I decided at pretty close to the last possible minute to have a small “thank you” party for the first set of SpyParty beta playtesters, and I invited some friends from the press who have been covering the game for a while.  Scheduling things during the evening at a big tradeshow like GDC is basically impossible…there are so many other conflicting events and parties and meetings that you have to just pick a date and go with it.  I picked Tuesday night, and tried to make it a short party, scheduled in-between other big events, but in a bizarre twist of fate I still ended up landing right on top of the SimCity 5 launch event, a game being made by all my old friends from Maxis.  Oops.

Anyway, the idea behind this party was to get the hardcore playtesters playing together in-person and say “Thanks!” with beer and snacks, but also to get them mentoring the folks from the press, who haven’t seen much of the mid-game yet because they haven’t played enough games.  I don’t know how well the mentoring thing worked out since it was not exactly a quiet contemplative training environment, but everybody seemed to have a good time, and that was the main goal.  Huge thanks to Jonathan Blow for letting me use his suite for the party, and to Luis & Mylene and John & Alice for bringing the food1 and drinks!

I took some pictures, maybe you can recognize some playtesters and press…

And, now we’re in the home stretch for the next batch of invites.  I’m plowing through the list of bugs and feature requests from the first batch, and the next invites are going out really soon™.  Here’s the current todo list:

• put portraits up along side for cast characters
• also spy!
• how to center text? allow two lines worth of space? uneven spacing?
• have box with ? on side for casting characters – progress status and neat
• don’t get that click on guy selects during cast characters
• character/level chooser mouse tip for select versus next/prev
• mouse overrides cursor keys in menus if over item…don’t override if key change but no mouse change
• why is volume not working on last 30 seconds timer on sniper machine?
• sniper review tells on waiting screens – sort of
• basic infrastructure for this
• chooser through animations playing on loop!
• text title and description support
• require sniper okay to continue
• bug_ambassador
• double_agent
• inspect_statues
• seduction
• steal_statue
• transfer_book
• check_watch
• mouse clicks are going to background window on spy side
• does spy side keep mouse cursor on results screen?
• sniper camera moves on results screen
• pgup->PageUp
• fix statue pad size
• multiple affordances controls
• display bumpers/QE/mousewheel?
• update action test text as affordance changes for Signal Double Agent?
• or kill it if it’s not an active affordance, so have to restart?
• document action test is same button?
• put small icon next to it?
• update while in lobby
• Update Failed on download bar…needs to test more
• remove briefcase verbs? or ignore them?
• write forum welcome/intro/faq posts
• update readme, or just empty it and point to the focum post?
• how to report bugs post
• post threads for known bugs
• tutorial video, walk through Spy and Sniper practice mode as if I was showing you how to play at a playtest
• ctrl-delete delete next word, use ctrl-right code…uh, and fix that
• updated lobbyserver won’t accept old connections, even to update, idiot!
• start sniper while other on results -> no -> sniper -> assert(level) – yay, found it!
• needs to zero play id on starting sniper because still current
• need to fix gameid/playid thing…I’m constantly stomping the gameid
• store gameid/playid pairs from server, then look up based on playid
• store playid on server as well
• can’t escape from sniper results after play attempt? IsLobbyGameOver busted
• add string wrap to property parser, or general line continuation?

I haven’t decided how many people to invite in the next batch, but it’ll be somewhere between 20 and 50, depending on how confident I’m feeling.  Yikes, 50 strangers from the internet!

2012-03-23 15:19:45 – Crossed some stuff off.  Working on the missions preview code, so people will be able to see what all the tells look like before playing.

2012-03-30 13:24:10 – Added a bunch of stuff I’ve been working on that wasn’t on the posted list!

2012-04-03 17:18:30 – Well, it turns out the mission tell preview took a lot longer than I thought, and I still didn’t manage to hook it up to the Sniper waiting screens, so it’s just in the practice menu for now.  I shouldn’t have done this one now, but once I started I failed to stop working on it.

1. Mylene’s homemade guacamole was awesome! [↩]

Cast Character Display

Update:  If you ended up here looking for the open beta, I have no idea why wordpress is sending you here when it should be sending you here. Sorry, and I’m trying to figure it out!

So, I’m motoring along through my beta todo lists,1 and I start to investigate a bug Rachel found during a recent playtest:  “suspected double agent on rollover but no triangles?”

Seems simple enough, and I’m able to reproduce it quickly.  Allow me to explain the bug, and then the naive fix, and then the real fix that doesn’t mess up the game’s tuning…

Missions, Casting, and Game Modes

First, some missions have cast characters, meaning the Spy (or the code) gets to pick a character at the party to cast into a role, for example the Ambassador, the Seduction Target, or the Double Agent.  These cast characters are displayed to the Spy and Sniper with a triangle over their heads, and the Sniper also gets a bit of rollover text when the target is on the cast character.  You can see an example to the right. 

The Sniper sometimes doesn’t get to see the correct cast character, so while both players get to know which character is the Ambassador, only the Spy gets to know who the Seduction Target is.  For the Contact Double Agent mission, the Spy gets to see the real Double Agent, and the Sniper gets to see multiple Suspected Double Agents, and doesn’t know which one is really it.2

There are also multiple game modes on most maps, and some of the game modes are known as subset modes, where the Spy can select for play a subset of the total available missions for the map, and then optionally enable a subset of the selected missions.  This is for more advanced play, and subsets prevent the Sniper from camping a given mission, or at least make it a very high risk strategy to do so because he or she can’t be sure the Spy is actually attempting that mission.   The Sniper can see which missions the Spy has selected, but not which he or she has enabled, so in the shot below, you can see the Transfer Microfilm, Swap Statue, Inspect Statues, and Seduce Target missions are selected, but the Spy only has to do 3 out of 4 of them.3

The Spy’s Selected (but not necessarily Enabled) Missions

The rollover text but no triangle!

The Bug

The bug reproduces when I deselect the Contact Double Agent mission on the Ballroom map, so there is no real Double Agent.  The mission code still randomly casts the Suspected Double Agents and sends them to the Sniper.  The Sniper code does “the right thing” in the code that draws the triangle and checks if the mission is selected, but doesn’t check in the rollover text code, and so you get the latter but not the former.  It looks like the shot to the right.

I obviously shouldn’t be displaying the rollover text to the Sniper for Suspected Double Agents when that mission isn’t selected as available.  Or should I…

The Fix(es)

My first thought was the obvious:  check whether the mission is enabled, and if it is, don’t display the text.  But as I was looking into making that fix, I started thinking about the ramifications of that change.  None of the cast characters can be the Spy (currently), so that eliminates a bunch of people at the party from the Sniper’s point-of-view, including the Waiter, the Ambassador, the Security Guard, and yes, the Suspected Double Agents.  If I fixed the bug and removed the rollover text, it would actually increase the number of potential Spies at the party, and change the tuning to make things more difficult for the Sniper.  The more partygoers the Sniper has to worry about, the more information he or she has to sift through to find the real Spy.

But, if I go the other direction, and just remove the number of Suspected Double Agents from the party if the mission is not selected, then things get easier for the Sniper, because even if the Sniper knows the suspects can’t be the Spy, having that density of people in the room increases the cognitive load.

After bouncing this issue off a friend, it seems like the right thing to do in the near term is to still send over the Suspected Double Agents, and display the triangle and the rollover text, even if the mission is not selected.  This way the number of people at the party stays constant regardless of whether that mission is selected, and the game stays tuned correctly.  It’s actually a kind of interesting solution, because it means the Sniper has just a tiny bit more cognitive load, because the suspects will be at the party, but the Sniper will have to either lowlight them or remember to ignore them if the Contact Double Agent mission is not selected.

Here’s the fix that actually removes the enabled check on the triangle draw code:

=== modified file 'project/spyparty/code/situations/double_agent/double_agent.cpp'
--- project/spyparty/code/situations/double_agent/double_agent.cpp      2012-02-24 03:13:37 +0000
+++ project/spyparty/code/situations/double_agent/double_agent.cpp      2012-03-14 21:20:46 +0000
@@ -414,8 +414,8 @@
     }
-    if(enabled && ( (GameMode == MODE_SNIPER) || (GameMode == MODE_DEBUG)) ) {
-        // highlight the suspects
+    if {
+        // highlight the suspects, even if we're not enabled, else we're affecting the tuning of the map...sigh
         for(uint32 i = 0; i < NumSuspectedAgents; ++i) {

Eventually, once I’ve got enough people in the beta to get valid statistics, I can experiment with other solutions, like removing the suspects. Another thing I’m not sure of is whether I need to display the Double Agent on the Spy view in this case…currently I don’t. It’s hard to see how that would matter since the Spy’s gameplay is so different, but I’m not quite sure.

This was not the blog post I was planning on making today, but I found it interesting that such a simple bug could have subtle tuning impact like this, and decided to share.  I firmly believe basically all game programming is game design, and the little decisions made while writing code are where the game design rubber hits the road, but this one surprised me with the subtlety of the ramifications.  I’m trying to imagine what would have happened if this was a big game with a team of designers, a team of producers, and a team of programmers, and this bug got entered by QA into the database, shunted to a programmer via an associate producer, and then “fixed” and checked off the list.  How long would it have taken to figure out why the Sniper was winning or losing more often than before after the next official beta build rollout?

I’ll post GDC pics next time!

1. Yes, sadly, there are multiple todo lists. [↩]
2. The real Double Agent is always a suspect.  The Spy doesn’t get to know who the other suspects are, just to make things even crazier!  Asymmetry everywhere! [↩]
3. There are actually two kinds of subset modes, one where the Spy has to pick which subset he or she will attempt before starting, and another where the Spy can opportunistically attempt the missions at play time. [↩]
4. GameMode == MODE_SNIPER) || (GameMode == MODE_DEBUG [↩]

I really should be working on my GDC1 talks. Instead, I am writing up yet another beta playtest, so I will make this quick!

On Friday my friends and awesome game artists Luis Antonio and John Cimino playtested.  They were only supposed to play 4 or 6 games, but kept playing for an hour, which is a good sign.  Of course, I took a bunch of notes, so here are the tasks from that:

• don’t get that click on guy selects during cast characters
• mouse overrides cursor keys in menus if over item…don’t override if key change but no mouse change
• have box with ? on side for casting characters – progress status and neat
• why is volume not working on last 30 seconds timer on sniper machine?
• sniper review tells on waiting screens
• chooser through animations playing on loop!
• require sniper okay to continue
• detailed stats stay on mouseover and off…good?
• mode on chooser that says if mouse moves off, and not keyboard select, then help goes away?
• pgup->PageUp
• ambassador was doing tapdance again…is it always the ambassador? I think so…!2
• microfilm get animation is same as put, so you get it out of your pocket, which makes no sense

I need to consolidate the recent punch lists so you folks can see what I’m working on.  I occasionally check items off the older lists in the older posts, which is kind of silly.  Sadly, the tasks on this list aren’t going to get checked off for a while due to the conference this week.

The best anecdote from the playtest was when John shot Luis and then said, “I lowlighted all of the men at the start because you’ve only ever picked women as the Spy.”   Luis realized his meta-mistake, and had to consciously start randomizing his character choices more. That is exactly the kind of know-your-opponent yomi gameplay I want to encourage!

If you notice the laptop to the left in the picture below, John is actually chatting with us using Google Talk.  Luis and John didn’t notice because they haven’t played that much yet and I didn’t want to point it out, but I could clearly hear the Spy’s mouse clicks through the connection, and they are huge tells, so I’m going to have to figure out what to do about that before I enable voice chat as a feature.

SpyParty causes bad posture.

All the auto-update, crash dump, and login stuff seems to be working really well, so I’m super happy about that.

Now, back to my talks!

1. The interview with Notch is supposed to be live-streamed on Gamespot, no link as of yet. [↩]
2. I’ve been seeing this rare bug where one of the characters would slide across the floor, jittering.  I noticed it again during this playtest and realized I always see it on the Ambassador, which is a huge help in debugging it! [↩]

Last Thursday we did a small playtest, the second so far in the Early-Access Beta!  This time it was Rachel, Lauren, Ian, and me, and we played and chatted (and restarted after crashes) for a little over 3 hours.

As it should, the playtest generated a ton of tasks, but this time I actually fixed a bunch of them before I got around to posting this, so here is the pre-struck-through punch list!  It seems much more satisfying this way, if only all my task lists were already mostly done before I posted them…

• coming out of settings menu doesn’t eat the final up and it performs action
• what is invert-y’s key? – was shift-y, made ctrl-y
• notify new chats if pageupped
• /ring bell when message comes in if in background?
• display match or lobby [channel] on /say and /emote
• escape should clear timestamps on all chats if displayed
• floating briefcase
• change white chat help to darker
• stop echoing command on /say /emote /whisper
• also do /reply and /retell local emulation
• chat help on sniper machine adjust up like chat line for portraits
• gameid sync is because server sends, then get request to change, which clears game
• include gameid in request?
• this is because of the clearing of the gameid in ClearGame
• the server gameid comes in before the be_role packet, which toasts it
• uh, undo previous CurrentGameID.Zero() change at least, still see sync issues?
• if page up, then escape, new chats don’t show up, and new chats disappear
• need to reset paging on escape?
• suspected double agent on rollover but no triangles?
• assert IsChatAllowed(), File: .\spyparty.cpp, Line: 5565
• when I chatted when cancelling invite
• go back on selection screens
• enter focus for chat?
• or just use it for chat and fuck it for menus
• fine, make it /say
• enter on empty chat should close
• crash dump!
• pigo says: i hit play again, and when i selected the sniper it crashed right away
• i’m in results, he e2mm, hit sniper, i hit no, he hits sniper again
• no confirm on end match in match menu
• just do SpyWins & SniperWins for lobby stats
• some whipsers getting eaten
• tolower username in game
• MOVEFILE_COPY_ALLOWED

2012-02-29 16:16:25 – I don’t think whispers were actually being eaten, I think it was /say in matches, which now describe which [channel] they’re talking to.  I think.

Of course, there are still some tasks left on the previous list, not to mention the list before that, but this is forward progress.

The funniest issue from this playtest came from chatting in the lobby.  I use Counter-Strike keys for chat, so ‘y’ is public chat, and ‘u’ is whisper.1  Lauren and Ian are big World of Warcraft players, so they would constantly hit ‘enter’ to chat, which when you’re in the lobby would start a match with somebody. About the third or fourth time one of them ended up playing a game in the middle of a chat conversation, I acquiesced and made ‘enter’ a synonym for /say just like ‘y’, and made ‘space’ the key for selecting menu items.2

Maxima

When you’re working on software, you get a feeling when you approach a local maximum, meaning a point where you’ve got the thing working pretty well given its current overall state.  This is always a long way from the global maximum3 but it means the game is pretty robust and does all the things it’s trying to do at this point in time reasonably well.  The current SpyParty builds need a bit more testing before they’re really at that local maximum, but I feel like they’re getting close.  The builds feel like this towards the end of PAX, after I’ve shaved off the rough edges found from 20 hours of playtesting.

This means I seem to be on schedule for the near-term beta rollout plan, which is nice.  I gave the “invite-some-fans-in-before-GDC” idea mentioned in that post a little more thought and I realized I was completely insane to even think about that…I have no time to fix or support anything during GDC,4 so everybody’s going to have to wait until the week of the 12th for more invites to go out.  Sorry!

Of course, with numerical optimization, moving off a local maximum means things get worse for a while until you find another maxima, and that’s true with software as well.  My plan is to simply bring you all along for that ride in the short term.  Once there are enough people in the beta who complain about me breaking stuff all the time, I will probably allow people to opt-in to the more bleeding edge builds, and keep them running on a separate server.  This is a pretty common thing to do to minimize pain during open betas, but it reduces your pain by increasing mine, so I hope I can put it off as long a possible.5

And no, I still haven’t gotten my first $14.26 from PayPal.

1. really team-chat in C-S, but whisper is the closest I have to that. [↩]
2. mouse click works as well, obviously. [↩]
3. if such a thing even exists for works of art and entertainment! [↩]
4. or even sleep, sadly. [↩]
5. especially since my server deployment team is me. [↩]

Late Sunday night, I was looking at the lobby server logs, and saw a login from “rachel” but no logout.  Uh oh, I thought, this must be a bug, since with only 9 people invited into the Early-Access Beta so far, the chance of actually finding another person in the lobby without making a pre-arranged date to play was basically zero.

I don’t have great tools for inspecting the running lobby yet, so I started up a local copy of SpyParty and logged on to poke around.  Hey look, it wasn’t a bug, it was actually my friend Rachel Reynolds, the real live beta tester!  She’d started up the game after registering, and was just checking things out.  She invited me to a game, and away we went!

According to the stats, we were in the match for 1 hour, 30 minutes, and 17 seconds, and we played 10 games for a total of 44 minutes and 31 seconds of playtime.  We spent a lot of time testing the new chat system and finding bugs and things that need cleaning up.  We also spent a lot of time re-learning how to play because neither of us had played since last summer!

Here’s the punch list we came up with from this official First Early-Access Beta Playtest:

• chat
• make local echo look like remote print, no /say
• actually, echo command and print message
• help on cursor line feels weird
• put “hit ‘y’ to chat, page up/down to scroll history” at bottom
• at least until person has done it a couple times?
• nah, just in small text, want to encourage it
• hmm, this is just going to be annoying if it’s always there…
• mask keys from game when chatting!!!
• sniper camera
• spy movement!
• don’t fade messages if app is background
• do a “checker is typing” meta message?
• can only do this out-of-game or it’s a tell
• word wrap text to screen
• uh, where do I cap the length of the chat message?!
• no where…need to do it in HandleKey, and have help?
• need to scroll the chat line too, including the help!
• or word wrap it? yikes
• statue in hand anim bug
• repro: grabbing statue on veranda in overlap area?
• fix statues to use the pad instead of radius
• character/level chooser mouse tip for select versus next/prev
• laser event still sending on sniper finished screen
• add back 3 of 4 known missions on ballroom
• have another menu mission state to pick available known missions
• pick 4 of 6 that will be the available
• then pick 3 of 4 to accomplish
• make sure this journals
• need to store some way of telling which map and game mode in db!
• a single dword?
• document action test is same button?
• put small icon next to it?
• remove briefcase verbs? or ignore them?

Not bad for an hour and half’s “work”!

However, for me personally, the biggest (re)discovery of the playtest was that I really like playing my game!  That probably sounds odd, but in the seemingly endless months of getting the beta ready, losing myself in server code that is necessary but feels very far away from making a work of art and entertainment for other humans to experience and enjoy, I’d actually forgotten how much I love just plain playing SpyParty, and it was great to be reminded of that.

Also, goddamn this game is stressful to play!

2012-03-02 13:59:07 – Just checked off the statue bugs.  Nobody is reading this old entry anymore, though, are they?