Wow, so the week after the Game Developers Conference was kind of  simultaneously crazy and great for SpyParty!  As I posted previously, I did a ton of playtests at the conference with developers, and I got a lot of great feedback on the game.

I also playtested it with a few folks from the game press, and they were nice enough to write up their experiences on their various news sites.  And then those articles got picked up by other sites, and things went a little nuts.  I was on airplanes for half of one of the days, ssh’ing in from my phone on the tarmac to try to keep my server running!

Let’s see, in the order the stories were posted:

• AVC at GDC ’10: Spy party! by John Teti on The Onion AV Club
  “I don’t want to beat around the bush here; this game is awesome in too many ways to describe here.”
• GDC 2010: Enjoyed and Annoyed by Evan Narcisse on Time Magazine’s Techland Blog
  “Even in its pre-natal form, Spy Party does a great job of creating a new kind of multiplayer psychological tension. It’s something that wasn’t even on my GDC agenda, yet it wound up rocking my world.”
• Why you need to be excited about SpyParty by Anthony Burch on Destructoid
  “There has never been a videogame like SpyParty. … SpyParty is as cerebral and personal experience as I’ve ever had with a multiplayer game. … Despite being two years away from completion, the early version I saw still remains one of the most subtle, enjoyable, and surprisingly playful multiplayer games I’ve yet played.”
• Innovative SpyParty Is Ultimate Mind Game by Gus Mastrapa on Wired’s Game|Life
  “SpyParty is like nothing else I’ve ever played. … When the laser focuses on you, the tension is intense. And the relief, when the beam swings away, is powerful.”
• I Know That You Know That I Know What You  Know by Chris Dahlen on Edge Online
  “Both players are tense with the joy of knowing or not knowing or thinking they know what’s about to happen.”
• The Next Smart Video Game Only Lets You Kill Once by Stephen Totilo on Kotaku and Gizmodo
  “Part of what is so exciting about Spy Party is the stuff that happens around the game. Hecker has seen the game trigger strong emotional responses. I even felt it… guilt of all things. I’ve killed thousands — millions? — of enemy characters and even some friendly characters in video games with none of the pangs of consequence. I shot one innocent partygoer in Spy Party after tracking them for a few minutes, after being sure they were Chris Hecker’s avatar and up to no good, and then, as they lay dead on the floor I realized I was wrong. I felt bad.”
• You Only Shoot Once: SpyParty by Kieron Gillen on Rock, Paper, Shotgun
  Kieron couldn’t make it to GDC this year, but he wrote up his thoughts on the game from reading the other articles!
  “Pure battle of wits stuff here, and seems totally fascinating. It’s a couple of years away, at least in part due to a major general aesthetic upgrade, but we’ll be watching it. Closely. Trying to work out if it’s a spy.”

In the middle of all this, Gus’ Wired piece hit the front page of reddit, and Anthony’s Destructoid story hit the front page of the games section of stumbleupon, both of which generated a ton more traffic to the articles and the SpyParty blog.  Stephen’s piece generated 300 comments on Kotaku and Gizmodo, a Fark comment thread, and as of this writing it’s on the top of the stubleupon games section with Anthony’s piece on the same page!

Then a bunch of other people started writing articles about the game, with titles like Finally, a TRUE Spy Game!, and commenting about the game on forums and on Twitter.  It broke out of the video game industry in a few places, like this article on a poker blog:  Innovative Video Game Concept Should Appeal to Poker Players.  It even snuck its way into articles about other games, like Brandon Boyer’s article about Jason Rohrer’s Sleep Is Death; the “banana bread” comment in that story happened because Jason thought Brandon had already played SpyParty, and the current tell for the Contact Double Agent mission uses the codeword “banana bread”!

To state the obvious, I am over the moon with all of this coverage.  The comments by fans on the big gaming blogs are really encouraging, and people seem to love the game concept and want me to get it done as fast as possible.

I took some screenshots to send to the various journalists, and I’ve assembled a page of images, which is also accessible at the top of the blog.  I’ll add any media to that page in the future.

I also took a bunch of pictures of the press guys playing each other…

Continue reading ‘GDC 2010: SpyParty Press Extravaganza’ »

I’ve decided the best way to go really mass market with SpyParty is to support a mashup of Big Head Mode and the hip retro vector graphics style of Tron and Geometry Wars…

Continue reading ‘New SpyParty Gameplay Mode’ »

As I mentioned before, I playtested the hell out of SpyParty at GDC this year.  I tried to take pictures of everybody playing, while simultaneously taking copious notes, as one should while people are playing your game.  Since I’m doing the depth first design methodology, the game required a fair bit of explaining to get people up and running, but after that, everybody got into the rhythm.

First up, my old friends Mike Mika and Chris Charla. I had added a bunch of features in on the runup to GDC, including adding console controller support to the Sniper so it could be played without needing room for a mouse, and I needed to make sure I didn’t break anything before setting it up at a big party on Tuesday night, so I had Mike and Chris over to the hotel room to pretest.

Mike and Chris have known each other forever, and so they know each other’s game play styles pretty well.  Mike used this knowledge to his advantage when he decided to just stand around talking, while loudly flicking the camera joystick (which doesn’t move the Spy) in time with another AI moving.  Chris took the bait and shot the civilian.  Hard core metagaming!  I really need to figure out how to get this level of in-the-same-room metagaming going across the net.

Mike Mika (otherocean.com)

Chris Charla (f9e.com)

After this, Mike tweeted:

Just played ten rounds of Spy Party at GDC! This is te best game I’ve played in a LONG time. Hecker is pulling it off.   5:55 PM Mar 9th

While Chris tweeted:

Just play tested Chris Hecker’s SpyParty! Even better the second time. Finally wasted @mikejmika. 5:53 PM Mar 9th

Yay!  Okay, so I didn’t bust anything, now it’s off to the party…

Continue reading ‘GDC 2010: Developers Playtest SpyParty’ »

So, the wp-recaptcha plugin I use for spam protection in wordpress freaked out when I upgraded the blog to wordpress 2.9.2 the other day, and started marking all the incoming comments as spam automatically, which was very helpful, especially right before all the press coverage for SpyParty this week.1  I could not figure out why there was enough traffic to melt my server, but nobody was leaving comments.  Well, here’s the explanation:

http://www.blaenkdenum.com/2010/03/recaptcha-marking-all-comments-as-spam/

Sigh.

Anyway, it should be fixed now, and I rescued 28 comments from the spam folder, and I’ll go through them and reply to the questions over the next few days.

ObSpyParty:2  To rescue this post from utter mundanity, I offer you this little story about playtesting at the Stupid Fun Club a few weeks ago…

Continue reading ‘28 Comments Rescued, Bonus Anecdote’ »

1. More about that soon! [↩]
2. Does anyone else even know what Ob______ means anymore on the internet? I am old, like, Usenet old. [↩]

I am still barely functional after a long GDC, but I playtested the heck out of  SpyParty at the show, and I took a bunch of pictures of everybody playing, so I’ll be posting those soon.   In the meantime, here’s a teaser:

Jonathan Mak plays while Daniel Benmergui and Petri Purho observe.

PS.  WordPress is totally fired for not allowing links in image captions without horrible hacks.  Here are their websites:  Jon, Daniel, Petri