Who do we want
Spry Fox is looking for a Senior Gameplay Engineer to help us build a non-violent MMO.
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08Jun (Note: if you haven’t already read it, please first read Summer Update #1, which includes lots of important information about new features that we won’t repeat here.)
Hey Scouts! It’s time to tell you more about what you can expect from the Summer Update. Let’s kick this off with yet another entirely new feature: Stone Skipping! (WIP – audio and vfx are still being finalized)
Every day, a limited number of mysterious, open-mouthed clamshells will reveal themselves beyond the shore. Find yourself a nice, flat skipping stone, toss it across the water into the clam, and rewards await you!
Amazingly, these clams are as appreciative of a skillful, many-skip stone toss as we humans, and will more generously reward scouts who manage to sneak in a few extra skips before hitting their target. Different-colored clams give different rewards; some give quartz, some cough up driftwood, and some will reward you with both of those things simultaneously. And on very rare occasion, even better rewards may emerge for a particularly generous clam.
For those of you who’ve unlocked a certain beach-loving character, you’ll be pleased to note that her recurring quest will no longer involve finding skipping stones, and will instead involve actually skipping stones. 😀
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03Jun Hey, fellow Scouts. It feels like just yesterday that we launched Cozy Grove on all platforms, and yet somehow Summer is almost upon us. And with Summer comes something very exciting – our first major (totally free) update to Cozy Grove! While dishing out bugfixes and QoL improvements, we’ve also been quietly working on a bunch of new content and features for you. We’ll be steadily parceling out most of this new content into Beta in the days ahead, and when we’re about to unveil something in Beta I’ll write a little blog post about it, like this. 🙂
New feature: Critter-catching (WIP)
Warm weather always brings the critters out, right? Summer felt like the perfect time to introduce critter-catching to Cozy Grove. A whole assortment of crawling and flying critters (with seasonal variation, of course) will now populate the item. You can buy a net from Mr. Kit to catch them – like the fishing rod, it will never break, and like fish, critters will spawn semi-continuously. Mr. Kit is fond of critters and will pay a reasonable amount for any that you catch, and some of the bears will express interest in critters from time to time as well. And of course, they’re collectible!
Different critters behave differently, and rarer critters are somewhat harder to catch. Happy hunting!
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17May Spry Fox is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to help us work on a new, original game!
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20Apr 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.
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02Feb
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.
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17Jan Spry Fox is looking for an Engineering Lead to help us work on a new, original game!
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17Dec 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…)
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05Sep Spry Fox is looking for an Art Director / Concept Artist to help us work on a new, original game. (more…)
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04Sep 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!
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11Aug 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…)
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24Aug 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:
- An in-game dictionary (so you can discover what your more inventive words actually mean!)
- A new “prestige” system, for people who complete the campaign and want to replay it at a higher difficulty level to continue challenging themselves.
- New random daily boards you can play.
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! 🙂
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04Aug 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.
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11May 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.
- Bushido Bear for iPhones & iPads
- Bushido Bear for Android devices
<3
The Spry Foxes
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30Sep Some background info: unscrupulous players will occasionally hack their Triple Town scores to get ludicrously high rankings on the leaderboards. To combat this, we have placed an upper limit on the leaderboard scores–any score above this threshold is assumed to be submitted by a hacker and automatically dropped. At the time of the events in this story, the threshold was 30M. Even the best players usually don’t score anywhere near this threshold, but apparently there are some players good enough to actually exceed it.
This is the story of one player who is good enough to exceed the score limit and was screwed (twice) by it, and who decided to take extraordinary measures to ensure his place at the top of the leaderboard.
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15Sep 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:
Using a Road Not Taken mod created by someone else
- Make sure that you’re running v731 or later. You can check your version number in the game’s options menu.
- Browse to the directory where you’ve installed Road Not Taken. (Follow these instructions to find it.)
- Browse to mods/
- In the “mods” folder, paste in a folder containing the mod you want to use. The “mod1” folder is there as an example. Note that you should not overwrite the mod1 folder (this won’t break the game, but if you ever want to get into modding, you’ll probably want to start from the default and/or have a copy of the default to refer back to).
- Launch the game, open the options menu, and choose Select Mod.
- The folder you just added should be listed. Choose it.
- The game will say that you will have to manually restart it. Agree. The game will close.
- Launch the game again.
Creating a new mod for Road Not Taken
- Browse to the directory where you’ve installed Road Not Taken
- Browse to mods/
- There is one mod installed by default. This is the directory named mod1/. Each mod is a directory of all the config files and art assets used by that mod.
- To create your own new mod, copy /mod1 to a new directory under the parent mods/ directory. Name it something unique. Example: “/mod/mod2”
- Edit the config files as you desire in a text editor.
To play your mod
- Load the game
- Open the options menu
- Select mods
- Selected your new mod. For example “mod2”
- You’ll be prompted to restart the game.
- On restarting the game, you’ll begin a game using your new mod config settings.
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15Sep 
Hi folks! We’re pleased to announce the first major FREE update to Road Not Taken! Today’s Steam update includes:
- New “just for fun” Timed Mode: try to rescue all the kids within four minutes! You lose time whenever you take damage, and you add time to the clock whenever you eat food and rescue children. Timed Mode has no impact on your career, so it’s a great way to enjoy Road Not Taken for a few minutes with limited stress. 🙂
- New creatures: the Forest Kraken and the Golem (and for those who haven’t yet noticed it in our previous micro-update, the Ninja Bear!) These guys add a little spice to the early years of your career!
- “Easier” mode and hard mode: In our previous micro-update, we split the game into two modes, Normal and Hard. “Hard” is basically our original gameplay mode with a few tweaks; “Normal” is more generous with energy and had less crowded rooms, among other changes. Checkpoints are also less punishing to use now. We’ve done more work in this update and now consider these features “complete!” This should make the game much more accessible to new users.
- Mod support!: Now you can edit everything about the game, including the properties of objects and levels, make your own hand-crafted puzzle rooms and more, and share your work with your friends! Running a mod will prevent your game from uploading scores to the leaderboards (to keep them pure/fair.) Also, please note that using mods is something you do at your own risk! We’re a very small studio and can’t be expected to prevent or to fix every issue that could arise in the zillions of possible mods that can be created. We’re excited to see those zillions of possibilities emerge though. 🙂 Detailed instructions on how to use and create mods can be found here.
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. 🙂
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11Sep 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):
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25Aug 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.
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05Aug 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.)
