Follow Monaco’s progress on Facebook and Twitter. Thrice daily updates! Connect with fans! See videos and screenshots!  Tame lions!  Discover the secrets of your eternal soul!

Become a fan on Facebook

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MonacoIsMine

Really, I’m updating these pages constantly, you can talk with other people interested in the game, and talk with me directly while I’m working.  Check them out!

I started Monaco as a way to break myself from the doldrums of design… apparently someone thought it worked!  Monaco was just nominated for Excellence in Design and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize in the 2010 Independent Games Festival!

Congrats to all the other finalists and I’ll see you in March!

http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html

And now… for our final dino-of-the-day… Tyrannosaurus Rex!

We’re still in development of course, but this is a shot of the dinosaur in our latest build of the game. Click on the thumbnail to see the full image. Let us know what you think!

Read the rest of this entry »

Oooh, did you notice the new link to “More Games…” in the left sidebar?  That’s a link to the Pocketwatch Games Casual Game Store.  We’re now selling tons of great casual and downloadable games along with the Venture games!

Check out games like:

• Fish Tycoon – Breed new species of fish!
• Plan It Green - Strategy Game from National Geographic
  
• Totem Tribe – Casual RTS

The great thing about buying these games from us is that you will support our efforts to make more great Venture games in the future.

So if you like the Venture games (or the fact that we give a significant portion of our revenue to charity), please make your downloadable game purchases through us!

OK, enough with the sales pitch… start playing some great games!

The progress bar took a big bump up today! We’re at 28 percent!

We’re taking a different approach to development with Dinosauria than we did with our previous two games. In the past, we’ve gotten into publishing deals early on, which forced us to ship on tight schedules. This time around, we’re not signing with anyone until the game is largely complete. We don’t want to be beholden to any schedule that may cause us to ship the game before it’s the best darn animal game ever.

So, what have we been up to lately? The fun stuff: gameplay!

Read the rest of this entry »

All of the dinosaurs from Venture Dinosauria lived during the cretaceous period in North America. The cretaceous spanned 80 million years and not all of these dinosaurs lived in tandem, but they do represent a fairly broad cross section of the larger creatures that lived during this period.

Yesterday we kicked things off with Deinonychus. Next up, Quetzalcoatlus:

(click to see a larger image)

Quetzalcoatlus was the largest flying creature to ever live. It had a wingspan of over 30 feet. Recent research suggests that Quetzalcoatlus was not a fisher or wader, but in fact roamed the prairies like a giraffe, catching small prey in his beak.

Time to announce the 12 dinosaurs in the game!  First up, Deinonychus:

(click to see a larger image)

Deinonychus, an 11 foot long, roughly 5 foot tall dinosaur, may have been able to run up the sides of trees using their powerful legs and claws, and possibly assisted by lift generated by feathered forearms.  They likely ate a whole range of prey: from insects and small reptiles to much larger prey.  They may have hunted in packs, having been found in close proximity to (and with teeth marks on) Tenontosaurus.

Feathers on deinonychus are not just a theory: quill knobs have been discovered on the closely related Velociraptor’s skeleton.

A quick glance at our first dinosaur model for Dinosauria, the lone Jurassic dinosaur of the bunch, Stegosaurus! (for full size images, click on the thumbnails)

First, we conceptualize the shape and colors:

After iterating on the concept image, we model the high-poly version, which we will use to create a normal map:

Then we break that down to the low-poly version:

Then we paint the texture and apply the normal map. The Stegosaurus is ready for the game! (at 2177 tris):

Last week Dinosauria hit its first milestone!  That puts us at 13% done. It’s also why I haven’t been blogging for the past week… I’ve been trying to get some R&R so my trapezius stops spouting obscenities at my desk chair.

Read the rest of this entry »

Venture Dinosauria is 8% done today.  This is due to the new addition to the team, Dylan Marquez.  Dylan has a graphic design degree from College of the Desert and a graduate degree in game design from the Art Institute in San Diego.  He’s been roaring through the modeling and texture work on ferns, tree ferns, and more!  We should have a pretty complete picture of our cretaceous ecosystems within weeks!