Two weeks ago, the Shy Snake team went to the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, CA. We took part in the indie dev Summit and attended a bunch of talks and events. If we missed you at the GDC, here’s a quick recap for you.
We visited a number of vendors on the show floor, many of whose products we use every day in creating Spy DNA.
We use UnrealEngine 4.10 to build our game, so it was really exciting to visit the Epic Games booth and talk to the Unreal Engine product managers, developers, and docs writers. It was so awesome in fact, that we stopped there on three separate days! We had great discussions with Epic booth staff, and are hoping to continue growing our relationship with this company.
We also paid a visit to Intel and NVIDIA exhibits to find out more about their developer programs, to help us both find our audience and help support the development of Spy DNA.
In search of a source for custom animations for our game, we spoke to several mo-cap companies, and looked at their software solutions. Why can’t we use the standard animations from the widely available libraries? Glad you asked, because we think you’ll like the answer.
Human bodies have an incredible ability to communicate what’s wrong with them, say by limping, clutching an injured limb, or possibly crawling. Since we’re placing all this emphasis on realism in our combat, we’d like to make the characters in the game to move differently if they are in any way impaired. That’s the kind of stuff that we’ll have to work on with professional motion capture artists in a studio.
We’ve made connections with a few freelance 3D artists, in hopes to find the person(s) who can help us build the custom items, weapons, and characters for the game. If you know someone who is interested in talking to us about it, have them ping games@shysnake.com. We’d love to hear from them.
Custom animations and 3d art are awesome, but they also cost a lot of money, so we’re hoping to raise the funds to help pay for them on Kickstarter.
We’ll be announcing the exact dates here on our blog, and on the mailing list. Please subscribe to our announcements if you’d like to be the first to know when we launch our Kickstarter campaign!