Friday, 30 June 2017

Anti Flux VR - Uk Games Fund Pitch!

Hey Guys!

This is Dave here with a much needed update to the Captain Dinosaur blog! So first of all its good to be back writing this after well over a year of forgetting to add stuff (our bad) and to finally shed some light on what we've been up to for the past 18 months! This post and the next couple will be more catch up posts than new shiny announcements but i hope you can enjoy them all the same!

Today's post is all about our Anti Flux VR Uk Games Fund submission from 2016! Uk Games fund is a funding program introduced last year following a large sum of government investment, its goal is to fund small UK based game teams to get there products to a sell-able or demonstrative state in order to grow and ultimately provide jobs and experience to the British economy.

Right, enough about the program, what about the pitch?

Anti Flux VR was to be a fully 3D virtual reality Shoot Em Up, with the player piloting a ship around large Virtual landscape overrun with Viruses. Much like the mobile game the players objective was to destroy as many of these viruses as possible using a variety of weapon and the colour changing mechanic that worked so well in the previous title!

We were aiming to utilize the Occulus Rift touch controller to further enhance the experience and were aiming to showcase the project at the Develop VR showcase, with that being the ultimate goal of the initial funding!

We put together a snazzy little video (view able below!) and had built an alpha prototype for the submission.

Although we ultimately (Spoiler alert i guess?) we were not able to get the investment we needed this time around, we really enjoyed leaving our 2D comfort zone for this project and overall think that the Uk Games Fund is a really great program and we certainly hope to apply for it again whenever we can.

So that's just a quick behind the curtain glimpse at our Anti Flux VR pitch!

Thank you for reading and please check out our Twitter and Facebook pages for updates on whats next for us at Captain Dinosaur Games!

Dave
Lead Programmer
Captain Dinosaur Games

Daves Twitter:@eofgizmo
Capt Dino Twitter: @CaptDinoGames

Sunday, 19 July 2015

Agents of S.O.A.P: Zero Mission

Hey folks!

Dave here with a little update about what we have been working on in the quiet of the West County!

Our newest game Agents of S.O.A.P: Zero Mission will be hitting mobile platforms in the next few weeks so its really about time we talked about it officially!



Agents of S.O.A.P is a dialogue based adventure game where you must diffuse a bomb and hack a computer to stop a terrorist attack on an Airship! Sounds easy doesn't it? Well its not that simple! in order to get the information and items you need to achieve this you will need to use all of your linguistic skills to persuade the airships crew to give up there secrets, all while a timer to your untimely demise counts down!


So you may ask "Why is it Zero Mission?" What Zero Mission indicates is that this is a stand alone mission that we are making FREE to get some much needed feedback! We are planning a much larger and feature filled Agents of S.O.A.P game with a completely new story and lots of additional game play but felt releasing a stand alone mission would help guide us through the development of that larger game!

As i mentioned earlier, our aim is to get Zero Mission to mobile platforms within the next few weeks so please stay tuned to our Twitter Feeds for More Info!

Twitter:
Captain Dinosaur Games: @captdinogames
Dave: @eofgizmo
Pete: @wildmelonpete

Wednesday, 15 October 2014

Anti Flux - 15/10/14

Hey Guys, Its Dave from Captain Dinosaur here and today i will FINALLY be blogging about our first release, Anti Flux.

Anti Flux is a Defensive-Shoot-em-up where the player aims to destroy as many aggressive viruses as possible to rack up a Hi Score. 
The Title Screen in all its glory!


To help you achieve this there are a number of power ups available that include: A Shield that returns your shield to full power, a Bullet that increases your damage for a short time, a Bolt that freezes the enemies in place and a Wave that creates a wave of destruction that stops all in its path!!
Shocking......

The enemies aren't generated in a set pattern so the player has to be ready for any eventuality and leads to the game being quite reaction based instead of simply remembering when and where enemies appear. Makes the game super hard too (Trust me, I'm the lead programmer and i have an embarrassingly low hi score compared to our testers!)

"Simple and easy to play"  Was definitely the phrase we thought of when initially designing Anti Flux. Myself and Pete (Lead Artist/Creative Dude) had worked on a couple projects for a previous company of ours that got very complicated as the development went on, leading to a mess of ideas and mechanics in the final product. It also left us drained and unwilling to even promote said project.

We didn't want this to happen with Captain Dinosaur Games so the idea for Anti Flux came about from that desire to focus on polish instead of complicated design. The art style was deliberately made using simple shapes and colours in order for us to concentrate on the games fun and playability instead of spending months fine tuning animations or backgrounds.
Wave Goodbye.... The weapon is much better than my Puns...

The game in its entirety took about 4 Months to make from Idea to Google Play Store release. Since then we have released on the iOS App Store and Amazon App Stores as well as adding a bit more content and streamlining the experience overall.

As of writing we have had over 2,700 Downloads so far which is a big step from our previous experience! The hardest part of this project so far has been trying to get it out there for sure. For people that have, before this project, not been big users of social media it has been a big eye opener.

So thats a tiny little insight to the development of Anti Flux! Which you can of course Download for Free from the Links listed below! As for whats next for Captain Dinosaur Games? We are working on a new project that is alot bigger in scope that will be hopefully taking the lid off of soon! As well as trying to improve Anti Flux where we can and get it onto a few more platforms!

Thanks for Reading, Happy gaming!
Dave Bellringer
Lead Programmer/Creative Director
Captain Dinosaur Games
Google Play Store: http://bit.ly/1s4Ek3w
Amazon App Store: http://amzn.to/1xRUjDQ
iOS App Store: http://bit.ly/1vYNcdm

Tuesday, 15 July 2014

An Introduction To Captain Dinosaur Games!

Welcome to the Captain Dinosaur Games official blog!

Who are we?
Captain Dinosaur Games are an independent video game developer based in the UK. The team is currently made up of two University of Wales, Newport graduates, Peter Morrish, Who studied Games Design and Dave Bellringer, who studied Computer Programming!

What do we do?
Our aim is make fun and challenging video games! That's it, no hidden agenda, just fun games! We have so far worked on Games for Mobile and Tablet devices but we also plan to move onto other platforms in the future!

What have we made?
Our first release as Captain Dinosaur Games was Anti Flux, a game in which you attempt to halt the never ending onslaught of computer viruses in order to achieve the Highest Score you can! Anti Flux is available right now for FREE on the Google Play Store (Store Link) and will be available on the Apple App Store very soon!


What's next?
Our immediate plans are to get the iOS version of Anti Flux available for download! Beyond that we are planning a content patch for Anti Flux that adds some requested features and fixes a few bugs! Please follow this blog, our Twitter and our Facebook page for more info!

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