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.

Movement and encumbrance

Everyone who has played the typical RPG is familiar with the way most games model encumbrance: Your character has a “carry weight.” Add anything to your backpack, from nothing at all, and up to that magical "carry weight," and your character moves exactly the same way. Go over the limit by even one bit, and in some games you lose the ability to run, or sometimes you can no longer move at all.

We think there's a better way to model this.

What if instead of using the player stats to compute a weight limit, we just compute the walking and running speed for any given weight? Computers are good at math, so this is not a burden to them as it would be to human players playing a pen-and-paper game.

Here’s a rough graph of the results:

Making the speed vs weight tradeoff continuous has a big effect on gameplay. In most games the strategy is to just pick up everything in sight until you are encumbered, then go through your inventory and throw away what you don’t want to keep. With a continuous system now the player will have to decide for every item, if it’s worth its weight.

Encumbrance affects things beyond running speed. Walking can also be slowed and the rate a character loses stamina might change. In addition some actions can be impacted. Some examples:

• You are trying to pick a lock. Encumbrance will have a minimal effect as a character is not really moving much.
• You are trying to swim across a stream. It may seem pretty obvious that this is not the best time to be wearing heavy armor or carrying your gold ingot loot.
• Bicycle riding. Some small effect, but like lock picking, the effect will be minimal

Each in-game skill will know how to adjust for any given encumbrance, making for a richer and more realistic player experience.

Here's a case in point: Mythbusters testing encumbrance in a real-world Doom setup. It will go no different for the characters in our game: the fitter and stronger they are, the more they can carry without a noticeable encumbrance.

Can you really carry all the gear of a first-person shooter and remain operational? UFC's Brendan Schaub helps Jamie and Adam find out.

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.

Gameplay demo: Shooting a weapon and using item dialog

In this video, Alex will walk you through the newly-added animations and sounds of guns firing, as well as interacting with objects.

Video transcript:

Hi there. This is Alex Maier with Shy Snake, and today I’d like to show you the progress we’ve made since our last video update.

If you watched the first video, you are already familiar with the HUD where we show the player character state and the important things like chance to hit the selected target.

Right now, Mr. Purple doesn’t have a target yet, so let’s help him with that.

See how the chance to hit graph now has a curve in it?

So according to the graph, you can see that if Mr. Purple aims a little longer, he’ll have a better chance of hitting the baddie here invading our lab.

You may remember from last video that the HUD has an expanded view, which you can toggle by hitting TAB. Now you can see Mr. Purple’s target area and how much damage his rounds can do at this range, if they actually land.

Let’s make Mr. Purple aim for two 0.2 second intervals.

A quick look at the Chance to hit graph. I say, I like these odds. Let’s pull the trigger.

Since last week, we’ve taught our player characters to hold their guns correctly and also animated the weapons, so of course I wanted to show that off for you folks.

Another thing we taught our game was to have items that the Player can interact with. See this big appliance here? Want to know what it is?

Now you can click on it, and it will pop up a dialog.

Note that the mouse cursor changes when it passes over items that you can interact with.
So, this is all I have for today. Thank you for watching.

Please stay tuned for more updates as Shy Snake continues to build the new game.

Our first screen capture video shows game controls

Our new game is introducing a lot of new concepts for the 3rd person strategy game genre, such as the timeline, as opposed to a fixed number of action points per turn. To help you visualize what this means for the actual gameplay, we've made our first screen capture video, to show how the timeline works, as well as how aim, accuracy, and damage calculations translate into player experience.

Let us know in the comments below what you think, and what else you'd like to know about our game!

Video transcript:

Hello and welcome.

My name is Alex Maier, and today I would like to show you how to use the controls in the new game that Shy Snake is building.

In the lower left corner, you can see the HUD, which shows your player characters and their respective states.

Currently, your party has two player characters: Ms. Green and Mr. Purple. They are idling, which is fancy talk for just standing around.

If you want them to do anything beside idling, you can give them a command.
Click anywhere on the map to tell your character to go there.

Oh look, here’s a non-player character, who looks like a bad guy. Let’s shoot him.

When you move over the enemy NPC, it changes to crosshairs.

You probably want to aim a bit before you fire, and you can click on the target a couple of times to add aiming time. Each click adds 0.2 seconds to your aim.

While the aim gets better, you can see your current chance to hit in the graph below, in the HUD.

When you like your chances, you can fire your weapon by right-clicking on the target.

Since the weapon we’ve equipped is a two-round shotgun, you can see that the ammo bar to the left of the chance to hit graph has gone down by one-half.

Now if you want to give your characters more than one command at a time, you can do this by pausing the timeline. Just hit SPACE.

You can queue up a number of commands which will be executed in order once you unpause the timeline.

The HUD has more information to offer. To toggle the expanded view, hit TAB.
Now you can see a diagram of your current target area as well as the damage and penetration graphs.

When timeline is paused, the stats shown are for the current moment in time, but once you unpause it, they become animated as the time flows.

So this is all I wanted to show you today.

This is still a work in progress, please stay tuned for more updates as Shy Snake continues to work on our new game.

Talk to you next time.