I’m sitting here in the Fire Hose Games offices, trying to stay out of the way1 as they do interviews about Slam Bolt Scrappers, which is shipping on PSN on March 15th,  getting ready for PAX East, and I realized I still hadn’t posted the new manual!

So, here’s the pdf, ready for half-fold double-sided printing:  The Updated SpyParty Manual

Here are some rasterized images:

So, study up, and hope to see you at PAX East!

1. okay, I actually was so exhausted I took a nap on their couch [↩]

As expected, SpyParty lost to Minecraft for the IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize, but we had a great time at the show and have lived to tell the tale (or at least blog about it)!

First off—and most importantly—I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the incredibly awesome SpyParty booth volunteers:  Chelsea Hash, Heather M. Decker, Roger Hanna, Tim Fowers, and Dan Alongi!  You can see them helping out in some of the pictures below, and they totally saved me from death-by-overcommitment!

Next up, come play the game at PAX East!

I’m mostly going to throw some pictures up in a gallery, but I figured this one would have some comedic value by itself:

This was the kiosk when we arrived for setup. I think this configuration might be biased towards the Sniper.

We were super lucky to have a line most of the time, so people could read the new manual1, and everybody seemed to have a good time with the game.  There were a few different video interviews that will be going up over the next couple months, and I’ll link to those when they’re available.

Did you spot the ringer, Alex Baard, from the PAX West tournament?  He didn’t tell his opponent he’d played before.  Not nice!

And, finally, here is the excellent Daniel Benmergui, who stayed with me after GDC for a couple days, gazing into the future, thinking artistic thoughts.

1. which I just realized I haven’t posted yet, I’ll do that tomorrow [↩]

The always awesome Ben Gilbert at Joystiq just broke the news:  SpyParty is going to be at PAX East, March 11th through 13th in that city whose streets were designed by cows, Boston, Massachusetts!

As I say in the article, I’m super happy about (at least) two things:

1. The Fire Hose Games guys for being so incredibly awesome to let me crash their booth (#1133) at the last minute.  They’re shipping Slam Bolt Scrappers in March on PSN, and it’s going to be insane crazy fun.

2. That fans are going to be able to play all the cool stuff going in for the GDC build, which is now officially the GDC & PAX East build!  Check out the article for a list of stuff going in.  Here’s a teaser for the Steal the Plans mission:

So, come play SpyParty and Slam Bolt Scrappers in Boston in March!

Update: two more articles in this week’s Joystiq series have been posted! The first is an interview recorded at NYU last November about my thoughts on quality for SpyParty, and the second is a video walkthrough of the new maps!  Here it is embedded, but it sometimes starts with an advertisement, sorry!

A video used to be embedded here but the service that it was hosted on has shut down.

SpyParty needs help!

Are you local to the Bay Area or going to be here next week, responsible, dependable, and hard-working, a game developer or interested in game development, and available to man (or woman) the SpyParty kiosk at the IGF Pavilion at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, March 2nd through March 4th?  Yes, that’s Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, next week…

If so, I want to talk to you.

Before you say, “please, yes, let me slave away on the expo floor!”, you need to understand how much work it is to do booth duty.  You are on your feet for hours, teaching people how to play SpyParty, wrangling crowds1, explaining how to do the non-intuitive bookshelf mission over and over again, answering sometimes inane questions, and taking detailed notes about any problems you see so we can reproduce them later, and the entire time you have to have a good attitude and be genuinely excited to help people out.   With the right attitude, you will have a blast and meet some great people in the game industry, but you need to represent the game well to the people who want to play.

You have a tough act to follow in Tom and Ian:

Specifically, I’m looking for two or three people to help out.  You’ll have to get to play and learn SpyParty, and then work the booth during the three expo floor days when the IGF Pavilion is open.

I need to be able to completely trust you, because my GDC schedule is always insane even when I don’t have my game on the expo floor, so I expect it to be off the charts wacko this year, so you’re going to be on your own a fair bit.  You will be representing my game when I’m not there, and my game is really important to me, both personally and professionally, so I need to trust that you’ll do a good job.

You should apply to do this because you want to help out, be a part of the insanity of making an indie game, and meet cool game industry people, but there is another benefit:  as part of the IGF finalists package, I have some passes to the GDC, so you and your co-booth-helpers will be able to trade off and go see some talks.  The schedule is here. At the very least, even if the talk turns out to be bad, you’ll be able to rest your feet.

If you are interested, send me email with the title “SpyParty IGF booth duty”, and explain why you’re the right person to help out.  You might want to include any references of people we know in common, since a network of trust always helps.  Anybody is welcome to apply, whether a full time professional game developer, an indie, QA folks, bloggers, fans, game developer wannabes, or whatever.  The key thing is you’re responsible, dependable, hard-working, and trustworthy.

Thanks for considering it, I really appreciate it, and sorry I’m so late in getting this together!

1. hopefully [↩]