Strengths, Focus and Games

The games we make are small, simple and friendly. As a small, self-funded developer, we don’t have the giant teams of animators, programmers, motion capture experts and famous voice actors that many other games have. A lot of small companies will tell you that it’s precisely this lack of resources that make indie games better. But we won’t. We love fancy big-budget games as much as the next person. We’ll be honest, we’re jealous of the big guys.

Still, while we might not have their resources, we do have a few tricks of our own that might even make the big guys jealous.

Shikigami Games was originally created to commercialize the PhD research of the company founder. Before forming Shikigami, he’d designed the artificial intelligence for some big name games, worked in private research labs designing AI for educational software, published in game AI books, spoken at game AI conferences, taught graduate and undergraduate AI courses and performed research in a variety of fields, including gesture recognition, opponent modeling, strategy representation, situational similarity, evolution of temporal clusters, scalable AI authoring systems, subjective impression of AI opponents and use of games in psychological and neurological rehabilitation. Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence is a big piece of Shikigami’s games.

PaperDoll, Shikigami’s first game, is based on the concept of highly-reactive worlds, worlds where people pay attention to what’s going on around them. In many games, characters only react to a small number of things the player does. Although players grow to accept this, it’s still frustrating when the game doesn’t react the way you think it should, or, in fact, react at all. There are holes in the game’s intelligence. We think we can fix that, and in doing so, not just make games more intelligent but change how people interact with games. In most games, the player is given a goal (go there, shoot that) and then searches for the single set of actions needed to achieve it. In a highly-reactive world, where every action has meaning, the enjoyment comes from trying everything to see what happens. It’s not about goals or winning, it’s about playing and exploring.

At Shikigami, we don’t make games where you’re a soldier shooting people or a tank commander trying to conqueror your enemy. We have nothing against those games, but there are plenty of smart people already making those. Our focus is on the games people aren’t making, the ones filled with intelligent, interesting characters who care about what you do and make you care about them.