Hey, sorry for the late notice, but it looks like we’re going to be a bit shorthanded at Day of the Devs this Saturday, November 5th, and we could use some help!

If you like SpyParty and are available from 1pm-10pm on Saturday in San Francisco (or a significant subset of that time block), please mail me at support at spyparty dot com and let me know a little about yourself. You’d be teaching people how to play the game, but it doesn’t matter if you’ve played before since we’ll teach you how to teach people. Obviously, if you have played SpyParty before that would be best, but it’s not crucial.

If you’re a booth helper you’ll get the immense satisfaction of introducing people to a video game, camaraderie, a free sore throat from talking too much, all the throat lozenges you can eat, a food truck dinner, and you’ll get a cool codecard with your choice of character, which also contains a free copy of the game (which you can gift to somebody if you already own it)!

So, shoot me a mail if you’re interested, thanks!

This build has taken forever and gotten about 3x too large, but here we go! Out next Thursday, October 27th!

I’m playing a bunch of SpyParty today, starting at 2:30pm US Pacific time and going until around 5:30pm, which means I start in 3 hours from me typing these words! I will livestream these games, internet-willing, at http://twitch.tv/spyparty.

I’ve posted about the SpyParty Competitive League before; it’s a really amazing ongoing competition organized and run by krazycaley with help from other community members.

Well, I’m in the Silver Division, and due to life and work craziness recently, I have a lot of makeup games to play, and through a miracle of scheduling, we are going to make them all up today in a single 3 hour block of SpyParty.

Here’s the schedule, which we probably won’t hit exactly, but is hopefully about right:

So, come watch the fate of Silver Division turn on a single stream. I should be warmed up by the end, maybe?

Last night I did a stream revealing and discussing the new in-progress SpyParty user interface. It seemed to go pretty well1 and people in twitch chat seemed to like it. Dig it yourself here on the SpyParty YouTube channel:

I will do a longer post with screenshots and mocksup and whatnot soon!  Feel free to ask questions here if you have them (it’s easier to reply here than the YouTube comments).

1. Thank you for not going down, comcast! [↩]

I have put this off long enough…I’m going to reveal the new SpyParty user interface tomorrow, Tuesday, June 21st, at 7pm US Pacific time, on the SpyParty twitch channel, http://twitch.tv/spyparty!

A wire-frame teaser. I wanted to take another teaser screenshot but the game is not currently running or even compiling…uh…wish me luck for Tuesday.

Apparently 7pm PDT is 2am GMT…sorry about that!  I’ll definitely put the video on the SpyParty YouTube channel line after the stream, so subscribe there if you want a notification!

We’ve been working on the new UI for a looong time, and it’s gone through a zillion iterations while we were mocking it up, then I started implementing it in a standalone test mode, and I’ve finally started hooking it up to the real game. My original goal was to not change any of the existing UI flow and just layer the new UI on top of it, but it became clear as we were working through the various issues that a bunch of stuff needed redesigning and smoothing out so it was more clear and simpler for new players, and while doing that it became easy to add a bunch of cool features for experienced players. So, hopefully the new UI will please all the people all the time…that happens sometimes, right?

During the stream, I’ll go through some of the mockups and iterations, I’ll talk about our process and reasons for making UI decisions and how we’re designing and implementing it, and I’ll show where we are so far. Some chunk of it (mostly having to do with game setup/loadout and results screens) should be available for beta testing fairly soon, in fact. The goal is to have a sizable chunk of it done for the Steam Early-Access release coming sometime this year,1 so people who buy SpyParty on Steam will get a video game that actually looks like a video game from the moment you launch it.

1. I have just about given up on trying to give out time estimates for this… [↩]