Comments on: Competitive Gaming: Come Play SpyParty at Evo in Vegas, July 6th & 7th

By: LowTierSteve

LowTierSteve — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 22:48:36 +0000

This aspect is very interesting to me. I’ve been a member of the Fighting Game Community for a couple of years now, and I run live streams of local casual game sessions and our monthly tournaments. I am always considering the watchability and entertainment factor of a game, and I feel like SpyParty will be very interesting and fun to watch. Demeteloaf brings up some well-thought points. If I were streaming my gameplay live (which I hope to do at some point), sometimes it would be appropriate to show only one screen, while other times I’d want a way to show both screens simultaneously to give the veiwers all the knowledge (obviously this capability would rely entirely on my PC setups). Cheating wouldn’t be a factor here because the players would be sanctioned off in a way that wouldn’t allow them to gain any extra information – problem solved. However, if I were streaming myself playing online from either viewpoint, it would be easy for the other player to cheat if they found out about the livestream. Maybe that’s still kind of a shot in the dark, but I’m always worried that when players find a way to cheat, they will do so. In my opinion, for SpyParty to obtain the same kind of high-level play as, say, Street Fighter games, people will have to watch videos online to learn new tactics, play competitively with viewer streams (like Starcraft II), etc. Starcraft is a game that doesn’t face this issue (despite having the same “you can’t see what I’m doing” aspect) because the gameplay is too fast; at high levels, if you Alt+Tab to look at the stream the other player is on, you are losing all of your time for actions/game activity and the other player now has a huge advantage based on actions he or she completed while you weren’t playing. In SpyParty, it would only take 5 seconds to figure out who the Spy is, and game over. For the record, I really want to see SpyParty become high-level like Checker wants – I have been excited about this for a long time (I wish I had found out about the beta sooner!). Just trying to offer extra feedback from a game player’s perspective!

By: checker

checker — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 20:18:00 +0000

I actually think it’s more “watchable” that most other competitive games in the sense that the pace is a lot slower so viewers don’t have to be experts to see what’s going on at a high level, but the hidden information aspect is definitely a challenge. One nice thing is that spectators can actually “play” the game as the Sniper…they don’t have the laser, but they can watch the game, and then check their guess, which makes spectating into a more active thing. We’ll have to see how it goes.

By: demeteloaf

demeteloaf — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:51:15 +0000

Curious how this ended up working…

Here’s my view, from my limited knowledge:

To me, spyparty seems inherently less…watchable than a standard fighting game. In a game that depends on asymmetric information, I’m not sure what the right format to give the audience that will make the game entertaining to watch. Do you give them just the sniper view, and leave them in the dark about who the spy is? Do you give them both views and allow them to see everything? Do you create a new view that only shows common information between both users (no sniper highlight/lowlight, etc.). Pretty soon, you’re going to run into the problem that plagued televised poker, as soon as you start allowing the audience to see more information than any player is allowed to see (hole card cameras), you have to stop televising events live because it becomes incredibly easy for an unscrupulous competitor to collude with an audience member to gain an unfair advantage. But at the same time, if you don’t allow the audience to have the info, it’s much less entertaining.

Anyways, not sure whether this is something you’ve thought about, or even if it is a real problem, but it’s what went through my head when you started talking about spy party on an entertainment level.

By: Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 21:33:52 +0000

I understand what you mean, given the structures of the fighting game versus SpyParty, but you seriously ought not to underestimate the depth of fighting games, even the psychological depth. if SpyParty is much deeper than fighting games, we won’t know it for quite awhile because fighting games really are very deep and because they have had a lot more time to develop.

By: jordy

jordy — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 16:48:36 +0000

I’d like to see this “This is like Bingo being played at an NBA basketball game…. Nothing necessarily wrong with it but strange.” statement reversed when this game is done and you show up at EVO again. I’m not very knowledgeable about fighting-games, but I do get the impression there is quite a large fan-base that supports intense competitive game-play. And I’ve no doubt there is a lot of depth in these fighting games, but when everything is said and done, I believe Spyparty garners much more potential, for at least psychological depth, then any fighting game, because it’s format seems a lot more suitable to display and utilize psychological depth.

Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I believe you can let that person eat these words when all is said and done.

By: checker

checker — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 03:28:59 +0000

Next Saturday, not this one, don’t want you to show up a week early! :) Yeah, I’m dying to see how the Evo folks take to it. I wish I had a plan(tm), my only plan is make it as deep as I can, and see what happens.

By: Viri Flaud

Viri Flaud — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 03:19:12 +0000

Excited to play some Spy Party this Saturday! I was pretty disappointed how Nidhogg was never released, so playing that is icing on the cake :)

As a former competitive gamer, I’m really curious to see your plans to turn Spy Party into a competitive game!

By: LowTierSteve

LowTierSteve — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 22:37:59 +0000

This is completely awesome. Congrats on getting the opportunity to expose your game in a big way – nobody really knew about Nidhogg until Northwest Championships a couple of weeks ago, and now it completely blew up. I bet you will be surprised at how many beta signups you get after Evo weekend. (or, maybe you won’t be surprised…)