Shy Snake’s got their hands full

We’re working on a few things here, one is almost done, and the others will follow soon after.

Thing One is one of those quick changes that turn out really big and involved. The idea was to switch out the scripting language we used in missions and dialog flows to help Alex write and debug missions quicker.

If you ever did a DIY project of your own, you know that sometimes, you open things up and go, “Well, while we’re in here, might as well do that other thing I was meaning to do.” And soon you have a disassembled motor on your dining room table and tools on every available surface, and there’s no turning back, just through. So, good news, we’re almost at the point where the motor goes back in. Jason will write up a blog post about that soon. Once the motor is in, that is.

As soon as the motor is back in and running, we’ll push an update to the Beta channel on Steam. You should see some stability and performance improvements from that. The maps should load quicker, for example.

Now Thing Two is directly tied to that first bit. While Jason’s been working on pulling things apart and putting them back together again, Alex was using the new scripting language to create new missions, which are now just waiting for a bit of testing and polish before they can be added to the game for you to play. That bit will come a little while after Thing One is up on Steam.

So stay tuned, and we’ll have a new shiny version for you to play with soon.

Combat hesitations

by Jason Sams, Lead Developer

In Spy DNA we have talked about how you can queue actions for your characters. When we were discussing the difference in behaviors of well trained troops or agents, vs thugs, vs civilians, one of the things that came up is how quickly a character can evaluate the situation and choose their action.

One of the concepts we have introduced to represent this in-game is the idea of a character being indecisive. To model this we introduced a skill called “Combat Tactics”. It’s a passive skill.

We used to key a character’s combat response off of their highest combat skill, but after thinking this through, we concluded this was not an accurate portrayal of how people respond in a tactical situation.

Let’s say we’ve got someone who’s a very skilled marksman while shooting at the range, but has no actual combat experience. Such a person would do worse in combat than a basic soldier who may have a significantly worse shooting skill, but has been trained specifically for a combat situation.

The new “Combat Tactics” skill will use mental quickness as its primary attribute, and mental memory as its secondary attribute. When an NPC decides to change their course of action in response to something it sees, this skill will be used to generate hesitation before starting the next action. This means some civilians and green troops may freeze for a bit once things go loud.

So how does this impact PCs?

When a PC is carrying out their queued actions this will not affect them at all. However, should you cancel your action queue, we will generate a hesitation for the character to represent this changing of their mind. Some PCs will be able to do this almost for free, either due to extreme mental quickness (Margo), or lots of training (Ivan). On the other end of the spectrum, avoid changing things up on Karsten, who’ll need some time to figure out the next steps. In effect it will be important for some characters to stick to the plan, whatever plan you made.

The “Combat Tactics” skill will improve with use, but the governing attributes will still have a large impact on how fast a character can respond to the change of orders.

Maps in Spy DNA

By Jason Sams, Lead Developer

We have been hard at work making the maps in Spy DNA look and perform better. We had a few objectives for improvements in our maps:

1. make the maps look better
2. increase the size of the maps
3. decrease level load times
4. provide a mini-map
5. include area maps for mission planning stage

The first major change we made was to increase the amount of decor on the maps. In spy DNA decor items (trees, rocks, signs, roads, etc) serve both to make the map visually interesting, but they also give the player and NPCs cover.

We have also increased the size of the maps. When we tested the various maps, we noticed that the buildings that were necessary for the mission were occupying too much of the area, causing the player to start near the building and so limiting the choice of approach.

This was happening on the small maps, usually 256 x 256 meter in size and smaller. So we have scrapped the sub 256-meter maps and most missions will now default to a 512 m or 1 km map. Some missions will now default to 2 km. 

Those of you that have played the demo might be wondering about the load times on the large maps. We have overhauled the code that generates the map which has greatly reduced the time it takes to load a map. Now the 1 km maps load about as fast as the old 256 m maps and there is no longer a significant difference on load times on maps smaller than 1 km. Even the 2 km maps are now loading in under 30 seconds.

The new code is split into two sections. There is the map itself, and now the Unreal Engine visualization of the map is separate from that. This allows us to do something neat: We can now show the map of the mission area during mission planning at the base. This has also opened up some new options for infiltration such as scouting options to identify points of interest on the map.

This same map is used for the mini-map during a mission. You see a lot of trees on the mini-map right now as we are stress-testing the system.

Because a map with this many trees would normally make it impossible to see your party, we will hide the leaves when you have the camera looking down. The vegetation will progressively fade away as the camera moves higher, resulting in a view like this.

This will let you keep tabs on your whole party and any NPCs that they can see. The fog of war will still apply and hide NPCs if no-one in your party has a line of sight.

That’s it for my update this month. I hope you have enjoyed the screen captures from the game. Next month we should have some video with live missions.

Spy DNA Development Update: Character creation

By Jason Sams, Shy Snake Lead Developer

Let’s talk about that all-important part of an RPG, creating your character. Last month I wrote a post about complexity in games. Character creation process in any RPG is usually the first thing the player does, which affects every aspect of the player’s experience afterward.

In order to get to the character creation, you need to go to a job interview with Dr. Crotalus

This presents some unique challenges to a game creator, or even a DM/GM.

First, you’re asking a player to design the character they want to play, having no knowledge about how your game works. For most people this means taking a guess, playing a bit, and potentially starting over.

Second, the choices made during character creation are typically permanent, and affect gameplay for the full playthrough of the game.

As a GM for a pen-and-paper game this was particularly difficult. The players would make their characters, and usually 3 sessions in, we’d be tweaking them, as players realized that the characters they wanted to play weren’t what they actually created.

So as an experiment, I had everyone make two characters. One was created the traditional way, rolling dice and allocating stats and skills on a character sheet. To create the other character, I gave everyone a list of 23 questions to answer for me before the game. Then I made characters for the players based on their answers, using my knowledge of the game world and rules.

The players could freely pick which character they wanted to use for each mission, given they were alive and well enough to go. You’d expect that the players would favor the characters they made for themselves, but instead they played the characters made by me, the GM, about 80% of the time, only breaking out the other character for special situations. Why?

As a GM you have more knowledge of what lies ahead for the players, what they will need, and typically how the system works. There is much less guessing. So as long as you know what kind of character the player wants to play, you’ve got a much better chance of creating one that will work well for the game.

Based on this experience, we wanted to replicate this character creation process in Spy DNA.

At first, we created a set of 21 questions with about 3 answers each, and then used that to configure the characters. And it was terrible. There simply wasn’t enough detail in the resulting playable character.

So we went back to the drawing board and came up with a new design pattern for the questions that was more suitable to a computer game, i.e. it didn’t require a human to read between the lines in the player’s answers.

Now in Spy DNA the character creation consists of three groups of questions:

1: Self: How you think of your character.
2: Favorite mission: What kinds of missions you prefer.
3: Approach: How do accomplish your goals.

Within each group we now start with a high-level question, and follow up with a refining question depending on the previous choice.

You can make your own character by answering a questionnaire

Under this model, you will see roughly 17 questions as part of character creation. However, there are more than 80 questions in the questionnaire, so any single pass will only see a small part of the whole. At last count, there are more than 230 answers to choose from during the creation process, each with a different effect on your character.

To test whether this system actually works as intended, I have been asking people to think of a character they want to make, then try using the questionnaire to create it. Afterward, we look at how close the resulting character is to what the player intended, and the results have been vastly better than with the old 23-question system.

It being us, we used this opportunity to take things a bit farther. As you go through the character creation questionnaire, we record the choices you make. Those become part of your character’s persona. They will influence how other characters react to you in-game. As an example:

Q: Which type of mission are you the most comfortable with?

1: Assassinations: Neutralize a single target using a variety of means.
2: Counter-terrorism: Aggressive combat tactics designed to neutralize a group of enemies before they can do harm.
3: Breaking and entering: Quietly break into buildings, avoiding detection
4: Asset manipulation: Recruiting and convincing assets to work for you.

You can see how this may both influence the type of missions your team were to receive along with how some characters, including those in your party, may respond to you.

You can select a pre-configured character to play

The character creation system in Spy DNA is designed to help players create a character they will enjoy playing, but you don’t have to use if if you don’t want to. In addition to the questionnaire, you will also have an option to play a pre-made character, or use the traditional system where you can directly assign the points (probably not included in Early Access).

Complexity in games

By Jason Sams, Lead Developer

I want to talk about complexity in games. I think complexity is a very misunderstood subject. Game developers are sometimes seeking to “simplify” where there’s no need, while at the same time adding complexity without realizing it.

What is “complexity?”

When I say “complexity,” I mean specifically “perceived complexity.” In other words: Is the action considered easy or hard for a human to accomplish?

Here’s a practical example: If I asked you to throw a ball at a target, would you consider that a complex or difficult task? Probably not. However, hitting a target with a projectile is a task complex enough that solving the math behind it drove the creation of the first computers.

When video games were created, lobbing projectiles at things was a rich enough subject that entire games were built around the idea, such as Artillery Duel and Scorched Earth.

Let’s look at a more recent example. Is driving a car complex? Most people consider it so easy that they do all sorts of other things while driving. Yet teams of engineers are still struggling to teach a computer to do the same thing. Analyzing visual data is so challenging, that they have to use additional sensors (Lidar) that humans don’t have, or need. Objectively, driving is very complex and yet it’s still easy for humans.

And again many games are built around the idea of driving (or flying). Most of those games are considered very easy to pick up and start playing. Perfecting your technique and winning is the real challenge.

What about an opposite example? Multiplying large numbers is so simple even a phone can do it a few billion times per second, yet ask a human to do it and many would rather drive to buy a calculator. No one would make a game like this outside of education.

In context of game design, we’re interested in complexity as perceived by a human player. In our case we are specifically interested in making the mechanics of the game easy to grasp. This idea has been a driving factor in the design of Spy DNA and is also the reason for us calling the game a Simulation RPG. (Side note: it’s also led to way more UI iteration than we ever envisioned.)

Our combat system is designed to be the best simulation we can make of combat. We chose simulation and not the traditional turn-based approach to solve the problem of perceived complexity vs. actual complexity.

I’m a big fan of realism in games. Nothing will frustrate me more than when something happens in a game that makes no sense in the real world. Some examples:

1: You move a character one step forward, you trigger an enemy group, that now all get to activate, move several times farther than your one step, and possibly attack and kill your character. All this before you can even react.

2: You find a new item in game, yet you can't use it because of some attribute or skill check. The worst ones are the cases where you lack “strength” to wear an item, yet, toss it in the backpack and you can be lugging several of them around despite them being harder to carry that way.

3: You sneak up behind a target and make a surprise attack. You stealthy weapon fails to penetrate the armor despite hitting a spot where there was none (visually). The enemy then turns around and kills you.

What all these things have in common is they are results of artificial rules imposed by a game system that don’t exist in the real world.

Human brain is very good at understanding natural things such as physics (throwing something), or processing an image, but dealing with large numbers of artificial rules is not something that comes to us naturally. Therefore games that go down this path are perceived as complex for the player.

Not all complexity is necessarily bad. There are many popular games built around artificial rules, chess being the first that comes to mind. Add a little random input and you have pretty much every card game ever. In these cases managing and exploiting the rules becomes the focus of the game.

In Spy DNA, we want you to feel like an agent in a believable world, where things that should work actually do work in-game. Or put another way, we wanted the combat system to be intuitive and realistic. We wanted the game to be about Spy DNA world and not about the combat mechanics.

When you play Spy DNA, one of the things you will notice is that we have a lot of attributes compared to most RPGs. I’ve heard people give talks saying that six attributes is too many for an RPG, and I consider that silly. I mean, if a console sports game can have 38 attributes (MLB the show), I don’t see why a serious PC RPG shouldn’t have more than 6.

Yes, this is a scroll bar in the attributes screen!

This is where we clearly see the difference between perceived vs. real complexity. By all accounts the simulation in the MLB game is more complex, but because each attribute is clear and easy to understand and relate to in real-life terms, it never feels difficult to understand or play.

By comparison, when you have too few attributes, the attributes have to stand for things that are not obvious from the name, such as using dexterity for speed, strength for hit points, or intelligence for spellcasting. Each game has a slightly different system, making it necessary for the player to learn a new set of artificial rules with each game. Learning abstract rule sets is a thing that humans aren’t very good at, and therefore perceive it as complex.

How could having more attributes actually make a game seem simpler? The primary way is to map the attributes to “things a human intuitively understands.”

In Spy DNA we have 21 attributes in 7 common groups. We use groups, so that players used to traditional RPG systems would immediately be comfortable. The groups simply provide the average of the sub-attributes for quick reference and ease of picking up the game for those familiar with other systems. Within each group we provide the details, so it’s intuitively clear what’s really going on.

Screen capture of Spy DNA character attribute screen

Let’s looks at dexterity, using the party sniper, Zoe, as an example. At a glance you can see at 81, dexterity is a strength for the character, as you would expect for someone specialized in ranged attacks. However, with our focus on being realistic, we break down dexterity into Dexterity, (could also be called manipulation), reaction, and flexibility. In this example the character has a clear specialization. You can also see from the description she has a “+40 enhancement”. This comes from the genetic enhancements which put the “super” in “Super Spy”. As a result of these you can end up with values in excess of the natural human limit of 100.

Reaction is simply reaction time and impacts reactive movements (duh). In-game it will make you harder to hit in a melee fight, and help with any other action that depends on quick reflexes.

Flexibility is important to martial artists or characters that want to sneak past alarms or hide in places you wouldn’t assume someone normally fits. 

By being explicit about the common traits that a character may have, it should be actually easier to parse what the attributes actually mean for gameplay. We feel that this is better than a giant array of perks because it’s clear and straightforward.

When it comes to combat, we try to simulate the world as it is, and not require people to learn a unique set of made up rules just to play Spy DNA. Let’s take cover as an example.

In some games cover is measured in increments (high, low, none), or as a percentage. In these examples the cover makes it proportionally harder to hit the target. So far so good. Now you need a mechanism for attacking a target in cover. So these games introduce the idea of “flanking”, or moving to a position where the cover doesn’t apply. Typically these are done on an all or nothing basis, leading to frustration as your character can clearly see and hit the target, but because you have not triggered the arbitrary rule that says you’ve “flanked” your target, you still miss.

In Spy DNA we deal with this in a straightforward way: if you can see it, you can shoot it. Humans understand intuitively that the more of a target is exposed, the easier it is to hit. How much easier? We solve that problem visually. We present the player with a picture of their character’s viewpoint. You see what is exposed, what the area your shot might land in is, and you make the call based on that. Visual and intuitive.

Screen capture of the gun sight cam, showing circular error probable values

I also want to talk about cover vs concealment in Spy DNA. A real-world consideration is: “Will this thing I am using for cover actually stop the bullets?” If the answer is no, it’s not really cover, but just concealment. You might use a couch or a thin door as cover, but those will only slightly reduce the energy of the shots. So if the enemy gets lucky or guesses where you are on the other side, you’ll still have a problem. The flip side of this is, that if you have a weapon with a high rate of fire and have a general idea where the target is hiding, you may be able to get them through their concealment. Just like in the movies.

This leads to the next bit, damage. In most games once you hit a target, there is a random roll for damage, and possibly a separate random roll for a “critical.” So back to that early example on math, most humans don’t have an intuitive feel for complex equations that don’t mirror something in the real world. So instead of having a good grasp of the actual probability of hitting and damaging a target, players have to develop a feel for a weapon’s effectiveness based on trial and error.

In Spy DNA we invert this equation. Damage is 100% deterministic once you hit a target. How much damage you do is based on three things.
1: What hit the target? Ex:type of bullet, fragment, knife, fist.
2: Where did it hit the target? Ex: head, arm, leg
3: How much energy did it have when it hit? More is better (for the attacker)

Those concepts should be very easy to understand, nothing feels complex about it. However, the actual simulation is very complex. It only takes a few lines of code to implement hitpoints. To simulate injuries, we have thousands of lines of code in Spy DNA. 

Spy DNA uses per-polygon collisions to model wounds on a character

Our models have multiple colliders so we can not only figure out if you hit your target (which we resolve per-polygon against the mesh), but also what part of the target you hit. Then our damage code takes over and models a wound based on the results. 

This creates interesting situations in-game. Looking over cover is still dangerous, even though you’re 90% covered. Why? Because if the enemy lands a shot, it’s the exposed part that gets hit, which in this case is your head. Sticking an arm out would be much safer.

The last bit I’ll talk about is the passage of time. Most similar games have made the decision to be turn-based. We are a simulation, which means every action you take, takes some amount of time. When in combat, time in Spy DNA only passes while you are doing something. The most similar game I can think of is SuperHot with their tagline “Time moves only when you move.” Time will pass for both you and the enemy when everyone in your party has something to do, even if that something is just wait.

Because you want to be able to react to the changing situation in-game while your character is performing their action, we allow characters to react to perceived threats. A character that spots a new threat will cause the time to immediately stop, so you can change your orders if you desire. This mechanic takes the place of the various “overwatch” systems that most turn-based games have.

The ability to stop time when new threats are discovered allows us to avoid the problem where you need to have characters on overwatch to protect a character that is moving, in case they trigger an enemy reaction. In Spy DNA, if an enemy becomes visible, you can just react to it if you choose. We completely bypass the complexity of having the player figure out which rule they can use to protect them against the AIs use of reaction rules. Instead, you just react to what you see when it happens.

When out of combat, you move the party around in real-time. You can manually enter combat mode if you want, and the game will automatically switch to combat mode when the first shot is fired. Exiting combat mode is always manual, unless the mission is finished.

We have put a lot of thought into how to create as realistic a game as possible, where the world feels natural and real to the player. We want you to enjoy the gameplay and story rather than having to learn and optimize for an arbitrary rule system. For many situations in Spy DNA there isn’t just one “optimal” solution, but multiple ways to accomplish your mission, which frees you up to just play the way you want.
 

Procedurally generated missions in Spy DNA

By Alex Maier, Writer of Words

Here’s a basic overview of how we generate randomized missions. We’ve built a Mission Editor tool for that, and here’s how it looks when you open a mission in it. Here we set all the basics for a mission, such as terrain type, time of day, and so on.

Spy DNA mission editor "Map" tab screenshot

Then we add all the interesting stuff, like the NPCs you’ll encounter on a mission: enemies, neutrals, people to be rescued, that sort of thing. This is also where we add eligible infiltration options. Not every infil option makes sense for every mission, so we make a list of the ones that do for a given one, and also describe the outcomes.

Spy DNA mission editor "Gameplay" tab screenshot

When the mission is generated, only a subset of the infiltration options are picked.

Generally, you’ll see four kinds of infiltration outcomes, and each of them influences the mission at spawn:

Outcome	What it means for the mission
You did great and have ALL the intel	You’ll see mission markers for some of the objectives, such as hostage location and enemy camp HQ, or enemy patrols won’t be concealed by the fog of war.
You did okay, and have some intel	You’ll see a mission marker for the some objectives, but not for others. In the case of our hostage mission here, you’ll see where they hold the prisoner, but not where the enemy HQ is, or you’ll find out the enemy patrol route, but not the schedule.
You failed, and have no intel	This is the equivalent of going in without any infiltration. Nothing lost and nothing gained.
You failed, and now the enemy knows you’re there	You’ll be going in blind, and the enemy will be on high alert. They may have added more patrols, etc. Examples of such failures would be to have your recon drone shot down by enemy, or have your agent captured during infiltration.

In-game, you select the infiltration option during the mission brief meeting, and it’s simulated prior to mission start by using the stats of the character you chose to complete the infil. This will allow for different members of the squad to shine, and for the player it will make sense to pick the right person for the right task. Or not, and deal with the consequences.

Here’s how the infiltration planning meeting looks like in-game.

You pick which infiltration option you like best

We use Lua to script all the different things we’d like to randomize. For example, the mission description (see first and second screenshot) has all these variables, and below it there’s a box where we define them. The randomizing function pulls the values such as countries, diplomatic titles, and such from a table where we store all kinds of things, tagged with metadata for searching, and the player sees the mission description like this.

Pardon the layout - it's a dev build :)

Here’s how it looks in the tool.

Randomizing names is a bit trickier, because unlike the stuff that is only used in the description, the random name has to be assigned to the character when they are spawned on the mission map. We have a way of doing that when we add the character to the mission.

This is also where we pick the character template for a given NPC, which includes the types of things they wear (military uniform or civilian clothes etc.) and some other aspects of their appearance such as hair styles (again, military personnel will have simpler hair styles and natural colored hair, while the civilians may have wider choices of both).

This is the NPC we're going to need to rescue

In most cases, unless it’s an NPC that persists throughout the game, we fully randomize gender, skin color, and body type. Military personnel will again have fewer choices in the body type department, as we will only allow them to have an “average,” “fit,” or “fighter” fitness level. Civilians get a fourth option in fitness level: “unfit.”

The level of fitness and body type aren’t just for show either, they influence the body owner’s attributes as well, so if you meet someone who looks strong and fit, they very likely are.

To make sure that the spread of different body types is more realistic, we weight the probability of each of them occurring. After all, you don’t see twenty-five MMA-fighter-level-fit people for every hundred you meet.

Body types matrix for female and male bodies:

	light	average	heavy
unfit	f-un-lt, m-un-lt	f-un-avg, m-un-avg	f-un-hvy, m-un-hvy
average	f-avg-lt, m-avg-lt	f-avg-avg, m-avg-avg	f-avg-hvy, m-avg-hvy
fit	f-fit-lt, m-fit-lt	f-fit-avg, m-fit-avg	f-fit-hvy, m-fit-hvy
fighter	f-ftr-lt, m-ftr-lt	f-ftr-avg, m-ftr-avg	f-ftr-hvy, m-ftr-hvy

With that, we can populate the world with a fairly diverse set of characters for the player to encounter. And often, shoot. Oh, and also create for yourself at the beginning of the game.

Other things you will have noticed in the mission generation tool would be buildings. We generate buildings at runtime from a floor plan which we also create in our tool, but that is a topic for another post.

For now, suffice it to say that when the map is generated, the buildings are placed on it somewhat randomly, according to the parameters specified when the building is added to the mission.

Let’s not forget the objectives! They contain Lua commands to evaluate when the conditions for a particular objective have been met, or failed, such as in case of having the civilian you’re supposed to protect, die. If an objective is marked as required, failing it will mean mission failure and you’ll have to do it over, and if an objective doesn’t have this box checked, you can fail it all you want and still complete the overall mission.

The Lua check is to make sure that the NPC 39 (our Hostage) is alive. Because this is a required objective, the mission is failed the moment the NPC dies.

Some objectives are only available when particular conditions are met. Case in point: “recover drone wreckage” is only shown if you chose the drone reconnaissance option and the drone crashed. If the drone is shot down and captured by the enemy, your objective (and area of search) will change to retrieving the drone from the camp.

When everything is said and done, we’ll have a mission that can be replayed over and over, but it will never be exactly the same. You’ll get different infiltration options, the terrain will be different, and the buildings will never be in the same spot. Same goes for objectives such as which building the hostage is in, or where the drone wreckage is.

By the time we ship the Early Access version, we’ll have a number of such missions implemented, in addition to a handful of storyline ones to tide y’all over until the full version is released.

We’re also thinking of creating affordances for players to design their own mission mods, and whole missions down the road. That’s something that will have to wait until after Early Access though.

Demo prep

We are getting ready for the demo. Today we made a new video from the latest build. This is the first time we’ve shown a play-though from character creation to combat. We’ve been focused on playability over the last few weeks, so we’re fixing lots and lots of smaller issues.

The big task was working through issues with load and save of games. Because the demo takes you through character creation before you can start taking sample missions, we wanted players to be able to save a character they generated. We also implemented a loading screen while working on load game. We hope these additions make the demo more enjoyable for players.

Another significant change from our previous videos is an updated camera system. While watching people play, we found players used three camera positions frequently. So we added direct support for the most common camera uses. 

• A low camera which shows things from the view of the character
• A high camera which shows the tactical situation
• A target camera which flies the camera over to the active target
• And we still have “free” camera so the player can move it around as they desire

For the low and high camera they save the player's view height and angle so if you switch away and come back you won’t have to reset the camera each time.

We also implemented a compass; it shows which way the character is facing. More interestingly, we also added contact ticks to the compass. So you can see which way contacts are relative to your active character. Also you can click them to fly the camera over to any contact.

The map generation has been heavily tested and we have recently implemented a number of performance enhancements. Currently the large maps can strain some mid-range systems so we put some effort into improving performance. There is more to be done, but we got a very nice performance bump for the demo.

For the playable characters we doubled the number of commander appearances available for the demo. There are two male and two female commanders to choose from, each with their three outfits depending on mission. There will be many more for the shipping game.

The demo will also include default genetic enhancements for all the playable characters. You will get to see a small example of the enhancements in action. In the shipping game you will be able to select and choose how your commander is enhanced to mirror your play style.

We implemented new shaders for the trees, firing range, roof of the base, and a few other items. This was done to make them more friendly to the camera so they cut or blur away so you can continue to see the most important parts of the map.

The status screen has been updated to show not only injuries, but also attacks which were stopped by armor or implants. You can mouse over any hit and see the force and type of attack along with how much of it any armor you may have stopped. 

Movement was reviewed. and walk, jog, and sprint speeds were double checked for the demo. We spent a bit of time graphing the various movement speeds vs attributes. These are the base speeds with zero encumbrance.

Walk speed graph

Jog speed graph

Sprint speed graph

The jog (max sustained movement speed) graph is 3D because it’s based off both quickness and stamina. This was triggered when we picked up a few too many weapons at the firing range and unintentionally tested our encumbrance system.

Barring any unexpected problems we expect to have the demo out this month. Stay tuned!

Realistic weapons in Spy DNA: How deep does this rabbit hole go?

As we’ve been known to say on more than one occasion, we want Spy DNA combat to feel very realistic, and by extension this means that the weapons also need to work like you’d expect them to in real life.

On one hand, weapons need to work realistically, in the sense that they should have a range and damage specifications similar to the ones in real life. Sniper rifles are best used at ranges over 100 meters (and we’ll make sure there are maps big enough for that to matter), and handguns are a good choice for concealed weapons or closed-quarters combat, where you’d have difficulty wielding a long-barreled assault rifle.

Gauss Assault Rifle by Denis Keman on Sketchfab

If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that that’s a given, and a premise of our whole game, really. When we set out to build Spy DNA, we wanted to provide the player with as realistic a combat simulation as possible, while still making it a game.

The main implication is that the realism makes for a slightly different set of perks and challenges than a typical shooter. We want for the player to be able to use the common sense and knowledge of how things work in the real world to navigate the game. Basically, if you think doing something would get you (or the opponent) hurt or killed in the real world, it should be the same in Spy DNA. Case in point, head shots. Best to avoid them. Or land them on your enemies.

Just like the real deal (P25 dart pistol)

But on top of that, the weapons also need to look the part. If we gave our soldiers guns that look like they’d be hard to get through an ordinary doorway, or were too heavy to even lift, the realism and the immersion go out the window. Don’t get me wrong folks, there ain’t a thing in the world wrong with games that do that, but it’s just not where we chose to take Spy DNA.

The little screen on the back shows ammo levels and other useful info to the shooter

So while designing the weapons, working together, Jason, Denis and I have been periodically taking a step back to check whether the weapon still looks usable, practical, and like something that you could imagine the military of 2075 using. You could overhear us having conversations about making sure that we don’t eject brass into the user’s face or hands, or make the shiny trim reveal the position of our sniper.

We put a lot of thought into the ammo feed position, grips, and how easy would it be to reload or unjam in a firefight, what accessories the owner may want to add and where, and so on. Denis put immense attention to detail into each weapon, and as a result we have game guns in which the sights align when you’re looking at them like you’d be aiming. The fact that it’s a 3rd person game where the player will most likely never see these little details doesn’t mean that we don’t pay attention to them.

Most weapons in our game will have a range of accessories/extensions such as scopes, sights, grips, bipods, and extended ammo clips that the player can choose to equip to add a touch of personalization to their kit.
If our Early Access really takes off, we should have the funds to make more customizable parts for the guns, including rare mods, color schemes, and accessories that can only be gained by completing certain missions.

Stay tuned for the announcement of our Greenlight campaign!