The Kickstarter video for Dinosaur Island.

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Ezra

Dinosaur Island Kickstarter video.

You can click on the image on the left to open a new window and see the Dinosaur Island video that we produced for Kickstarter on YouTube.

We were pretty naive when we signed up for Kickstarter thinking that all we had to do was tell the world that we had made lots of best-selling computer games in the past and, with your help, we would like to do a new 3D dinosaur simulation. We’ve since learned that you first need to build up interest (that’s why we’ve created this site) and then – only after there are a lot of people already interested in your project – take it to Kickstarter.

The background foliage.

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Ezra

Ed Isenberg created this background using XFrog’s Prehistoric Plants collection.

The wonderful foliage used for the background on the Dinosaur Island site was created by Ed Isenberg using XFrog’s prehistoric plant library (click here to go to the XfrogPlants site).

This is a good example of the environment that we will create for Dinosaur Island. We know that these plants are historically accurate for various time periods. However, we aren’t paleobotanists, so if any of you visitors to the site are, please feel free to contact us because we certainly could use your advice.

We’re still building this site!

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Ezra

Paleontologist Norman Ross preparing the skeleton of a baby dinosaur circa 1921. (Library of Congress)

If you happened to wander in to this site by accident – and how else would you get here – we’re still building the site, writing content and playing with the design.

If you have any comments or suggestions, we would be glad to hear from you. Go to the Contact Us section to send us an email.

Thank you for your patience.

Designasaurus.

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Ezra

Designasurus for the Apple //GS (1988)

Back in 1987 I had the extraordinary good fortune to sign a contract with Brittanica Software to develop an educational game about dinosaurs.

Like most of the people that have found their way to this site, I’ve loved studying about dinosaurs since I was a very little kid. Somewhere there is an old acetate record of me – probably age 5 – talking about dinosaurs.

The first thing I insisted on was that we not look at the project as a ‘game’; rather it was to be educational and completely accurate.

I had recently graduated with a degree in computer animation from a little private school (now defunct) called Marycrest College which was the first college to offer a degree in computer animation. Many of my friends from the program did the artwork for Designasaurus. Below is a screen shot from the ‘IBM DOS’ (yes, there were computers before ‘Windows’) version of Designasaurus:

Screen shot of Designasaurus on the IBM (1988).

IBM PCs at that time ran in 320 x 240 resolution (the computer screen in front of you is probably more than 1,000 pixels wide) and only had four colors. The computer had 640 KB of RAM (a tiny fraction of the amount of memory that is available on most computers today) and that included the operating system, too!

Another interesting note: back in 1988 there was no easy way to make a ‘screen capture’ and create a file that could be used for the box art. The picture, above, which appeared on the back of the original Designasaurus box was taken with a Polaroid camera (another blast from the past)!

Welcome to Dinosaur Island!

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Ezra

This is the place for the latest information about the development of Dinosaur Island, a great new educational game for PCs and the Xbox game console. Here you will be among the first to see to the new dinosaur animations and you will also be able to help influence design decisions.

Dinosaur Island is currently under development by Dr. D. Ezra Sidran and Ed Isenberg; two game developers who have been writing best-selling computer games together since 1987.

Here we will be posting videos of dinosaur animation tests, concept art, design documents and asking you, fellow dinosaur lovers, for feedback about what you would like to see in Dinosaur Island.