add some tweaks to the Compy’s gameplay to encourage stealth and the use of the claw attack.  We hope to gently discourage players from simply rushing out of spawn and finding the nearest target to go blow up.  The “right” way to play as the Compy is to use size and stealth first to achieve a few claw kills and then when the situation gets desperate try and take someone out with the suicide detonation.

We also want to address a longstanding difficulty of the medic classes.  Dino D-Day has medics but it can be less than satisfying to play them because of the difficulty in actually healing people.  We hope to address this by incorporating a very thoughtful idea proposed by a community member on our forums.  We are still testing this so we will see how it turns out.

As I’ve mentioned before we’ll also be shipping a few in-progress bots.  This is all working towards an update that I will outline below but for the time being these bots, while unofficial, are still pretty fun to mess around with.  Bear in mind they’re not finished but if you don’t mind some console commands you can have a pretty fun round of deathmatch against them.  I figured that was enough to at least make them available for those in our community that might be curious about them.

In addition to all of that the next update will also address a number of other issues.  Among them:

• Adding a T-Rex spawn preference to Multiplayer options (if you don’t want to be selected as the T-Rex)
• Close down suicide exploit for thrown/pounced/eaten/incapped players
• Automatic satchel pickup
• Improved Trigger/Stygimoloch melee
• Took out recharge for raptor pounce
• Fixed footstep attenuation for dinosaurs (so you can hear their footsteps MUCH better now)
• Hitbox misalignment in certain animations.  This fix will allow us to add in a Microraptor ceiling cling which we removed prior to the update last October.  Still testing but we expect it to be in.  Super-fun to hang onto a ceiling and spit on people!
• Jumping now deducts stamina to close down the infinite stamina / bunny-hopping exploit.

The Not-so-immediate Future

The next update following the Compy/Medic patch will, as always, incorporate bugs/balance issues raised by the community.  In addition to that we want to finally get a really good, concerted update on the game’s dialogue.  We haven’t done much with it since launch and we’ve added so many new dialogue events that Dino D-Day isn’t as talkative as it should be.  So I’m going to call this update the “Funny Update” because we’re going to write a whole bunch of new material and get it all in.  We’ll bring the cast back to record some new lines and everything.  I hope that this particular update will ship sometime in March or early April.

The Definitely-not-immediate Future

In the 3-4 month time frame we are preparing the next major update to Dino D-Day.  The particulars of this update are still not totally firmed up but we will reveal more soon.  The major feature that will be added at this time will be something that I’m calling “Skirmish” mode right now.  It will be a new game mode that can be played offline by yourself or online with a few friends.  We’ll reveal more about this game mode in a future blog post as we want to get feedback from the community on the particulars of it as it starts to take shape.

This update may also include other content but we are not quite ready to announce anything as of yet.

The Far-flung Future

Man will live in habitable domes on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.  The lion will lie down with the lamb and the Cubs will win a World Series.  As far as Dino D-Day goes, who knows?  We’ll see where things go but we always have plans for the future.  We think of Dino D-Day as a “world” that we’ve created with lots of fun characters and stories that we can tell.  We want to do that in as many ways as possible.  Right now, the best way to develop the world of Dino D-Day is to continue working on this multiplayer game and keep our players happy.

As always, thanks for playing everyone!  Keep the feedback rolling in.  We can’t guarantee we’ll use everyone’s ideas but we will always read them and carefully consider it as part of our ongoing work!

The Devs