spry fox
Latest
Epic Games Publishing picks up indie studios Eyes Out and Spry Fox
From Nine Inch Nails to Cozy Grove, these are two very different creative forces.
How Spry Fox used (human) guinea pigs to evolve Free-Range Dragons overnight
If you played Spry Fox's Free-Range Dragons at PAX Prime earlier this month, you may have a vastly different impression of the game than players who returned to the team's booth during the show's final hours. This isn't just a matter of taste, either. Spry Fox actively updated its PAX Prime demo of Free-Range Dragons throughout the expo weekend, making sweeping changes in response to player behavior and feedback. The experiment was a valuable learning experience for Spry Fox, and produced results that will likely inform the project's future direction.
Spry Fox explores the joy of flight in Free-Range Dragons
After challenging players with the uncompromising high-stakes roguelike Road Not Taken, Spry Fox is taking on more lighthearted fare with Free-Range Dragons, an action-oriented game in which players pilot flying dragons across fanciful 2D worlds. There's a hardcore streak underneath Free-Range Dragons' cheery surface, however. Citing inspiration from Capcom's Monster Hunter series, Free-Range Dragons features high-flying battles in which you'll hunt down dangerous creatures and drag them back to your home base to recruit them. Free-Range Dragons is flexible enough to support multiple playstyles, and it's up to the player to decide how far they want to push themselves during their quest.
Spry Fox serves up Free-Range Dragons teaser
Free-Range Dragons is the next organic creation from developer Spry Fox, the studio behind complex puzzler Road Not Taken. A less mentally taxing game, the action of Free-Range Dragons is about "the joy of movement" and the team previously described it as "2D Monster Hunter." "You have a flaming dash maneuver that can be used as both an attack and a tool for altering your trajectory," noted the company blog post of the game's teaser reveal. "We're still experimenting with a variety of additional attacks and powerups, like fireballs, flame breath, lassoing, and more." If you're attending PAX Prime this weekend, go ahead and check out Free-Range Dragons at booth 135. Also ask for the foam bat so you can whack the devs a couple times for that part in Road Not Taken you're stuck on.
Road Not Taken review: Take it
The developers at Spry Fox aren't sure how to describe Road Not Taken. They say it's kind of a puzzle game and kind of an RPG. It's a little cute but also pretty dark. There's survival, crafting and randomly generated levels like in Don't Starve, but it also has a rich narrative. Okay, it's time we put this descriptive ping pong to rest: Road Not Taken is a roguelike. This is the most important game mechanic to remember when booting up Road Not Taken – you will die and lose progress and it will suck, but you will keep playing. You will keep playing for the puzzles that test your ability to strategize and plan movements three, four steps ahead of time. You will keep playing so that no more helpless, freezing children die alone in the forest. You will keep playing to discover new friends, lovers and enemies around the town, or to figure out new crafting recipes in the woods. You will keep playing to see what lies underneath the protagonist's hood, and what happens to him when his limited years of life are done. Road Not Taken is a roguelike, but it's also so much more.
Road Not Taken hitting PS4, PC August 5
Spry Fox's stylish roguelike puzzler Road Not Taken will launch for the PlayStation 4 and PC platforms in August, the studio revealed today. Road Not Taken is an overhead-view adventure game in which players have a limited number of in-game years to solve environmental puzzles, befriend NPCs, and advance the game's evolving narrative before death claims their character. An energy mechanic defines gameplay throughout, as players must carefully weigh their options in order to avoid burdening their character with too much physical strain. Road Not Taken will debut in the PlayStation Store and on Steam August 5. A PlayStation Vita version will launch this fall. [Video: Spry Fox]
Triple Town leaving Facebook, Steam keys offered for PC, Mac
Triple Town will move on from Facebook on June 16, developer Spry Fox announced yesterday. "This was not an easy decision for anyone, but Triple Town's Facebook edition has not been financially successful for many years, and our ongoing efforts to support and maintain it are detracting from our efforts to make new games for you," the statement reads. "We hope you will take comfort in the fact that the iOS and Android versions of Triple Town will remain available and free to all of you." There's a silver lining to the news for fans - so long as they log in before Jun 16, players that have spent any amount of money on Triple Town's Facebook version will be able to claim a Steam key for PC or Mac, which Spry Fox says is "nearly identical" to the Facebook version. Considering the Steam version sells for $10 and that even a 99-cent purchase makes a Facebook user eligible for a key, that's a pretty decent move on Spry Fox's part. [Image: Spry Fox]
Road Not Taken's quirky cast of characters in gifs
Steam, PS4 and Vita game Road Not Taken features a lineup of lost, lonely and lovable characters. Some of them hang out in the town square, some are worried parents of children who've wandered into the forest, others are those scared children, and still more are beasties of various sizes and shapes. The game allows you, the hooded and magical finder, to form relationships with these NPCs, 15 years at a time. Whenever you enter a forest to save lost children, one year of your life passes. After 15 years, you die and have a chance to start anew, making new friends and lovers, with some talents from your previous life carried to the new one. Spry Fox has shared a few of these characters and settings with Joystiq in the best way possible – gifs. Check out the adorable art style and spooky things of Road Not Taken below. There's also a contest happening right now that asks you to submit a sound effect for the in-game fox. Yes, the contest is called "What does the Spry Fox say?" [Images: Spry Fox]
The fox says whatever you want in Spry Fox's Road Not Taken contest
Road Not Taken, the deep strategy-puzzle game from Spry Fox, has a problem. The game has a bunch of foxes, but Spry Fox doesn't know what they say. This is a question that has haunted humanity for months – and now you have the opportunity to answer it. The "What does the Spry Fox say?" contest is live now. It asks you to create a sound effect for the sassy foxes in Road Not Taken and upload it to YouTube by April 23 with the tag "#WhatDoesSpryFoxSay." You can tweet your video to @spryfox with the same hashtag. The more likes your entry gets, the better its chances of winning: Spry Fox will pick a victor from the most popular sounds, and that noise is going straight into the game. Before you try to make the foxes drop f-bombs, note that Spry Fox won't accept offensive material. "Keep it classy," the team says. Read the full contest details here, and get inspired by the adorable dancing foxes from Road Not Taken after the break. [Images: Spry Fox]
2D Monster Hunter with extra dragons from Spry Fox
Everything in this game is dragons – the cows are dragons, the chickens are dragons, the bears are dragons, the wolves are dragons. You aren't a dragon, but in the earliest art, you do have a sweet red beard that trails into the distance, turning green at its tip. It doesn't have a name yet, but Spry Fox is set on making a dragon-filled, monster-catcher game. "You can sort of think of this as a 2D Monster Hunter," Chief Creative Officer Daniel Cook said. "You're riding these dragon creatures .... You can hunt them down. You have a home base and the animals will come and terrorize your farm and your home, and they'll steal stuff from you and you can steal it back, track them down and tame them. And then you turn them into mounts of your own." The main attack in this dragon game is a lunge – movement is more akin to jumping monkeys than soaring, mythical beasts. You can hop quickly across rocks and glide in the air, positioning your mount for the best lunge. The creatures will be procedurally generated, and they come from Glitch artist Brent Kobayashi, who's also doing the art for Spry Fox's Road Not Taken. That one is due out, tentatively, this summer for PS4, Vita and Steam. This game isn't an MMO, but Spry Fox is working on a couple of those, Edery said, including one based on Steambirds, the studio's aerial combat game. The team has one engineer that keeps busy building these prototypes. Cook says they like things clean and simple, and a single engineer helps with that. For every 10 mediocre games, there's one hit that keeps the studio running – see Triple Town – Cook said. "2D Monster Hunter" might just do that trick. See below for a larger first look at Spry Fox's dragon-catcher game.
Road Not Taken is deeper than you think
Road Not Taken looks like it could be a mobile game. The gameplay itself takes place on a series of grids, in cold, fantastical forests, where players must combine objects to clear paths and rescue children lost in the woods. It looks as if you could tap, tap, tap a tablet screen to move your little hooded character around the map. But that's only the first layer of the game.
Crafting the crunching leaves and childish laughter of Road Not Taken
Road Not Taken is indie developer Spry Fox's roguelike set in a mystical wooded land in which players solve puzzles to rescue lost children. The environment is rife with natural noises, such as crunching leaves, birdsong, wind and children's laughter, and all of these sounds were created by hand by the game's audio producer, Daniel Simmons. For the sound of leaves, Simmons picked up some dry leaves from outside of his home and crunched them. For the kids' talking and laughter, he recorded his children, ages 2 and 6. Even the music of Road Not Taken has an earthy feel, provided by his friends and bandmates playing wooden flutes and singing with a haunting vocal dexterity. Take a listen to some sounds and songs of Road Not Taken below.
Road Not Taken takes road to PS4, Vita
Road Not Taken will come to PS4 and Vita, developer Spry Fox announced during Sony's PlayStation Indie Arcade event at PAX Prime. The developer behind Triple Town plans to launch the game in 2014. Road Not Taken is described as a "puzzle roguelike," in which players set out to rescue children from forests and solve ever-changing puzzles along the way. The game includes permanent death upon failure, and with each entry into the forest, the woods will regenerate to keep the challenge going. Road Not Taken will also launch on Windows and Mac via Steam.
Road Not Taken is coming soon from Triple Town's creators
Triple Town is one of my favorite games on iOS over the past few years -- it's a puzzle game with a simple ruleset and a whole lot of complexity. The creator of that game, called Spry Fox, has announced a new title in development called Road Not Taken, and you can now see some concept art from it over on the official blog. The game is sort of roguelike, according to the developers, and as you can see above, it has some similarities to the grid-based Triple Town. But instead of building up a world, it's more about finding a path through the world, and avoiding or confronting various dangers on the way. As you can tell from the title, which refers to the famous Robert Frost poem, the game will offer various paths, and it seems like most of the strategy will come from choosing your own way. Sounds interesting. Road Not Taken isn't coming too soon -- Spry Fox says it probably won't be ready until the end of the year. But we' hope to see it on the App Store when it finally is ready to go.
Roguelike puzzler 'Road Not Taken' coming late 2013 from Triple Town dev
Triple Town developer Spry Fox has announced its next project, Road Not Taken. Like Triple Town, Road Not Taken is a puzzle game, though it looks like Spry Fox is trying something a little different this time, injecting the game with an interesting narrative structure and roguelike elements. Yes, it's a roguelike ... puzzle game. Inspired by the Robert Frost poem of the same name (minus "The"), Road Not Taken hopes to explore the idea of what happens when someone goes against the grain of society, wandering off the usual path. Spry Fox is touting a "pointillist" narrative. The idea is that, just as hundreds of tiny dots can reveal a work of art when viewed from a distance, multiple plays of Road Not Taken will begin to reveal "a greater theme." Yeah, it all sounds pretty hoity-toity, but hey, look at this adorable trailer and artwork!%Gallery-188145%
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Triple Town
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Spry Fox's David Edery discusses the real impact of social gaming with his Facebook and mobile title Triple Town, which launched on Steam this month. What's your game called and what's it about?Triple Town is an original puzzle game about building a city. It's basically a re-invention of the match-three genre; instead of matching three-plus objects to clear a space, you match three-plus objects to create higher-level objects. Trees becomes huts, mansions become castles, etc. Meanwhile, giant bears move around the board blocking your progress. It seems simple at first, but this is a game that requires extraordinary practice and planning skills. Many people played for months before building their first castle (and there are two tiers beyond that!). We've heard Triple Town described as "the Civilization of match-three games" and we really like that. Triple Town won a bunch of awards in 2011 and we've been updating and improving it ever since!Are you trying to break Triple Town out of the "social game" box with the Steam launch?Not really; it's been doing fine as a single player game on mobile for over a year now. The goal of the Steam launch was to bring a flavor of Triple Town to people who might not otherwise have heard about it, to offer a full-screen and offline mode, and to satisfy fans who wanted an all-you-can-eat version of the game with absolutely no IAP in it.
Triple Town developer sues over iOS knock-off
Spry Fox, a social developer most recently known for its Facebook game Triple Town, has filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against iOS development house 6Waves LOLAPPS (seriously) over Yeti Town, a mobile app that Spry Fox CEO David Edery claims is almost an exact duplicate of his company's product."We're not just talking about the game's basic mechanics here," Edery said in a statement made on his personal blog. "We're talking about tons of little details, from the language in the tutorial, to many of our UI elements, to the quantities and prices of every single item in the store." What's more, Spry Fox was in confidential, NDA-protected negotiations with 6Waves LOLAPPS to publish Triple Town, right up until the day Yeti Town was released.As part of their negotiations, Spry Fox had given 6Waves months of private access to Triple Town during its closed beta test. "It's bad enough to rip off another company. To do so while you are pumping them for private information (first, our game design ideas, and later, after the game was launched on Facebook, our private revenue and retention numbers) is profoundly unethical by any measure."Mobile rip-offs have become fairly commonplace these days, so its refreshing to see a small developer aggressively try to protect its intellectual property. The outcome of this case will be unlikely to set any legal precedents, but if the courts weigh in Spry Fox's favor, it could be enough to discourage iOS counterfeiting in the future. [ER 09 via Shutterstock]
Daily iPhone App: Steambirds: Survival
You may remember the game Steambirds from a previous Daily App post. It's a turn-based flight simulator that plays like a board game. Instead of actually flying your planes, you move them turn by turn. It's a game about strategic positioning and planning. Now, developers Spry Fox have teamed up with Halfbrick Studios (makers of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride) to release a sequel called Steambirds Survival. Sort of. I say "sort of" because it's pretty much the same game, though it's been polished up quite a bit, and plays a lot more smoothly than before. There are also new powerups to play with (if I'm not mistaken -- it's been a little while since I played the old version), and the levels are divided into cities, which you can either unlock with an in-app purchase, or open up by just playing the game. This version also adds Game Center integration. And even if it doesn't sound like your thing, it's worth checking out: Both the standard version and the HD version (for iPad) are free. At that price, the game's definitely worth a look.
