We’re looking for a highly skilled Unreal Shader Technical Artist that can bridge the gap between Art and Engineering. This is a key role in developing the unique artistic style of our game. Extensive knowledge of shading, lighting, rendering, and post processing is required, as well as a strong understanding of the 3D-graphics pipeline and a keen eye for aesthetics and best art practices.
Spry Fox is looking for a Senior Server Engineer to help us work on a new, original game!
(more…)
Spry Fox is looking for a 3D Art Lead to help us work on a new, original game — a stylized, joyful and non-violent MMO project!
Our 3d Art Lead will be a key role, bridging the gap between Engineering, Design and Art. We are looking for a talented, multi-disciplinary 3d artist who loves to dive into the organizational and technical side of things, and strives to find systemic and scalable solutions to keep the team moving. You will establish and maintain our art pipelines and processes while helping drive key visuals in the game. You will need to be very comfortable with all the technical and creative aspects of art production.
(more…)Spry Fox is looking for an Engineering Lead to help us work on a new, original game!
(more…)Spry Fox is looking for a 2D animator to help us work on a new, original game. We expect to have at least six months of full-time work for whoever accepts this position; possibly much more. (more…)
Spry Fox is looking for an Art Director / Concept Artist to help us work on a new, original game. (more…)
We are delighted to announce that Alphabear 2 is available worldwide as of today! 🙂
The first Alphabear – a quirky English word puzzle game, for those of you who haven’t played it – was an award-winning and relatively popular game. It has been downloaded well over five million times. Our new sequel is bigger and better in every way. It has a full narrative, several new modes, a new Avatar system (yes, you can finally *be* a bear, not just play with bears), new dictionary tools (featuring Merriam-Webster), greatly enhanced “bear speech”, and more!
Spry Fox is looking for a senior engineer, experienced with C++ (and ideally with Unreal 4 as well) to help us work on a new, original game. (more…)
We are pleased to announce that Alphabear: Hardcover Edition, the premium version of our award-winning English word puzzle game, is now available on Steam for PCs & Macs. The price is just $9.99 and we’re celebrating the launch with a 10% discount for those who buy it ASAP. 🙂
The original version of Alphabear has been downloaded over four million times and has won numerous awards, including Google’s “Best Indie” award in 2016. This updated version of Alphabear has been enhanced and completely rebalanced. All free-to-play elements have been removed from the game and new features have been added, including:
In addition to the Google Play Award, Alphabear is Gamezebo’s best mobile game of 2015, and also received a Game Developers Choice Runner Up award for “Best Mobile Game” in 2015. We’ve been asked by thousands of you for a premium, less-grindy, pay-once version, and we hope this fits the bill!
So what are you waiting for? Visit Steam now to take advantage of our launch discount! Happy bearaphrasing! 🙂
If you’ve ever wondered who Spry Fox is, why we do what we do, and what inspired us to make Steambirds Alliance, there is a delightful (short) documentary video you can now watch on that very subject. 🙂
By the way, if you like this video, the wonderful person who made it – Russ Pitts – is doing a Kickstarter to fund more videos of this sort! Please consider supporting Russ, he’s a real treasure.
We’re very pleased to announce the worldwide launch of Bushido Bear, our new action game for iPhones & iPads and Android devices! Don’t be fooled by its adorable appearance… Bushido Bear is a very challenging arcade game that will take many hours of play to master. 🙂
In Bushido Bear, you play as the guardian of a forest that is being invaded by evil creatures, spirits and demons. You can collect additional guardians, each of whom has unique characteristics and abilities.
For example, Lone Cub is a tiny bear who easily dodges enemies but is slower than normal; he rains arrows down on his enemies when he makes a combo. Neo Bear is larger, speedier, and capable of slowing down time as he plans his maneuvers. And Chef Bear… well, let’s just say that he enjoys making sushi.
We could say more, but we’d rather you just played the game!! We really hope you like it.
<3
The Spry Foxes
We’ve added mod support to the Steam (PC/Mac) version of Road Not Taken! Warning: writing and using mods is something you do entirely AT YOUR OWN RISK. We’re way too small a studio to fix every possible bug introduced by every possible mod. OK, having given that warning, here’s how you dive into modding:
Hi folks! We’re pleased to announce the first major FREE update to Road Not Taken! Today’s Steam update includes:
These changes (except mod support, sorry!) are coming to the PS4 for free as well as soon as they clear QA and certification! It’ll be a few weeks, but it’s definitely coming. 🙂
We’re a weird studio. When demoing a new game at PAX, most companies try to make the demo as good as they can before the show, then lock it down and live with whatever they’ve got until the show is finished. We, on the other hand, treated PAX Prime 2014 as a giant ongoing playtest, and iterated every evening on the demo/prototype of Free-Range Dragons. Each morning, we brought a new build of the game to PAX that was substantially different from the previous day’s build! 🙂
In case you’re curious to know more about this process, we’ve copied below the entirety of our Skype development log from that very intense time period — all 35 pages of it!
One thing to be aware of: Andrew Fray, one of the lead developers on the project, lives in the UK. That’s primarily how we were able to make this work: he did most of the iterating while the rest of us slept.
Skype Log, starting 8/27 (just before the start of PAX Prime):
Hey folks – I’m pleased to reveal the teaser trailer for Free-Range Dragons, an original action game that we’ve had a small team quietly prototyping for the past year while we were putting the finishing touches on Road Not Taken. 🙂
Free-Range Dragons is all about the joy of movement. We’ve spent a ton of time experimenting with and refining the mechanics of flight in this game, as well as the mechanics of chasing and being chased by wild dragons. Your dragon can loft itself into the air slowly, or use the terrain to send itself rocketing. You have a flaming dash maneuver that can be used as both an attack and a tool for altering your trajectory. We’re still experimenting with a variety of additional attacks and powerups, like fireballs, flame breath, lassoing, and more.
If you’d like to stay up to date on the ongoing development of Free-Range Dragons, just keep your eye on this blog, follow us on Twitter @spryfox, or sign up for our email newsletter!
And if you’re attending PAX Prime in a few days, stop by our booth and check out Free-Range Dragons in person! 🙂 We’re booth #135.
Hey everyone,
I’ve got a whole lot to say today, but first and foremost: Road Not Taken is available for download today!! You can get it worldwide on Steam (PC & Mac) and in North America on the PS4. And hey, we’ve put together a snazzy launch trailer to whet your appetites:
To celebrate the launch of Road Not Taken, we’re offering a limited-time 20% launch sale on Steam, where players can pick up the game for just $11.99! We’re also thrilled to be partnering with Sony, allowing PlayStation+ subscribers to get Road Not Taken absolutely free during the month of August. (For PS4 fans who live outside North America: the European PS4 launch is tomorrow, the Asian launch is the 7th, and the Japanese launch is the 20th, as per the PS+ release calendar.)
Hi folks! We’re thrilled to announce the official release date of Road Not Taken! It’ll be coming to Steam (PC & Mac) and the Playstation 4 on August 5th, 2014 — just a little more than a month from today! And to celebrate this announcement, we’ve put together a new trailer! This one is a bit, er, unusual. You might need to have lived through the late 80s or 90s to really get it. 😉
We’ve hit a snag while adding sound effects to the creatures in Road Not Taken. The problem is, we’ve got no idea what this critter should say:
So… we’re holding a contest!
Help us out by creating a sound effect that you think would sound good when the player bumps into this fox. If your sound effect is chosen as the winner, we’ll put it in the game, put your name in the game’s credits page, and give you a free copy of Road Not Taken, too. 🙂
Lately, we’ve been doing a ton of playtesting of Road Not Taken, particularly with fellow game developers. (If you’re ever looking for brutally honest feedback, other game developers are a good place to start.) In general, the feedback has been pretty positive: people love the game’s basic mechanics, art and audio. But one big issue repeatedly crept up in many of our playtests: people weren’t sensing the depth of the game and weren’t feeling a strong sense of progression. This blog post is all about how we’ve been fixing that. 🙂
I like to think of Road Not Taken as an iceberg floating in the ocean: a tiny percentage of the total game is visible above the surface when you first start playing, while the vast majority of the game lies unseen, waiting to be discovered. A large part of that depth comes from all the unusual creatures and objects you can encounter as you explore the enchanted forests of the game. Another large part comes from all the secret tools and boosts you can create if you know what you’re doing. (For example, if you combine the right number of red and white spirits lurking in the forest, you can create a useful magic axe.)
In previous blog posts, we’ve talked about the procedural system we use to create the enchanted forests that serve as your proving ground in Road Not Taken. That system is what makes Road Not Taken a fun game to play repeatedly, and as with any good roguelike you’ll need to play RNT many times before you’ve stumbled upon every interesting object and creature lurking in the forest.
But a purely random system, even a very rich one, can start to feel repetitive over time. Every snowflake might be unique, but after you’ve looked at a thousand snowflakes it’s easy to stop appreciating them! Our roguelike developer ancestors have invented a few solutions to this problem, one of which is to change the look and feel of the environment to signal when something new/important/dangerous is happening. Sewers transition into dungeons, dungeons become underground caverns, etc. And in Road Not Taken, peaceful glades might lead to blizzard-ravaged woods, haunted glades and dangerous ice caverns! The changing terrain is both a marker of your progress as well as a warning of new challenges to come.