Tim Malcham

DINO MERCS is a roguelite/turnbased/deckbuilding game featuring dinosaur ... mercenaries! Build a deck and defeat enemy mercs in fierce, strategic, combat. Available in Early Access on Steam: #app_reviews_hash" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">store.steampowered.com/app/1827640/DI…

Art direction > Fidelity

Fanart of #DinoMercs

"One of the best ways to determine wild carnivores is to travel with a big carnivore of your own. Smaller predators will tend to stay far away from a Carnotarus, and even most larger theropods will usually seek out an easier meal rather than risk a serious Injury in a fight."

Goals for 2025: 1. Do one big, final update for DINO MERCS. Leave the game in a great place and move on. 2. Start DINO MERCS 2 (learn UE5/blender, re-learn how to animate). Try to release a pre-alpha build at the end of the year. 3. Build a tool for my sandbox TTRPG.

X owning a game studio is a massive corporation owning a game studio. This is a self fulfilling problem being posed as a solution. Hire people to make cool shit. Pay those people appropriately. Putting the requirement of AI on this just limits the kind of work produced. Just go make games. Stop putting goal posts and requirements on it. We live in a time where tooling to do this is more accessible than ever.

DINO MERCS finally got the magical 10 steam reviews from players who didn't get the game for free. “Mostly Positive” – which is definitely a win for being my first ever game. Working on making the game even better, plus this gets me even more pumped for making the next game

Looks like tons of game devs and artists are moving over, understandably. Feel free to find me there and I’ll follow back!

Been getting good feedback from beta testers who have been playing the new update. I'll be actively working on fine-tuning the update over the next couple weeks. A lot of stats, cards, and enemies will be adjusted to better play with the new mechanics. New update coming soon!

@Fedora_Saurus Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. First up is definitely scaling back enemy/player shields/armor/hp a bit. But I'm really glad to hear it's overall more engaging!

First impressions seem promising (though, dev acknowledged the slower pacing and is working on that next). I like how you actively have to THINK about card placement each round. When I get a chance to play more, I'll send in some full feedback. 🫡

Dino Mercs gameplay overhaul beta is up!! If you watched my stream of the current gameplay and thought the game looked a little too easy before, why not try out the new beta? 😉

The Card Slot / Damage type overhaul update is now live for testing. For more details check out the DINO MERCS discord: discord.gg Hope y'all enjoy the update.

Every time I go a more than a few months without deploying a build of DINO MERCs to Steam, my auto-release system breaks because Steam loves to make things difficult for devs. So instead of releasing the update for testing today, it'll probably be released tomorrow instead

Just finished reworking how damage works in DINO MERCS, plus reworked all the player/enemy decks. Tomorrow I'll be releasing all the changes for testing in Steam if anybody would like to try them out. These are big changes, so a lot of playtesting will be needed!

Halo on Unreal Engine 5 looks AMAZING! Here's all the clips of Halo UE5 put together

@internetisaiah Thanks man, I definitely will! I'll start posting my progress on it. It'll be usable with any system/rules, and should massively cut down on the prep work needed for running a campaign.

In addition to video games, I love playing TTRPGs. I've been working on creating on a sandbox campaign and setting, complete with an web app to help manage all the complexity (100+ locations, 200+ npcs, 40+ factions) Might share more details here soon 👀

@Fedora_Saurus Thanks for the kind words! This is my first ever game, so definitely learning a ton about how to design a game in the first place 😅

It can be easy to get discouraged or defensive when a negative review comes along, but he doesn't give up on the project. He learns from it and thinks about ways to change things up, without compromising his overall idea for the game.

Honestly this is something I really respect about the Dino Mercs dev. He takes feedback/criticism in stride and finds solutions to make his game the best it can be.

@Fedora_Saurus This will be another challenge I'll need to think through gameplay-wise - some characters will have more of a focus on certain damage types, emphasis on certain stats, etc.. In the near future I'll be redoing stats completely so there's a lot of work to be done here!

@uu_studio Can't just rely on Birtie smashing everything with her Melee moves in the future, I see. 🤭 I agree this will make for some really interesting deckbuilding choices, and potentially make fights a lot more challenging!

I'm working on a huge change to DINO MERCS: damage types will become more specialized, dealing damage only to specific types of stats. For example: kinetic damage will only deal damage to armor, energy damage deals damage to shields, etc. I'm doing this because… 🧵

@DomEReapeR definitely a valid concern - the "elite" damage types (armor piercing, necrotic, explosive, etc.) will still deal damage to all stats. One benefit though of some damage cards being useless some hands is that it encourages playing non-damage cards as well (this is the hope)

@uu_studio I'm interested to see how it'll work, I did like how some were better against others but you could still do a little damage with sub-optimal ones, I worry about running into a shield and having only kinetic cards in my hand or something like that.