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.