CounterSpy prepares to infiltrate PS3 and PS Vita

Hello, PlayStation.Blog compadres! I’m one of the co-founders of Dynamighty, a small independent studio situated in lovely San Francisco. We’re a squad of ten, founded by a core team with prior experience at LucasArts and Pixar.

When Sony asked us to write a quick post to tell you a bit about our game, we met the request with excitement (“YES! We get to start talking about our game!”) and terror (“CRIPES! Now we’ve got to deliver…”) – a range of emotions that’s par for the course for devs during a production timeline.

Truthfully, we ARE super-excited to finally be able to start talking about our labour of love, our very first game: CounterSpy (working title), a side-scrolling action game being developed for PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, and mobile platforms.

As an elite member of C.O.U.N.T.E.R., your goal is to infiltrate, sabotage, and strike at the very heart of two opposing Super Powers embroiled in a frenetic Arms Race that threatens the existence of humanity. You are countering the insane plans of these Cold War foes, raiding their seemingly impregnable bases and undermining their sinister machinations, all before they can launch their ever more diabolical weapons of mass destruction against each other.

In fact, one of the levels we’ve been working on this month has you going behind the Iron Curtain to penetrate a secret military base that is preparing a deadly new rocket for launch. As the countdown to launch ticks away, you’ll fight through hordes of well-armed representatives of the card-carrying oligarchy that object to your presence.

Get to the rocket in time and you can sabotage the guidance system, causing a launch day explosion and getting you a nice fat bonus from C.O.U.N.T.E.R. HQ. It sounds like a tall order, but fret not: you’ve got a broad arsenal at your disposal, including a cool selection of prototype weapons that you will unlock as you steal collections of blueprints.

At Dynamighty, we are huge fans of side-scrollers. CounterSpy is our love letter to the genre. Just thinking about some of the classic games that shaped our childhood – Flashback, Out of this World, Impossible Mission, Metroid — we’re inspired to deliver something that brings our own voice to the genre.

The ’50s/’60s Cold War aesthetic of CounterSpy is borne of our love for classic espionage movies and television shows, side-scrolling action games, and the strong graphic styling of the ’60s. The setting was driven by a fundamental part of our vision at Dynamighty, which is to build games around themes and settings that we love and have inspired us across movies, TV, music or literature.

In this case, there is SO much rich inspiration to geek over from that era: the Bond movies, the classic Mission Impossible TV show, the graphic designs of Saul Bass, the cool mid-century architecture of that era… We love it all and we believe it is important that the games we make have a really distinctive, strong visual style.

Although it’s primarily a single player game, we are working on some interesting ways to let you compete with friends that go a little beyond traditional high scores. We are also very eager to talk about more about our cross-platform plans, including how the PS3 and PS Vita versions can work with the extended gameplay you can get from also downloading and playing on a mobile device. You know, the device you use to post Instagram photos of your cat, tweet your awesome lunch plans, or play those free games that don’t seem to ‘quite’ give you enough gems to get to level 4. It’s OK; we do those things, too!

From all of us at Dynamighty, thank you for reading! We hope you’ve enjoyed this small taste of what we’ve been working on. We’ll be sharing more as we go, including some of the cool stuff we have planned for the social side of the game. Until we meet again!