Characters and animation

We’re getting ready to go to Kickstarter with our game, to help us raise the money needed for the custom art, animations, and hopefully original music for Spy DNA. This means we’re making a new video to show off the progress we’ve made in the past couple of months.

One important improvement you’ll notice is that we’re using custom characters to replace the placeholders we got from the Unreal Engine asset store.

The cool thing about using custom characters is that we can make them look all different, use different body types, skin and hair colors, and of course different clothing.

Now the challenge with that is that once you stray from the Unreal Store, you need to rig up and animate the characters from scratch.

While we’re working on funding custom motion captures, we’re using some animations we purchased from mo-cap vendors with our characters.
We have (finally!) settled on an animation workflow for the project. We use Autodesk MotionBuilder for working with animations. This allows us to retarget an animation from one character to another. This is important because depending on the source of the character they may have a different skeleton, which makes the animations incompatible. This tool allows us to solve this problem.

Next, we get the animations into our project in Unreal Engine. That done, there is still a lot of work to do. The first step is selecting which animation to play for a character at any given time. At last count we have nearly 1,000 animations captured. Selecting the right one to play at any given time is complex enough we had to abandon the normal UE4 blueprint system and move most of the animation logic to C++. Once the system knows which animation is to be played, it may be necessary to slightly speed up or slow down the playback to match the speed of the specific character. 

It’s at this point that things start to get hard (as if it wasn’t hard enough already, heheh). So now that you have your base animation, you want to adjust it for the environment, so that a character's feet don’t go through the ground or hang in the air. Also you want the character to look and aim in the right direction. For these effects we are evaluating some middleware solutions (HumanIK, Morpheme, and IKinema). These provide tools for improving the interaction between the animation, character model, and the environment. In some cases they can also generate animations on the fly in response to environmental stimulus. A good example would be falling down stairs after dying.

In the process of getting it all to work, we get to watch many animations that look pretty funny. Do you have your favorite animation bloopers from a game you played? Share it with us in the comments.

GDC session highlight: Making a game fun for all kinds of players

There were so many awesome sessions going on at the GDC, it was hard to choose which ones to go to! Luckily, attendees get access to the recordings after the event, so we’re looking forward to watching the sessions we didn’t attend in person.

When beginning to write this post, I noticed that GDC team have made some of this year’s sessions available to watch for free on YouTube already. As they continue to add to the playlist, I will post the more relevant talks here with my comments.

Just how hard would you like your game to be?

One of the sessions GDC already published makes great points about building games that can be fun to play for a wide range of users. We wanted to link this video here for you and share our thoughts on how this relates to what we’re doing here with Spy DNA.

The two main takeaways from this talk for me are:

• Ability to remap controls is not just nice; for some users, it’s critical to be able to play at all.
  
  Spy DNA is primarily targeting the PC market, and we’re planning to allow the player to use either mouse and keyboard, or the game controller to play. To make our game playable for people who can’t use the standard key mappings, we will include the ability for the users to remap their controls to suit their needs.
• From “almost impossible to lose” to “almost impossible to win” is a sliding scale of difficulty, and many players would enjoy choices beyond just “easy” and “hard.”
  
  We are giving this one a lot of thought.  We want to avoid the temptation to take the easy way out and just make a the enemies stronger or more numerous.  Instead we are putting our effort into the most realistic version of the game.  This will be the hardest setting.  For players that do not enjoy the harshness of realistic combat, we will have a variety of options to make the game easier.  Examples would be accelerated healing for the PCs, starting with more skill points, or a reduction in the enemy's ability to land the most damaging shots. 
  
  We understand we are building a hard-core combat system that will be more challenging than most strategy games. However, once someone buys our game, it’s theirs to play, the way they want to.  So if limiting the enemy to low-power weapons is something you want to do, that will be your option.   
  
  This means that in Spy DNA, on one end of the continuum, there will be a full “ironman” mode, where you don’t get to reload, and only very few (if any) checkpoints. On the other end, there will be a super-easy mode, for people who either don’t have the ability to master the harder difficulty levels, or don’t play the game for the challenge.
  
  We don’t want to limit the difficulty settings to just Hard, Medium, and Easy. Instead, we’re aiming to offer our players many more points on the continuum to choose from, both to make Spy DNA appealing to players of all levels, and to provide a gradual difficulty increase for better replay value.

Anyways, that’s what we thought when we listened to this talk. Even if you don’t watch the whole video (or any of it), I  hope we got the two main takeaways across. Use the comments below share your opinions.

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!

Development update: UI

We've been working hard on the UI for Spy DNA.  One of the challenges with creating realistic combat is how to present the many options that are immediately available to a real combatant in a simple and intuitive UI.

We recently did our first round of play testing.  The chance to observe people playing is very valuable to a developer. From this we made a list of UI interactions the players didn’t find obvious and have addressed each one.

One example of this is the action of changing equipment.  Watching people play a common pattern was to pause the game, go through inventory and find the weapon they wanted, then equip it.  Now because the game is timeline based this would generate an action to equip the weapon.  However, since the game was paused, it didn’t immediately appear equipped.  This created confusion.  So we now show the state at the end of all queued actions where appropriate.  

For interacting on the 3D map we moved from placing all the controls on the HUD to popping up context-sensitive controls where it makes sense.  Now you can quick-click an enemy to attack as before.  However, a long click will open up a menu with all the various attack options for the combination of attacking character and target. A quick click executes the default action as before.

The same applies to movement.  Clicking on the map selects the default movement speed.  If you hold down the left button for about half a second the speed options also appear. 

Some controls such as character selection and character state remain in the HUD.  The idea is the state of the currently selected character should always be visible and the common controls ready.  

Testing weapons at our virtual shooting range

As you've heard us say many times before: realism in combat is going to be the calling card of our new game, Spy DNA.

Of course, this means that we need the weapons to be as realistic as possible, so we built a kilometer-long virtual shooting range to test them in the world of our game. We brought some pistols and rifles to try out, and took some screen captions for your enjoyment.

To dial in the weapons, we used real-world data from target shooting competitions. For example, the current record holder at 1000 yards is Tom Sarver, who shot a 1.403 inch 5-shot group in 2007. So we took his group size for a base line when writing the code that determines where the bullets land at a given distance.

Tell us what you think in the comments!

All our base are belong to you

One of the levels you'll be revisiting often in our new game is the base, where your characters can equip weapons, add new genetic enhancements, and heal combat injuries.

Here are a few screen shots from the Unreal Engine 4.10 level editor for you.

This here is the office area of the Crolimax Lab, where the researchers work. It looks very much like a regular office, because that's what it is!

The lab houses a secret vault with cryogenic suspension capsules where our genetically-enhanced agents can rest and recover between missions.

Things get a little more intense in the secret underground facility, which can be reached from the back of the Crolimax lab.

The underground base has virtual reality training facility, where the agents can hone their skills from shooting and hand-to-hand combat, to hacking, and safe cracking.

The Crolimax report: December 2015

December is usually the time to kick back and slow down for the holidays, but not here at Shy Snake! We’ve been busy building Spy DNA, making new levels, models, and character behaviors.

In the weeks since our last update, we’ve focused on finishing the first draft of the game “screenplay,” AI, realistic damage, and additional weapons and forms of combat.

Story

As of today, we’ve cleared a major milestone: the first complete draft of the game script is finished!

Screen capture from a demo level

What does this mean? That we’ve got the entire story arc outlined and every level that moves the story forward described in detail, with character dialogue and different action options.

The script is a little over 31,000 words long, and 190 pages at this point. We’ve got the game spanning four chapters, each chapter about fifteen levels long:

1. Character creation and background
2. Game premise introduction
3. Investigation and pursuit of the bad guys
4. Escalation to final boss fight

The game is focused around the protagonist (the character that you create and play throughout the game) uncovering an espionage plot and pursuing the evil guys across the world to prevent classified tech from falling into the hands of a rogue government.

As the story develops, complexity and battle intensity grow to continue challenging the player while their skills and attributes grow.

We’d love to tell you much more about it, but we don’t want to spoil the game for you, so the last bit we’d like to share is that we expect the script to grow by at least another 50 percent or more as we add deeper dialog trees and extra side quests. We can’t wait to share the game with you!

Level design

The script has 45 levels in it, give or take, which cover the main storyline from start to finish, and this number will only continue to grow as we add side quests. Each of these levels is a detailed 3D map living in the world of Spy DNA fifty years in the future, with landscapes, buildings, cars, and of course people!

Screen capture from the level design editor

Level design is what will take an enormous amount of time from today on, all the way to the beta release, after which we expect to focus on polish, and not add any more content.
If you wonder what level design looks like, here is a screen capture of Alex working on one of the early levels on the game, which takes place in an apartment complex.

The Crolimax secret base is going to be one of the maps that the player will return to after most missions, to both heal from any battle injuries as well as to receive intelligence reports and new genetic enhancements. This map is what we’ll be focusing on this week, before moving on to getting the character creation working. 

These three levels (character creation, Crolimax base, and the apartment complex) will become our first playable demo, which we’ll make available to a small group of players who we’ll look to for feedback and suggestions.

AI

A good Artificial Intelligence (AI) is critical if we want to make the game fun and challenging for players, whatever difficulty they choose. The AI will control both the enemies as well as neutral and friendly NPCs, and be able to adjust on the fly, based on the player’s actions and commands.

Getting the AI to do all the necessary things for the playable demo is another one of our main goals this month and next.

Combat

Of course, what would a strategy game be without combat? We’re getting to the point where we’re pretty happy with how our projectile weapons work, and are now switching gears to create a hand-to-hand combat system for those situations where you want to avoid attracting attention with gunfire, or just don’t want to shoot any civilians.

The villains are driven by the in-game AI, which makes them act in response to player actions

On a side note, the grenades also work now, and you can see how that looks in the level design screen capture that’s linked above. Now that we have grenades, adding destructible objects to the game is our next priority, because seeing things blow up is half the fun in throwing a grenade, right?

All in all, we’re quite happy with the progress we’ve made this month, and are looking forward to sharing more with you next year.

Happy New Year from Shy Snake!

Creating the world of Spy DNA: Screen capture

Just a quick screen capture of Alex working to create the world for Spy DNA, and testing the grenade throwing functionality. Enjoy.