After a hiatus, we’re back with zerotka posting to the blog! – checker

Information is a valuable thing in all areas of life. The government does a great deal of work to keep ‘sensitive’ information from the public, Coca-Cola has a vault for its secret formula, and there are even rumors of secret societies like the Illuminati. It comes as no surprise to me when this expands into any competition. In baseball you can see the catcher give signals to the pitcher on what pitch they are thinking or you can see coaches touch their hats in certain ways to convey secret messages.

Therefore it should be no secret that SpyParty is exactly…the opposite.

You may have read from a previous blog about the community of SpyParty. The community extends a bit further than that. Not only are they friendly and want to treat everyone with respect, they are also open about their top secret strategies. There are a bunch of discussions on the private beta forums about the different strategies people use. Strategy is also freely discussed between players before, during, and after games. I can recall several days where the chat was filled with “theory crafting” and what strategies would be good.

The nature of SpyParty is that communication is bound to happen. When I was working the booth for PAX 2013, I would constantly see players finish a game and immediately talk to their opponent. They would discuss what they were thinking and what got them shot. Communication is extremely helpful when you are playing and learning the game. You gain a wealth of knowledge from the other person but you may also discover things that you do subconsciously. Communication isn’t just for newer players either, there is a TeamSpeak sever that many veterans use to communicate when they play each other. If you fancy watching streams, you can usually listen in to the players and see what they are saying.

SpyParty isn’t the only game in which you can communicate with your opponent after a match. There are tons of games that allow this and inevitably it seems to bring in some pretty mean spirited people. Valve has done a blog post about its communication ban system for Dota 2 and Riot has a team dedicated to helping correct bad behavior. Is SpyParty different by design or has this just been a lucky streak? The player base for SpyParty isn’t very big, especially when compared to Dota 2 and League of Legends. Both games have millions and millions of players. I have personally invested over 2,400 hours into Dota 2 and probably close to 1,000 into League of Legends. Not once, after a game, has the opponent offered advice on how I could improve, or what mistake(s) caused my downfall(s). Yet, after every game of SpyParty, that’s the first thing that gets talked about regardless of how much you have played. There’s some sort of inclination to just talk–even if it’s just about strategies.

Sharing strategies and game breaking bugs in SpyParty isn’t a recent phenomena, it’s been going on since the beginning. checker has stated that he would like to know about strategies in order to properly balance and tune the 1v1 to ensure a better experience for everyone, and so far the community has been doing just that. I’m sure there are some strategies that are being tested out in private or being tinkered with but players don’t seem to keep strategies secret for long, and there does not seem to be a guaranteed winning strategy.

I reached out to checker and asked him his thoughts on the openness of the community and the future of this phenomena.

Could you explain your thoughts on the openness of the community toward sharing strategies and sharing information so readily?

I think it’s amazing!  I have two thoughts about it, which are related but separate. First, at this stage in development it’s really important that I find out about any degenerate strategies as soon as possible so I can fix them, and the folks in the beta seem to agree with that and they quickly report bugs that are exploitable in gameplay, or strategies that seem unbalanced.  The really experienced players have even gone to the trouble of ranking the game balance bugs in order of priority in the Bugs forum so I can quickly know which ones to fix first.  Second, the players in the beta seem genuinely interested in exploring SpyParty‘s the mechanics to see how deep the game goes, and they’ve publicly talked about how sharing strategies will allow them to go deeper faster. I think that shows a lot of forethought and more than a desire to just play a game now and win, but also to help it reach its potential, for which I am very grateful!

Do you think this trend is going to keep up even as the community grows bigger and bigger?

I really hope so.  I think the small size of the community and the relative inaccessibility of the game right now help a lot because everybody currently in the beta is committed to the game, for sure.  However, I do think (hope?) the design of the game helps with this a bunch too.  First, as you mention above, the way the games in a match play out, there’s a clear break time between the games where it just makes sense to ask “Why’d you shoot me?”, and the way the replays are integrated into the game results also encourages analysis and conversation about the game you just played. But another important aspect of the game design that’s different from a lot of other competitive games is the intimacy of an individual game, where you’re playing a close subtle game of hide and seek with a single other human, rather than being on a team of people killing each other repeatedly. The team dynamic in a lot of MOBAs means it’s easy to take credit for victories and blame others for defeats, which doesn’t really work in SpyParty, so I think players approach it from a more humble vantage point from the start, which is good for honest communication.  I mean, unless you’re nice and ask, you might never know why the Sniper shot you, so it behooves you to be friendly and exchange information.

Eventually you will run into someone who is trolling or just having a bad day and become a hamper to the community. Is the process that takes care of ‘bad apples’ going to be primarily community driven or some sort of automated reporting system or perhaps a combination?

It remains to be seen, I’m not sure yet what will be necessary. So far, it’s seldom come up, and usually a quick PM in the beta forums solves the problem.  As the game grows, I assume we’ll need some kind of reporting system, but I hope to never have to write some kind of algorithm that bans people or whatever. I’m an optimist, even about people on the internet!

Finally, I have heard rumors that the community loves you. Do you have a response to that?

♥

Thank you for your time!

Update:  we’ve shown them animating!

I’m super excited because it’s time to introduce the next five new SpyParty characters!

Say “hello” to the new folks!

And here are all ten of the new characters posing for your aesthetic edification! This images looks like a cast photo from a wacky mystery movie, and this is only half of the twenty (!) playable characters we’ll have in the end.1

Half of the SpyParty Cast, Done!

As I’m sure you remember, we’ve chosen what we call a natrualistic and illustrative style for the new SpyParty artwork, and I’m so incredibly happy with how it’s coming out. The characters are varied and diverse, but all feel like they fit into the SpyParty universe. John Cimino, our amazing artist, has outdone himself again, and the work just keeps getting better!

Diversity

Before I introduce each character individually, I want to talk for a second about diversity in SpyParty. I did a long interview with Evan Narcisse over at Kotaku a while back where I talked about the different kinds of diversity I want to explore in the game, including how important a diverse and inclusive community is to me, but for the purposes of this character reveal I want to talk about diversity in the character designs.

I want SpyParty to be “the most diverse game ever”, which is a kind of silly hyperbolic statement, but it is a good guiding principle for us to follow when we’re concepting characters. Less hyperbolically, I would like the characters in SpyParty to represent a wide variety of people who don’t normally appear in video games. This list includes women, minorities, old people, and people with disabilities. Furthermore, I’d like all of these diverse characters to be playable, and have them all be competition-level tuned and balanced, even though they retain their diverse characteristics. By this I mean the elderly woman will walk like an elderly woman—so mostly likely slower than a fit young person—and because of this, a player choosing her as the Spy will have to compensate with better time management for accomplishing missions. However, the design of SpyParty is such that this walk-speed-disadvantage will contribute to the meta of the game, and so players will be less likely to choose her, so she’ll be less suspicious, so they’ll be more likely to choose her, and down the yomi rabbit hole we go! I’m lucky that I’m working with a game design that allows me to explore diversity with no compromises. If I was working on a game with serious space marines in it, it’d be a lot harder to include a playable elderly woman…

The axes of diversity we’re actively exploring with the SpyParty characters are: age, gender, ability, race, and body shape. We’re also addressing sexual orientation, but in the game mechanics themselves, rather than in character design: there’s a mission called Seduce Target, where you can choose who you’re going to seduce, and it allows any combination of characters to seduce one another. It’s not a terribly deep exploration of sexual preferences, but it’s there and it’s real gameplay. There are many other axes worth exploring; one important one we are skipping for now is class/income-level, because I couldn’t figure out a way to address that meaningfully in a game about a high society cocktail party while still keeping the game focused on the core perception and deception skills.

We’re also looking to keep the cast diverse in the sense of the archetypes we include. We definitely acknowledge and embrace some spy and mystery cliches, but we want to tread carefully and push further. Is it okay to have a character in a traditional aristocratic outfit from a country as long as there are others of the same race in more modern business or party attire? I think so, but we need to be careful to not slip into racial stereotypes and harmful cliches.

On a more superficial note, we also look at aesthetic diversity, especially when it comes to the silhouettes of the characters. This is a very inspirational sketch showing the diversity of silhouettes in the Corpse Bride movie:

In SpyParty, the silhouette is incredibly important for instant visual recognition, even when lowlit. The less confusion between characters, the better the Sniper can keep track of suspects. Hats and interesting hair styles are a big part of creating the character’s silhouette, as you can see in the group shots.

The New Characters

Okay, enough generalities, here they are! Remember, these names are all placeholders until we pick real names for them. I think we’ll probably end up involving the community in naming the characters, but it’s not time for that yet. Each character has an interesting fact or anecdote about them, so I’ll introduce them each individually…

Ms. F

We use photo and video reference when we create the characters, because we want a level of naturalism that you can’t really get if you’re just making stuff up out of your head. There are tons of tiny details that give weight and believability to a real person in a real space, and it’s easy to miss them if you don’t have reference. Well, the reference for Ms. F is actually John’s girlfriend Alice! Alice has helped out a bunch in the SpyParty booths at PAX and Evo, training newbies to play the game, and giving them pointers to play better.Here’s a great photo of Alice cosplaying Ms. F…will her appearance in the game change her real life mentoring behavior?

Mr. G

Mr. G is the first character in the new art style who has a direct analog in the old art, so he allows us to do embarrassing before/after shots like this one.

Ms. H

SpyParty characters are made of about 12000 triangles on average. Ms. H’s hair has 23767 triangles in it. Put another way: there are two full characters’ worth of triangles in her hair alone. It’s also rigged, meaning it has a skeleton inside it so it can animate plausibly while she moves her head and talks. It’s worth it to spend so many triangles on her hair because it looks so awesome, and it really makes her silhouette distinct. We actually spent a ton of time during the original character art style development phase working on how hair should look. I think hair simulation usually looks terrible in games (and CG movies), so we wanted something stylized and animatable, but that didn’t need a zillion bones or a special hair system and that fit our illustrative style. This hair technique we settled on, where the hair is kind of “clay-like”, works really well. John can animate parts like ponytails and mustaches, but we aren’t stuck simulating and rendering individual strands, which is expensive and usually looks terrible.Here’s a shot of Ms. H’s hair showing the polygons:

Mr. I

We just added vehicles to SpyParty. Initially Mr. I is going to move around like the other characters, which will probably look terrible since wheelchairs do not move by the same rules that walking people do, but eventually he’ll get a completely custom wheelchair movement system. He’s lower to the ground than the other characters, so he might be a good choice as Spy because he’ll always have good cover, but then again, that makes him suspicious. I think the dot-com billionaire turtleneck snob look is going to get him shot a lot.

Ms. J

Yes, the purse dog is fully animated. Well, it doesn’t have a lower body, but the head is articulated and it can look around and react to what’s happening. I don’t know if people are going to shoot the dog or not. Technically, it’s part of her mesh and skeleton, so you can shoot Ms. J by shooting the dog just like you can shoot any character by shooting them in the hair or in the shoe, so I’d have to add special code to disallow shooting the dog, but on the other hand, I can’t imagine adding a sound effect for shooting the dog, that seems like it’s going too far. There’s a glass breaking sound if you shoot somebody having a drink, so there is precedent for special sound effects… This needs serious design thought, and consultation with an ethics committee.The dog is modeled after Alice’s dog, which may also affect the decisions in this area.Also, Ms. J is drinking a Pimm’s, complete with a cucumber. And didn’t John do a fabulous job with that hat?

Group Shots

Here are some posed conversations with the new and old characters:

Technical Details

One interesting difference between this reveal and the last time is these renders are all of the in-game realtime models, not concept art models with millions of polygons. When we did the first reveal, we hadn’t created the runtime models yet with their posable skeletons, and so we had to pose the million polygon models, which was a giant pain in the butt. We decided never to do that again, since posing the concept models is basically a complete waste of time in terms of developing the game. So, this time we waited to reveal them until we had the full in-game models decimated, textured, and rigged. John’s already animating them and so we’ll reveal their talk animations soon, probably after E3.

There are some non-realtime rendering tricks and a bunch of post-processing on all these shots, but the meshes and textures are the same as appear in the game.  The foam on the beer is totally faked in Photoshop, however.

Since we’re releasing these new characters rendered with the in-game models, let’s also re-release the old set of characters, but this time rendered from their realtime meshes so they match up:

Next Steps

Now that we have 10 new art characters, we can finally make a real playable competition-worthy map, and that’s the goal for PAX 2014. I’ll talk about this in more detail in the near future, but as you probably know, the original 5 characters are in the game now, but it’s more of a technology demo than a playable map since 5 people isn’t enough of a crowd to make a real SpyParty level.  But with 10 characters we can really do something! Currently the existing Balcony level has 7 partygoers, and Ballroom has 13, so we’re going to make a new map that’s between the two sizes, and get it tuned up and even use it to replace Beginner vs Beginner Ballroom as the tutorial map, so when people sit down to play at PAX or in the beta, they’ll be playing the new artwork from the beginning.  Eventually they’ll want to start exploring the other maps, and they’ll find the old art, but hopefully by that point they’ll understand the depth of the game and not care too much about the visuals. That’s the theory, at least.

We can also try replacing Balcony with a new artwork map with 7 partygoers, but that’s a bit of a terrifying prospect given that Balcony is one of the premier competition maps and is very finely tuned. But, it’s gotta happen sometime!

More generally, we have 10 more new characters to do to give us a total of 20 playable partygoers. If you look at that group shot at the top of this post, it’s going to be a very crowded picture.  I think we’re going to have to either widen the image or make some people sit down. Heck, even this this crazy picture of the giant Downton Abbey cast has only 18 characters in it, so imagine an even more crowded cast than that!

Wallpapers

Finally, if you want higher res versions, here are direct links to the 2560×1600 ones.  If you need other aspect ratios, let me know in the comments.

 

1. And that’s not counting the waiter and the security guard, so 22 total, yikes! [↩]

So, we made a trailer last week, which may have inspired beta player jecat to make this awesome SpyParty parody of the famous Dead Island Trailer:

Ye Olde

That long image there to the left is a picture of the current spyparty.com homepage as I write this. As you read this, there will be a new fancy doesn’t-look-like-a-default-WordPress-install homepage. Welcome to the 21st century, spyparty.com!

Plus, to go along with the new homepage design, we made the first SpyParty trailer! More on that below.

The development blog is staying the same old design for a while,1 but I wanted people who came to the site looking for information about or to play SpyParty to be able to find it easily, which was not the case with the old homepage.

So, I went with a design like most indie game websites, with the name, a trailer, a short description, some screenshots, and a “buy button”, all near the top of the page. Of course, since I am…well, let’s just say I’m never at a loss for words…you can keep scrolling and get more information about the game.  I wanted to highlight all the various ways to follow the game and get more info, talk about how cool the community is, call out some of the great quotes from the press, acknowledge that I have no idea when the game will be done but that I will keep making it cooler, and finally talk about John and Keith a bit. Oh, and proudly display the game’s laurels, as required by Indie Game Law.

I wanted to show some of the new art on the page, but also mix in the old art since it’s the art you actually play right now.

Also, there’s finally a link to the beta site login for existing players to find the forums or re-download the game, which has been requested a million times here and elsewhere, except I probably hid the link too well so no one will actually see it. I also think I might make the blog link a little more obvious. I’ve got a way to put a headline near the top of the page for important news, but I also might make a section for the latest headlines from the blog, and maybe even a list of live streams currently playing, kind of like the streams page.

One important goal of the website was to make it fully responsive,2 since apparently these mobile telephones and tablets are a thing now.  I got a bunch of help from the totally awesome Chris Remo with how to implement my design in HTML and CSS and make it use CSS media queries to work on small-ish devices.  You can resize your desktop browser window to see all the dynamic stuff happening as the width shrinks, I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

One thing I’m not happy with is how it appears to be basically impossible to write a javascript lightbox that doesn’t suck.  If you click a screenshot on the homepage (or most places on the blog), the lightbox will pop up.  I’ve used a heavily modified version of Lokesh Dhakar‘s lightbox script for a while, and given my effort to make the page work well on phones, I tried to update the lightbox to do touch interactions seamlessly. Well, as far as I can tell, it is basically impossible to implement a lightbox that does not allow the user to scroll the lightbox off the screen, allows native pinch zoom in the browser (not emulated crappily by javascript), and allows swipe to change images when at the edge or one finger scroll if zoomed in, and is cross browser and degrades gracefully.  Basically, I want a lightbox that acts like a native photo gallery app, but it does not appear to be possible.  I decided native pinch zoom was the most important feature because I’m always frustrated when a mobile site disables it when there are images on the page, so I prioritized that and ended up allowing the lightbox to scroll off the view, which is bad, but was the least worst of all the tradeoffs I found.

The Trailer

As part of this homepage redesign, we finally made a trailer for the game!  Keith did a great job with it. We’ve had trailers for specific features before, like the New Art Trailer, and the Replays Trailer, but never for the game as a whole.  Here it is:

I wanted this trailer to give the flavor of the game, but not explain too much. It should have a bit of a narrative arc and tell a light story, but nothing too distracting. In the end, I think it might be a bit confusing for complete strangers to SpyParty, but I hope people can figure it out from the video and the short description, and hopefully the trailer makes people who are just hearing about the game want to learn more.  I also worry that the trailer implies there’s a fixed character who’s the Spy, but it wasn’t clear how to correct that without a lot of exposition that would have messed up the flow.

You’ll notice this trailer is almost completely the old art and is completely in-game footage. This is intentional, because the last thing I want is somebody watching some super polished pre-rendered trailer and then loading the game and feeling misled. Of course, this means the Spy pours a drink down her face in one shot because the runtime code for taking sips from a drink isn’t aligned with the mouth properly in the old art. Oops.

The one place where we diverged from the game was having music in the trailer. The music was a relatively late addition; we were originally going only have the crowd walla, but in the end it felt necessary and I think it really helps tie the whole thing together.

We’ll be making new trailers every so often now that there’s a good place for them right there on the shiny new homepage, so as the new art comes in expect the new trailers to reflect that. I’m also thinking about inviting fans to make trailers to see what people come up with; I really liked it when Minecraft showed fan-made trailers on their homepage.

Also, here’s to the little details:

Bugs and Comments

Please post comments below if you have trouble with the new page on your preferred internet viewing device. It’s impossible to test all the different ways to browse the web, so I’m hoping my limited stochastic sampling found most of the big stuff, but I’m sure I missed some things. If you want to report a bug on the page, mention your browser and device and what you saw when things went wrong.

Thanks!

1. mostly due to priorities and time constraints, not any particular love of the old design [↩]
2. which, the last time I made a web page, was called liquid, and also get off my lawn [↩]

I was playing a birthday match1 today with jecat, and after one of the games where I was the Spy and thought I was highlit the entire game but in fact was lowlit, we got to talking about often this happens, even in elite games. In fact, the Spy often thinks the Sniper knows (or strongly suspects) who he or she is, and so Spies often find themselves playing conservatively even though they know from experience that when they’re Sniper, it’s very hard for them to figure out who’s the Spy; you usually feel pretty snowed under with information.

I got to thinking about it, and this Spy world-view, where you always think you’re the center of attention, even though there’s an entire party going on around you filled with people doing their party things, seems really narcissistic, or egocentric, or solipsistic…I’m not sure which, maybe all three? Fighting that assumption that you’ve already been made and forging ahead is one of the core biases to overcome as the Spy. You see it at all levels of play from newbies to elites, which I find very interesting.

This is all related to one of my core aesthetic goals of the game, namely forcing consequential decisions with partial information, which I’ve always thought of as primarily occurring on the Sniper side, but it really does happen on both sides. As the Spy, you have to decide to do something (accomplish missions), and then what to do (which mission), even though you don’t really know if you’re a suspect or not. How you go about this “doing” is obviously very important, but just the act of overcoming your confirmation bias and starting at all is something you can feel when playing.2 This is one of the parts of the game that I’m most happy with, because I think this concept of embracing uncertainty and making decisions even when you’re not sure is very au courant, in that most big decisions in modern life are made with only partial information, but you still have to make them to the best of your ability.

Here’s an edited clip of the stream with parts of this game and the discussion after it:

If you want to see the whole stream, it’s here.

In the stream chat, varanas had a nice quote on this topic:

Sometimes when I think I’m done for I’ll just start taking crazy risks because I think I have nothing to lose. I think it’s best to assume that if you’re not dead then there’s still everything to play for.

Given how often the person who thinks they’re doomed ends up winning, I have to agree.

1. usually round numbered games like 1000, 5000, but in this case, 12 games around his 2222th game, since we missed his 2000 [↩]
2. This idea of games making these thought processes explicit is covered nicely in Frank Lantz’s GDC talk, Hearts and Minds. [↩]