Shy Snake went to GDC 2016

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!

Welcome new team member!

Yay, this month Shy Snake has doubled its team! We're two now, and finally the "we" is not just a figure of speech anymore :)

I'm super excited to announce that this month a brilliant developer who also happens to be my husband, is joining the Shy Snake team as the company CTO: R. Jason Sams!

Jason is an expert in computer graphics and compute. He has many years of experience having worked at Be (BeOS), PalmSource, Nvidia, and most recently Google (on Android).

Jason will focus on the engine behind our games, starting with creating a kick-ass AI to control all the NPCs in the game and an animation system to make the characters feel life-like.

By Alex Maier, founder of Shy Snake.

What's the name of the game?

The year is 2075.

The Federal Government has just funded the Crolimax Lab, a top-secret team of scientists working to create the world's first genetically enhanced intelligence agency.

Your mission, Commander, is to lead these super-spies in the fight against evildoers worldwide.

Spy DNA

Drumroll! The game has a title!

"Spy DNA" name hints at the secret genetic enhancement technology developed by the Crolimax Laboratory, where the main character their squad are turned into super-spies.

"Spy DNA" by Shy Snake is the next generation of 3rd person strategy games, offering hyper-realistic timeline, weapons, and damage modeling.

We at Shy Snake have set out to take the sci-fi strategy game genre to its logical next step, innovating where the great predecessors left off. We've developed an engaging and complex plot, and set it in a rich world of the not-so-distant future.

We're building "Spy DNA" to be an immersive game which will take both brain and brawn to complete.

Shy Snake has a logo

So, big news this week is that our company now has a logo!

Quite a bit of time and thought went into designing it, and we're happy with the outcome.

At first, we wanted to focus on the shy nature of the snake, and there were a number of drafts that had snakes hiding behind flowers, leaves, or even their own tails. True story, some real snakes use their own bodies to "hide" when they're shy, too!

After a while, we settled on a logo showing a snake with a joystick, to symbolize gaming. If snakes played games, they'd probably have an easier time using a joystick, compared to a keyboard or a game controller. So joystick it is.

We hope you like our new logo as much as we do.

Hello world

Shy Snake now has a home on the web, where we can tell the world what we're up to.

Right now, we're working on our first game.

It will be a turn-based 3rd-person game, set a few years in the future. We don't have a name for the game yet, but we still want to tell you about it.

The two main things we think many gamers will like about our game is the timeline-based approach to the turns, and a realistic damage system.

Timeline-based turns means that the turns for each character may have different duration, depending on the character's attributes for that particular action (physical or mental quickness, for example), or any impairment (such as injuries or fatigue.) 

What does this mean for gameplay? It means that if your character's turn is 0.5 seconds long, you'll get to go again after 0.5 seconds of game time have elapsed. Other characters' turns may be longer or shorter, and the game will pause when it's one of your character's turn to go.

This also means that you won't be trowing away action points at the end of the round because what you wanted to do didn't fit cleanly into how the game was dividing the time. We'll calculate how long a particular action will take a character, and they'll be done with it when they're done. And that's when they get to do something else.

The realistic damage system means that we won't just calculate whether you hit your target (or the enemy NPC hit your character), but we'll also calculate hit location, and base the impairment of the injured character on that.

In simpler words, this means that if the character gets shot in the head, no matter how many damage points they have, they will probably have to lie down for a while. A really long while.

So, this is it for today. There'll be more updates later, so stay tuned.