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KickStarter Spy DNA - realistic tactical combat with genetically enhanced agents

agris

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For skills there are currently just under 20. Some will get cut once we have a few more levels complete. There is a cross feed mechanism so training or using one skill will advance related skills. For example practicing with pistols with have a small positive effect on the rifle skill. The majority of them are combat, stealth, or observation related.
IMO, you want the skills to feel distinct. Wasteland 2 went overboard with the three different speech skills (X-ass), while I think the Fallout 1/2 division of small / big / energy weapons was distinct enough that spec'ing in them felt like a different playstyle. Of course the distribution of weapons using those skills was kinda screwy and resulted in players who could gimp themselves (i.e. starting the game as a ranged energy weapon spec'd PC), but the game world kinda required that. The point is, a player who was a master of small guns played differently than a big guns player.
 

Roqua

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For PC games that I really enjoyed that I would refer to as inspiring for SpyDNA
Planets Edge
Jagged Alliance (originals)
Silent Storm 2
Fallout 1 & 2
Close Combat
Wait, so you weren't inspired by Brigade E5, 7.62 High Calibre or Marauder? Because they use exactly what you seem to be using - a system based on the time each action takes to be executed, instead of just an invisible round system like most RTwP games. You should give 7.62 a try, their system is the most complex and interesting in any RTwP game I've ever seen.

I was going to mention those games, but I greatly disliked the combat in all these games and didn't want it to influence what they are doing. I believe all the UFO RTwP games did the same thing but I haven't played one in probably a decade or more by now.

I still have no idea about your rpg system. How many stats? how many skills? Are there perks? Are there systems like it you can point to? Is it rpg-lite?

I also still do not know if it is a full fledged rpg or not. For instance, some games have a story between missions, some consider themselves rpgs and others know they are not. Is this a Squad tactics game with some rpg elements or is a rpg where I go around completing quests and missions. Is it like Breach & Clear with an added story between missions, or is it like WL2 where I go around picking locks, talking to NPCs, buying shit in shops, completing tasks/quests/missions? Etc.

Is it something like JA 2 where it is map based? I don't have a clear idea of what is this game is offering besides realistic combat.

I've been thinking how to describe the progression. The recent Shadowrun games are probably the best analogy. It's primarily mission based but with considerable story and dialog.

I don't want to say too much about stats and skill because neither are finalized. The current draft has 7 primary attributes with each having additional detail values for those that want to know and control everything. For example, the core stat "Perception", breaks down into "mental perception, sight, hearing, and smell" if you really want the nitty gritty details.

For skills there are currently just under 20. Some will get cut once we have a few more levels complete. There is a cross feed mechanism so training or using one skill will advance related skills. For example practicing with pistols with have a small positive effect on the rifle skill. The majority of them are combat, stealth, or observation related.

Perks: yes, but though genetic enhancements.

Great to hear that it will not be rpg-lite and will have some depth and meat to it. Thanks for the reply.
 

Roqua

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I greatly disliked the combat in all these games
How come man?

It just wasn't good to me. I hate spending 8 hours setting up for a 3 second combat. Almost all the game is wasted time. Compare that to Aarklash Legacy or JA 2 or any game with good combat and you spend most of your game in fun combat.
 

felipepepe

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Yes, 7.62 can be very overwhelming sometimes, it's a very hardcore kind of game.

Marauder, on the other hand, shows just how much potential that system has. It removes a lot of elements and reduces you to 1 character for most of the game, but then throws you against ridiculous odds:

8n5ThbH.jpg

xhMTBo0.jpg


In a Turn-based game you would certainly die, standing still while 20 enemies took their turn, and in real-time it would be too fast & devoid of tactics. But this "per time" system makes that every single second counts. You kill a guy, see that the other will take a few seconds to reach you, so you might have enough time to load two more bullets and prepare the weapon again... oh, and you & everyone die in 1-2 shots.

Seriously, defending your home alone from 20 raiders with this system is one of the most intense gaming experiences I had.
 

Xzylvador

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No jokes or references to how Deus Ex-like this game appears?
The first few seconds I actually thought it was a mod of the original, especially with the character portrait looking exactly like jc denton.
 

Baron Dupek

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Interface remind me Cold Zero: Last Stand/No Mercy. P.cool game, hard from time to time.

Wanna do RTwP? Don't do these "rounds" system a'la IE games at least.

+brofist for Apeiron's games, they're really good. Best gun porno ever.
 

Tigranes

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To me "RTWP" implies something I'm not seeing here ... generally autoattack or player AI routines. You click a few guys to attack, hit the space bar and watch them go, then watch it run for a while, then hit space bar when you want to tweak something else. This looks more like you have to issue every action deliberately. Once a guy finishes whatever he's doing, you have to issue his next order. That's not really RTWP. It's not "turn based" either in the sense of you go, then I go; it's more like Frozen Synapse or Laser Squad Nemesis, except with interrupts. LSN was well described as "phase-based"; maybe that's what this really is. Or maybe I'm projecting.

Good luck Shy Snake. Great studio name by the way.

Oh, so that's why so many Codexers hate RTwP. They play it in the most boring way possible. To be fair, the games enable that, but they also enable Normal difficulty.
 

Zombra

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Oh, so that's why so many Codexers hate RTwP. They play it in the most boring way possible.
I know I sure do. Somehow, to me RTWP epitomizes a "get it over with" minimum-effort mentality. I'm comfortable with that being my fault.

In any case, this game's approach clearly "enables" a higher level of mental engagement. Go, Shy Snake.
 

Tigranes

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Oh, so that's why so many Codexers hate RTwP. They play it in the most boring way possible.
What other way is there? Other than purposefully ignoring game mechanics that is.

Manually control every unit? I never even considered any other way. If the game is too boring to play that way, then you should just drop it and play something else.

Anyway I'm fine with the approach this game is trying to produce, a lot will depend on how it interlocks with other systems so hopefully we'll be able to see it in action later.
 

Dalek

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Well, that certainly seems like it could be an interesting game. Really curious to see how the combat flows.
 

Zombra

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Mailing list update:

The Crolimax Report: February 2016
Hey there folks,
This month 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.

1621e179-232b-469f-8e29-240cfa8e0727.png

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.
8fb2a467-4083-4bbc-9739-a6009a3b4449.png

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.
Thank you for following our progress towards the release!

If you'd like to catch up on what's going on at Shy Snake between the newsletter issues, you can always check out our blog!

>From our blog:
 

Infinitron

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Combat in Spy DNA

1464318167302



This is Jason with an update on the Spy DNA combat system. We’ve been making some graphics and demo videos for our Kickstarter pitch, and I thought we should share some of them with you. In today’s post, I’ll start with our new gunsight, that we use for aiming, and then move on to the combat system.

In Spy DNA we have put a lot of thought into making combat feel as real as we can. One of the areas that’s often disappointing in games is the critically important mechanism you use to attack the enemy.

Most games assign a character a simple chance to hit, usually modified by range and cover. We use a full 3D world instead. To avoid the problems, such as identifying obstacles and cover, when aiming in the top-down view, we open a gunsight view when you pick a target.

Single shot firing sequence


Single shot firing sequence

The biggest thing we do differently is replace the “chance to hit” with “Circular error probable”. The rings around your aim point represent the 50%, 90%, and 99% likelihood of your shot landing within those rings.

You trade off time aiming for more accuracy in your shot. You can adjust it to try to get the first shot off quickly, or take some time to make sure you hit. You can also adjust the number of shots, burst, or burst length.

When using automatic fire, burst or full auto, recoil will reduce precision of later shots as recoil adds up. For single shot and burst your character will re-aim so follow on shots meet the same accuracy requirement you set.

Our damage model is based on your weapon and where you hit the target, not on a random dice roll. So you will be able to aim for weak spots in the armor or for vital parts of your target. Cover is handled the same way. The ability to move the target point around lets you aim for exposed parts of the target.

Now let’s talk about how our combat system works. We call our system Concurrent Turn-Based. I’ll explain what this means. We differ from traditional turn-based games in some important ways.

Let me start with what we are trying to accomplish.
  1. The player should have time to think and take in the battlefield and environment.
  2. The moves available to the player should as close as possible mirror the options that a real-life soldier would have.
  3. The results of actions should be be realistic.
After a lot of experimenting we have settled on a system where the game focuses on a character when it is their turn to start their next action. So while combat is ongoing, the game engine cycles though characters as their turns come up. In this way it feels like a traditional turn-based game. There is one very important difference. While the game is progressing to the next player turn, every character and object in the game moves.

This was not a decision we took lightly. We made this decision to avoid the time quantization problem that traditional turn-based games have. Think of the frustration where near the end of the player turn you move a character and trip one or more enemies. Now your character (or whole party) just sits there helpless while the enemy takes a turn (or full round) worth of actions. This is a side effect of games trying to map combat to a mechanism that doesn’t exist on a battlefield.

In Spy DNA we are trying a more direct simulation of the world. The character that makes contact would actually have the initiative. The characters that spots them would make a reaction time roll (based on their attributes and combat experience) to see how fast they can react. Also because other characters in the player party may be mid-action, such as movement, you could cancel those long actions and give them a new task.

I made a short video where a character ambushes two unaware NPCs. The action commands I give the game are:
  • Throw a grenade
  • Draw my pistol
  • Crouch
  • Aim and shoot to finish off the second target
About three seconds of game time actually elapses in this demo.

Compared to Turn Based games, we have two major differences. The first is turns in Spy DNA are not uniform in size. Turns come up as the character completes their previous command. This means that fast actions such as firing a single shot will result in that character's turn coming up again quickly. Slow actions such as moving a long distance will mean many other characters are likely to take their turns before coming back to that character.

The second major difference is the turns progress concurrently, i.e. all at the same time. So if you give a move order to one character, and a quick attack order to another, each time the second character attacks you will see the first make some progress on their move order. In effect, you will see time progress forward for everyone until one of your characters completes all the commands in their queue.

Should a character spot something needing your attention while they completing an command, the game will stop and focus on the character. This allows you to react to things that come up mid action such as an enemy coming around a corner.

I hope this gives everyone a feel for the type of gameplay we are trying to deliver.
 

Athelas

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So turn-based with asynchronous turns? Cool.

Faster actions making your next turn come up faster makes sense, I suppose, but it could lead to anything other than aiming/firing being disincentivized. Firing a gun in a turn-based game typically has an 'unrealistically' high action point cost (compared to say movement), presumably to avoid that.
 

Severian Silk

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What we are really doing is something between the two. I don't have a proper label for it (and I didn't write the text on the website). Every action is assigned a time. So it will be that characters turn once that amount of time has passed. However, when that character commits their action time progresses for all characters in the world until some character in the players party has finished their previous action or encounters something worthy of an interrupt.
Unless I'm misinterpreting, this sounds like "WEGO" in Frozen Synapse or "clock based" system in GearHead RPG.

Or maybe it's just RTwP with tons and tons of "auto pauses" or "smart pauses".

Not sure. I didn't watch the video.
 

udm

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Don't worry, the videos don't show much. shysnake if you're still reading this thread, please put up some videos that properly demonstrate a few rounds of combat. For now I'll have to agree with Severian Silk that it sounds like WEGO (with initiative), as compared to traditional turn-based games that use IGOUGO with an initiative-based setup.
 

shysnake

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Don't worry, the videos don't show much. shysnake if you're still reading this thread, please put up some videos that properly demonstrate a few rounds of combat. For now I'll have to agree with Severian Silk that it sounds like WEGO (with initiative), as compared to traditional turn-based games that use IGOUGO with an initiative-based setup.

Right now the AI's a bit rough for a example battle. We've been focused on getting the UI mature enough we can start sharing videos and screen shots. The team is only 2 people and we are racing to get ready for Kickstarter, but I'll find a way to squeeze in a video for this site if you will forgive us for the AI being a work in progress and the NPCs not moving much.

Right now pistols, SMGs, rifles, and snipers are all working, is there any specific types you want to see? It will take a couple days if it goes well, or a couple weeks if I find bugs while filming and have to fix them before letting the video out.
 

udm

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Personally I am more keen on seeing how a few combat rounds play out. The weapon mechanics like ballistics interest me of course, but these are features that can be fine-tuned later on. If possible, do one without music in the background and just focus on introducing the core gameplay elements
 

shysnake

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This went better than I feared...

The video is from the 3rd take. In the first two I was overaggressive moving the rifleman and he died. The enemy are only equipped with pistols but they out number the players 5 to 2.

We are still about 5+ months from alpha so bugs and glitches are expected.

 

laclongquan

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For reference, Codex do have RTwP fans. We are just a bit less virulent than the pure-TB guys. But we do exist.

Second. For RTwP games that are good, I will add UFO Aftershock and UFO Afterlight. Especially UFOAL if you want an experience of every second counts, and counter reloading scums a bit. Also physic of ballistic bullets or ragdoll.
 

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