Spy DNA Development Update: Character creation

By Jason Sams, Shy Snake Lead Developer

Let’s talk about that all-important part of an RPG, creating your character. Last month I wrote a post about complexity in games. Character creation process in any RPG is usually the first thing the player does, which affects every aspect of the player’s experience afterward.

In order to get to the character creation, you need to go to a job interview with Dr. Crotalus

This presents some unique challenges to a game creator, or even a DM/GM.

First, you’re asking a player to design the character they want to play, having no knowledge about how your game works. For most people this means taking a guess, playing a bit, and potentially starting over.

Second, the choices made during character creation are typically permanent, and affect gameplay for the full playthrough of the game.

As a GM for a pen-and-paper game this was particularly difficult. The players would make their characters, and usually 3 sessions in, we’d be tweaking them, as players realized that the characters they wanted to play weren’t what they actually created.

So as an experiment, I had everyone make two characters. One was created the traditional way, rolling dice and allocating stats and skills on a character sheet. To create the other character, I gave everyone a list of 23 questions to answer for me before the game. Then I made characters for the players based on their answers, using my knowledge of the game world and rules.

The players could freely pick which character they wanted to use for each mission, given they were alive and well enough to go. You’d expect that the players would favor the characters they made for themselves, but instead they played the characters made by me, the GM, about 80% of the time, only breaking out the other character for special situations. Why?

As a GM you have more knowledge of what lies ahead for the players, what they will need, and typically how the system works. There is much less guessing. So as long as you know what kind of character the player wants to play, you’ve got a much better chance of creating one that will work well for the game.

Based on this experience, we wanted to replicate this character creation process in Spy DNA.

At first, we created a set of 21 questions with about 3 answers each, and then used that to configure the characters. And it was terrible. There simply wasn’t enough detail in the resulting playable character.

So we went back to the drawing board and came up with a new design pattern for the questions that was more suitable to a computer game, i.e. it didn’t require a human to read between the lines in the player’s answers.

Now in Spy DNA the character creation consists of three groups of questions:

1: Self: How you think of your character.
2: Favorite mission: What kinds of missions you prefer.
3: Approach: How do accomplish your goals.

Within each group we now start with a high-level question, and follow up with a refining question depending on the previous choice.

You can make your own character by answering a questionnaire

Under this model, you will see roughly 17 questions as part of character creation. However, there are more than 80 questions in the questionnaire, so any single pass will only see a small part of the whole. At last count, there are more than 230 answers to choose from during the creation process, each with a different effect on your character.

To test whether this system actually works as intended, I have been asking people to think of a character they want to make, then try using the questionnaire to create it. Afterward, we look at how close the resulting character is to what the player intended, and the results have been vastly better than with the old 23-question system.

It being us, we used this opportunity to take things a bit farther. As you go through the character creation questionnaire, we record the choices you make. Those become part of your character’s persona. They will influence how other characters react to you in-game. As an example:

Q: Which type of mission are you the most comfortable with?

1: Assassinations: Neutralize a single target using a variety of means.
2: Counter-terrorism: Aggressive combat tactics designed to neutralize a group of enemies before they can do harm.
3: Breaking and entering: Quietly break into buildings, avoiding detection
4: Asset manipulation: Recruiting and convincing assets to work for you.

You can see how this may both influence the type of missions your team were to receive along with how some characters, including those in your party, may respond to you.

You can select a pre-configured character to play

The character creation system in Spy DNA is designed to help players create a character they will enjoy playing, but you don’t have to use if if you don’t want to. In addition to the questionnaire, you will also have an option to play a pre-made character, or use the traditional system where you can directly assign the points (probably not included in Early Access).

Complexity in games

By Jason Sams, Lead Developer

I want to talk about complexity in games. I think complexity is a very misunderstood subject. Game developers are sometimes seeking to “simplify” where there’s no need, while at the same time adding complexity without realizing it.

What is “complexity?”

When I say “complexity,” I mean specifically “perceived complexity.” In other words: Is the action considered easy or hard for a human to accomplish?

Here’s a practical example: If I asked you to throw a ball at a target, would you consider that a complex or difficult task? Probably not. However, hitting a target with a projectile is a task complex enough that solving the math behind it drove the creation of the first computers.

When video games were created, lobbing projectiles at things was a rich enough subject that entire games were built around the idea, such as Artillery Duel and Scorched Earth.

Let’s look at a more recent example. Is driving a car complex? Most people consider it so easy that they do all sorts of other things while driving. Yet teams of engineers are still struggling to teach a computer to do the same thing. Analyzing visual data is so challenging, that they have to use additional sensors (Lidar) that humans don’t have, or need. Objectively, driving is very complex and yet it’s still easy for humans.

And again many games are built around the idea of driving (or flying). Most of those games are considered very easy to pick up and start playing. Perfecting your technique and winning is the real challenge.

What about an opposite example? Multiplying large numbers is so simple even a phone can do it a few billion times per second, yet ask a human to do it and many would rather drive to buy a calculator. No one would make a game like this outside of education.

In context of game design, we’re interested in complexity as perceived by a human player. In our case we are specifically interested in making the mechanics of the game easy to grasp. This idea has been a driving factor in the design of Spy DNA and is also the reason for us calling the game a Simulation RPG. (Side note: it’s also led to way more UI iteration than we ever envisioned.)

Our combat system is designed to be the best simulation we can make of combat. We chose simulation and not the traditional turn-based approach to solve the problem of perceived complexity vs. actual complexity.

I’m a big fan of realism in games. Nothing will frustrate me more than when something happens in a game that makes no sense in the real world. Some examples:

1: You move a character one step forward, you trigger an enemy group, that now all get to activate, move several times farther than your one step, and possibly attack and kill your character. All this before you can even react.

2: You find a new item in game, yet you can't use it because of some attribute or skill check. The worst ones are the cases where you lack “strength” to wear an item, yet, toss it in the backpack and you can be lugging several of them around despite them being harder to carry that way.

3: You sneak up behind a target and make a surprise attack. You stealthy weapon fails to penetrate the armor despite hitting a spot where there was none (visually). The enemy then turns around and kills you.

What all these things have in common is they are results of artificial rules imposed by a game system that don’t exist in the real world.

Human brain is very good at understanding natural things such as physics (throwing something), or processing an image, but dealing with large numbers of artificial rules is not something that comes to us naturally. Therefore games that go down this path are perceived as complex for the player.

Not all complexity is necessarily bad. There are many popular games built around artificial rules, chess being the first that comes to mind. Add a little random input and you have pretty much every card game ever. In these cases managing and exploiting the rules becomes the focus of the game.

In Spy DNA, we want you to feel like an agent in a believable world, where things that should work actually do work in-game. Or put another way, we wanted the combat system to be intuitive and realistic. We wanted the game to be about Spy DNA world and not about the combat mechanics.

When you play Spy DNA, one of the things you will notice is that we have a lot of attributes compared to most RPGs. I’ve heard people give talks saying that six attributes is too many for an RPG, and I consider that silly. I mean, if a console sports game can have 38 attributes (MLB the show), I don’t see why a serious PC RPG shouldn’t have more than 6.

Yes, this is a scroll bar in the attributes screen!

This is where we clearly see the difference between perceived vs. real complexity. By all accounts the simulation in the MLB game is more complex, but because each attribute is clear and easy to understand and relate to in real-life terms, it never feels difficult to understand or play.

By comparison, when you have too few attributes, the attributes have to stand for things that are not obvious from the name, such as using dexterity for speed, strength for hit points, or intelligence for spellcasting. Each game has a slightly different system, making it necessary for the player to learn a new set of artificial rules with each game. Learning abstract rule sets is a thing that humans aren’t very good at, and therefore perceive it as complex.

How could having more attributes actually make a game seem simpler? The primary way is to map the attributes to “things a human intuitively understands.”

In Spy DNA we have 21 attributes in 7 common groups. We use groups, so that players used to traditional RPG systems would immediately be comfortable. The groups simply provide the average of the sub-attributes for quick reference and ease of picking up the game for those familiar with other systems. Within each group we provide the details, so it’s intuitively clear what’s really going on.

Screen capture of Spy DNA character attribute screen

Let’s looks at dexterity, using the party sniper, Zoe, as an example. At a glance you can see at 81, dexterity is a strength for the character, as you would expect for someone specialized in ranged attacks. However, with our focus on being realistic, we break down dexterity into Dexterity, (could also be called manipulation), reaction, and flexibility. In this example the character has a clear specialization. You can also see from the description she has a “+40 enhancement”. This comes from the genetic enhancements which put the “super” in “Super Spy”. As a result of these you can end up with values in excess of the natural human limit of 100.

Reaction is simply reaction time and impacts reactive movements (duh). In-game it will make you harder to hit in a melee fight, and help with any other action that depends on quick reflexes.

Flexibility is important to martial artists or characters that want to sneak past alarms or hide in places you wouldn’t assume someone normally fits. 

By being explicit about the common traits that a character may have, it should be actually easier to parse what the attributes actually mean for gameplay. We feel that this is better than a giant array of perks because it’s clear and straightforward.

When it comes to combat, we try to simulate the world as it is, and not require people to learn a unique set of made up rules just to play Spy DNA. Let’s take cover as an example.

In some games cover is measured in increments (high, low, none), or as a percentage. In these examples the cover makes it proportionally harder to hit the target. So far so good. Now you need a mechanism for attacking a target in cover. So these games introduce the idea of “flanking”, or moving to a position where the cover doesn’t apply. Typically these are done on an all or nothing basis, leading to frustration as your character can clearly see and hit the target, but because you have not triggered the arbitrary rule that says you’ve “flanked” your target, you still miss.

In Spy DNA we deal with this in a straightforward way: if you can see it, you can shoot it. Humans understand intuitively that the more of a target is exposed, the easier it is to hit. How much easier? We solve that problem visually. We present the player with a picture of their character’s viewpoint. You see what is exposed, what the area your shot might land in is, and you make the call based on that. Visual and intuitive.

Screen capture of the gun sight cam, showing circular error probable values

I also want to talk about cover vs concealment in Spy DNA. A real-world consideration is: “Will this thing I am using for cover actually stop the bullets?” If the answer is no, it’s not really cover, but just concealment. You might use a couch or a thin door as cover, but those will only slightly reduce the energy of the shots. So if the enemy gets lucky or guesses where you are on the other side, you’ll still have a problem. The flip side of this is, that if you have a weapon with a high rate of fire and have a general idea where the target is hiding, you may be able to get them through their concealment. Just like in the movies.

This leads to the next bit, damage. In most games once you hit a target, there is a random roll for damage, and possibly a separate random roll for a “critical.” So back to that early example on math, most humans don’t have an intuitive feel for complex equations that don’t mirror something in the real world. So instead of having a good grasp of the actual probability of hitting and damaging a target, players have to develop a feel for a weapon’s effectiveness based on trial and error.

In Spy DNA we invert this equation. Damage is 100% deterministic once you hit a target. How much damage you do is based on three things.
1: What hit the target? Ex:type of bullet, fragment, knife, fist.
2: Where did it hit the target? Ex: head, arm, leg
3: How much energy did it have when it hit? More is better (for the attacker)

Those concepts should be very easy to understand, nothing feels complex about it. However, the actual simulation is very complex. It only takes a few lines of code to implement hitpoints. To simulate injuries, we have thousands of lines of code in Spy DNA. 

Spy DNA uses per-polygon collisions to model wounds on a character

Our models have multiple colliders so we can not only figure out if you hit your target (which we resolve per-polygon against the mesh), but also what part of the target you hit. Then our damage code takes over and models a wound based on the results. 

This creates interesting situations in-game. Looking over cover is still dangerous, even though you’re 90% covered. Why? Because if the enemy lands a shot, it’s the exposed part that gets hit, which in this case is your head. Sticking an arm out would be much safer.

The last bit I’ll talk about is the passage of time. Most similar games have made the decision to be turn-based. We are a simulation, which means every action you take, takes some amount of time. When in combat, time in Spy DNA only passes while you are doing something. The most similar game I can think of is SuperHot with their tagline “Time moves only when you move.” Time will pass for both you and the enemy when everyone in your party has something to do, even if that something is just wait.

Because you want to be able to react to the changing situation in-game while your character is performing their action, we allow characters to react to perceived threats. A character that spots a new threat will cause the time to immediately stop, so you can change your orders if you desire. This mechanic takes the place of the various “overwatch” systems that most turn-based games have.

The ability to stop time when new threats are discovered allows us to avoid the problem where you need to have characters on overwatch to protect a character that is moving, in case they trigger an enemy reaction. In Spy DNA, if an enemy becomes visible, you can just react to it if you choose. We completely bypass the complexity of having the player figure out which rule they can use to protect them against the AIs use of reaction rules. Instead, you just react to what you see when it happens.

When out of combat, you move the party around in real-time. You can manually enter combat mode if you want, and the game will automatically switch to combat mode when the first shot is fired. Exiting combat mode is always manual, unless the mission is finished.

We have put a lot of thought into how to create as realistic a game as possible, where the world feels natural and real to the player. We want you to enjoy the gameplay and story rather than having to learn and optimize for an arbitrary rule system. For many situations in Spy DNA there isn’t just one “optimal” solution, but multiple ways to accomplish your mission, which frees you up to just play the way you want.
 

Procedurally generated missions in Spy DNA

By Alex Maier, Writer of Words

Here’s a basic overview of how we generate randomized missions. We’ve built a Mission Editor tool for that, and here’s how it looks when you open a mission in it. Here we set all the basics for a mission, such as terrain type, time of day, and so on.

Spy DNA mission editor "Map" tab screenshot

Then we add all the interesting stuff, like the NPCs you’ll encounter on a mission: enemies, neutrals, people to be rescued, that sort of thing. This is also where we add eligible infiltration options. Not every infil option makes sense for every mission, so we make a list of the ones that do for a given one, and also describe the outcomes.

Spy DNA mission editor "Gameplay" tab screenshot

When the mission is generated, only a subset of the infiltration options are picked.

Generally, you’ll see four kinds of infiltration outcomes, and each of them influences the mission at spawn:

Outcome	What it means for the mission
You did great and have ALL the intel	You’ll see mission markers for some of the objectives, such as hostage location and enemy camp HQ, or enemy patrols won’t be concealed by the fog of war.
You did okay, and have some intel	You’ll see a mission marker for the some objectives, but not for others. In the case of our hostage mission here, you’ll see where they hold the prisoner, but not where the enemy HQ is, or you’ll find out the enemy patrol route, but not the schedule.
You failed, and have no intel	This is the equivalent of going in without any infiltration. Nothing lost and nothing gained.
You failed, and now the enemy knows you’re there	You’ll be going in blind, and the enemy will be on high alert. They may have added more patrols, etc. Examples of such failures would be to have your recon drone shot down by enemy, or have your agent captured during infiltration.

In-game, you select the infiltration option during the mission brief meeting, and it’s simulated prior to mission start by using the stats of the character you chose to complete the infil. This will allow for different members of the squad to shine, and for the player it will make sense to pick the right person for the right task. Or not, and deal with the consequences.

Here’s how the infiltration planning meeting looks like in-game.

You pick which infiltration option you like best

We use Lua to script all the different things we’d like to randomize. For example, the mission description (see first and second screenshot) has all these variables, and below it there’s a box where we define them. The randomizing function pulls the values such as countries, diplomatic titles, and such from a table where we store all kinds of things, tagged with metadata for searching, and the player sees the mission description like this.

Pardon the layout - it's a dev build :)

Here’s how it looks in the tool.

Randomizing names is a bit trickier, because unlike the stuff that is only used in the description, the random name has to be assigned to the character when they are spawned on the mission map. We have a way of doing that when we add the character to the mission.

This is also where we pick the character template for a given NPC, which includes the types of things they wear (military uniform or civilian clothes etc.) and some other aspects of their appearance such as hair styles (again, military personnel will have simpler hair styles and natural colored hair, while the civilians may have wider choices of both).

This is the NPC we're going to need to rescue

In most cases, unless it’s an NPC that persists throughout the game, we fully randomize gender, skin color, and body type. Military personnel will again have fewer choices in the body type department, as we will only allow them to have an “average,” “fit,” or “fighter” fitness level. Civilians get a fourth option in fitness level: “unfit.”

The level of fitness and body type aren’t just for show either, they influence the body owner’s attributes as well, so if you meet someone who looks strong and fit, they very likely are.

To make sure that the spread of different body types is more realistic, we weight the probability of each of them occurring. After all, you don’t see twenty-five MMA-fighter-level-fit people for every hundred you meet.

Body types matrix for female and male bodies:

	light	average	heavy
unfit	f-un-lt, m-un-lt	f-un-avg, m-un-avg	f-un-hvy, m-un-hvy
average	f-avg-lt, m-avg-lt	f-avg-avg, m-avg-avg	f-avg-hvy, m-avg-hvy
fit	f-fit-lt, m-fit-lt	f-fit-avg, m-fit-avg	f-fit-hvy, m-fit-hvy
fighter	f-ftr-lt, m-ftr-lt	f-ftr-avg, m-ftr-avg	f-ftr-hvy, m-ftr-hvy

With that, we can populate the world with a fairly diverse set of characters for the player to encounter. And often, shoot. Oh, and also create for yourself at the beginning of the game.

Other things you will have noticed in the mission generation tool would be buildings. We generate buildings at runtime from a floor plan which we also create in our tool, but that is a topic for another post.

For now, suffice it to say that when the map is generated, the buildings are placed on it somewhat randomly, according to the parameters specified when the building is added to the mission.

Let’s not forget the objectives! They contain Lua commands to evaluate when the conditions for a particular objective have been met, or failed, such as in case of having the civilian you’re supposed to protect, die. If an objective is marked as required, failing it will mean mission failure and you’ll have to do it over, and if an objective doesn’t have this box checked, you can fail it all you want and still complete the overall mission.

The Lua check is to make sure that the NPC 39 (our Hostage) is alive. Because this is a required objective, the mission is failed the moment the NPC dies.

Some objectives are only available when particular conditions are met. Case in point: “recover drone wreckage” is only shown if you chose the drone reconnaissance option and the drone crashed. If the drone is shot down and captured by the enemy, your objective (and area of search) will change to retrieving the drone from the camp.

When everything is said and done, we’ll have a mission that can be replayed over and over, but it will never be exactly the same. You’ll get different infiltration options, the terrain will be different, and the buildings will never be in the same spot. Same goes for objectives such as which building the hostage is in, or where the drone wreckage is.

By the time we ship the Early Access version, we’ll have a number of such missions implemented, in addition to a handful of storyline ones to tide y’all over until the full version is released.

We’re also thinking of creating affordances for players to design their own mission mods, and whole missions down the road. That’s something that will have to wait until after Early Access though.

Spy DNA development update 2018-02-23

By Jason Sams, Lead Developer

It’s been a while since my last update. I’ve had my head down in the game code making some fundamental changes. We have made major changes to the AI system, character customization, hit location and damage system, level designer, asset loading, modding support, and a few other things. 

Let’s start with character customization. We put a lot of effort in making the players character fully customizable. Now a few of you gave us a hard time for going overboard here. The reason we put so much effort into this is we unified it with NPC generation. This will let us generate much more unique NPCs for each mission and avoid repeating the same character models over and over.

New game screenshot

During character creation you will be prompted to choose your commanders frame (skinny, average, or heavy), and condition (pro-fighter, fit, average, nerd). This choice determines which character model you will see in game and will also change your attributes. The condition choice biases your attributes towards physical or mental, while the frame choice is a speed/dexterity vs strength/toughness choice. 

Related to this we implemented our appearance reaction model. Each appearance item is rated on several metrics, such as Serious, Classy, Scary, and the ability to conceal weapons or armor. So while you may want to bring the heavy armor to the dinner party, doing so will make it much harder to get people talking, at least by verbal means. 

Wardrobe screenshot

Speaking of armor, we added the armor options to the wardrobe screen. You can now equip your characters with a variety of armor and storage options. I’ll have some updated screenshots of the overhauled equipment screen soon. Armor in spy dna is now working as intended. Armor resists bullets and other weapons, but for it to work, the weapon needs to hit the armor. This makes your aim point really matter. Unless you have the heavy weapons out, you will want to try to avoid hitting the heavily armored points on a target.

Character status screen

We updated the status screen to show where the shots have hit a character. The length of the marker changes depending on the penetration of the incoming round. The diameter represents the damage level of the shot. The hits are colored based on result. 
Green = fully blocked by armor
Yellow = blocked by dermal armor, probably still really hurt though.
Red = call the doctor and make an appointment

Attributes screenshot

We are scanning the shot against the polygon mesh of each piece the characters are wearing. We don’t want near hits/misses being mis-reported by the engine.

We have also been cleaning up the UI. We moved from using pre-drawn icons for the party to using render targets and snapping them in game. This means they will reflect the current state of the character. If you change into a delivery worker outfit to sneak into a building, the portrait will update on the fly.

Skills screenshot

And the final bit for the update is the changes to the inventory screen. We have moved a few things around and made room on the left, under the item image, for attachments or modifications. 

Inventory screenshot

We have also put a lot of time and effort into performance work. To give you just one example: The time from a level loading until you can start moving has been reduced from a minute or more it could take in the past, down to about a second. The pathfinding will prepare in the background now, using multiple cpu cores to speed things up if available.

While we basically had Spy DNA up on jackstands with the engine out and all kinds of parts strewn all over the place, it was challenging to really show and explain all the things that we had in-flight. But now that we have put the thing back together, we’ll be sharing updates on a more regular basis.

Stay tuned.

Getting ready for Early Access

It’s been a heads-down month here getting ready for early access. I’ll talk about what we are doing to go from demo to a full game. The transition from demo to full game for us has been about adding progression and content. 

The first big change is the result of a mission now affects your game. You can now also train your team at the base. Wounded characters will need some time to heal at the base before they are available for future missions. We’ve implemented the save game system and made the full character roster available. It’s all pretty obvious stuff, but it still needed to get done. 

While on mission, a character can advance their skills by using them in the field. On the skills page you will now see a count of how many times that skill has been used. Each use will improve the skill. 

The amount of the improvement will depend on several factors. First, each skill has associated attributes which govern how well your character can learn the skill. These are separate, though possibly overlapping, from the attributes which bias the ability to use the skill. For example “mental motivation” is a factor in learning most skills, however, it is used in few skill checks. These determine the character’s learning rate modifier for that skill. 

In addition each skill has a base learn rate to adjust for skills that are used frequently vs rarely. For example we don’t want to penalize hacking and lockpicking progress just because there are fewer chances to use the skill. 

Back at the base, skill training is a passive activity. You can assign each character two skills (primary and secondary) to train. Then as each day passes, any characters at the base that are healthy, will train those skills. So characters that are not taken on missions will still be making progress. A character that is not healthy may still make some progress. For example, a broken leg will prevent training physical skills, but would allow the character to keep working on mental skills. 

Injury recovery is similar to training at the base. A character will survive a mission as long as they are alive at the point when the “end mission” screen is triggered. In theory we can simulate post-mission death due to injury, but that would be an opt-in for extreme difficulty. Because we track each injury a character suffers, we do healing per-injury. Different injuries can heal at different rates. As they recover, they will automatically resume training as their health allows.

In the case of non-fatal injury to the Commander, if one or more other characters are available, you will be able to designate an acting commanding officer to cover the Commander’s duties and lead the squad on missions until recovery. If no one is available, time will fast forward until the Commander recovers. 

For early access we also wanted to make the full character roster available. So in addition to Ivan, Karsten, Nuri, and Zoe from the demo, you will now have Alexey, Marguerite, Ronda, Shinichi, and Rustam. 

Saving and loading has been implemented. The game will now autosave after each mission at the base. For initial early access saving will be limited to while at base. We will implement saving while on mission later.

We also have been hard at work on the UI. We received a lot of feedback about the look and feel of the UI and have responded with some improvements. Functionally the location of the controls is largely unchanged. What we have done is softened the appearance of the buttons, borders, and dialogs, and replaced some of the radio buttons with icon based sliders that make it easier to visualize how the controls work together.

We published a video for those wanting to see more of the new UI.

One final change for realism and game ballance we’ve made, was to implement the penalties for attacking moving targets. Simply put, it’s harder to hit something that is moving than something that is still. The mechanic implements this is two ways. One, there is a penalty to the circular error probable (CEP) for any given aim time. Two, the moving target limits the amount of time that can be spent aiming. The strength of the penalty is based on how fast the target is crossing the character’s field of view and how far away they are.

The first batches of character voices have started to arrive. Each playable character will have an unique voice and persona which they will use to acknowledge your commands and give you status updates.

The last area of getting ready was the implementation of settings screens. We have made a pass over all the sound effects and broke them into channels so each can have its own volume control (music, ambient sounds, combat sound effects, player character voices). We have also started implementing the settings for difficulty and new game options. These will be exposed soon.

With all these changes, the core engine of Spy DNA is pretty much ready for early access. What we are finishing up now is getting enough of the missions ready that the game has some content to go with the engine. 

Spy DNA has been Greenlit on Steam!

We've made it! In under two weeks, actually.

Alex has always considered thirteen (along with other primes) to be a lucky number. And it sure was a lucky number of days for us to get the Greenlight thumbs-up.

Thank you everyone for voting and for being our supporters as we work on getting Spy DNA ready for you.

Next stop: Early Access. We're shooting for Q2 this year. For now, there's a bunch of paperwork and prep work on Steam, and of course a lot of coding. We'll announce the Early Access launch date when we know it ourselves.

Stay tuned!

Spy DNA Alpha demo now live

Download free Spy DNA demo now

The demo is live, 'nuff said! Go get yourself a copy and let us know what you think!

Demo prep

We are getting ready for the demo. Today we made a new video from the latest build. This is the first time we’ve shown a play-though from character creation to combat. We’ve been focused on playability over the last few weeks, so we’re fixing lots and lots of smaller issues.

The big task was working through issues with load and save of games. Because the demo takes you through character creation before you can start taking sample missions, we wanted players to be able to save a character they generated. We also implemented a loading screen while working on load game. We hope these additions make the demo more enjoyable for players.

Another significant change from our previous videos is an updated camera system. While watching people play, we found players used three camera positions frequently. So we added direct support for the most common camera uses. 

• A low camera which shows things from the view of the character
• A high camera which shows the tactical situation
• A target camera which flies the camera over to the active target
• And we still have “free” camera so the player can move it around as they desire

For the low and high camera they save the player's view height and angle so if you switch away and come back you won’t have to reset the camera each time.

We also implemented a compass; it shows which way the character is facing. More interestingly, we also added contact ticks to the compass. So you can see which way contacts are relative to your active character. Also you can click them to fly the camera over to any contact.

The map generation has been heavily tested and we have recently implemented a number of performance enhancements. Currently the large maps can strain some mid-range systems so we put some effort into improving performance. There is more to be done, but we got a very nice performance bump for the demo.

For the playable characters we doubled the number of commander appearances available for the demo. There are two male and two female commanders to choose from, each with their three outfits depending on mission. There will be many more for the shipping game.

The demo will also include default genetic enhancements for all the playable characters. You will get to see a small example of the enhancements in action. In the shipping game you will be able to select and choose how your commander is enhanced to mirror your play style.

We implemented new shaders for the trees, firing range, roof of the base, and a few other items. This was done to make them more friendly to the camera so they cut or blur away so you can continue to see the most important parts of the map.

The status screen has been updated to show not only injuries, but also attacks which were stopped by armor or implants. You can mouse over any hit and see the force and type of attack along with how much of it any armor you may have stopped. 

Movement was reviewed. and walk, jog, and sprint speeds were double checked for the demo. We spent a bit of time graphing the various movement speeds vs attributes. These are the base speeds with zero encumbrance.

Walk speed graph

Jog speed graph

Sprint speed graph

The jog (max sustained movement speed) graph is 3D because it’s based off both quickness and stamina. This was triggered when we picked up a few too many weapons at the firing range and unintentionally tested our encumbrance system.

Barring any unexpected problems we expect to have the demo out this month. Stay tuned!