The latest build is up for your enjoyment, and contained within there’s a beautiful new map called Pub!

The new Pub level, playable now!

Pub was obviously inspired by the cool old pubs in London, with their flowers and patrons drinking a pint on the sidewalk. In fact, if you look at some of the reference images we used, they basically look just like SpyParty levels, complete with conversation circles and everything!

To be true to this look, there are no conversation circles inside the Pub, they’re all out on the sidewalk. Inside, there are two statues, and window pads looking outside. There’s even a window pad looking inward where the window is open to the Sniper’s right, similar to the one you can see in the second reference image, and yes, you can flirt with somebody through the window!

A Pint of Wells Banana Bread Beer, Barkeep!

Of course, once we have a pub, we need a bartender, so Toby got a second job, and a whole new behavior…

Toby works two jobs.

There’s no waiter on Pub, only the bartender, so to get a drink, you need to go to the bar and order it. This also means the Purloin Guestlist mission completely changes on this map. Before, the guestlist would be on Toby’s tray, and you’d steal it (or have somebody else steal it if you got a “green Action Test”) when he served you a drink. Now, it’s on the bar or in his pocket. You can either pick it up yourself, or choose to delegate the pickup to another guest by going into a conversation.

If you delegate, the NPC goes to order a drink and steal the list, so the Sniper has to think back to who was in which conversation and when and with whom, which adds a significant layer of subtlety to the mission.  SpyParty beta testers have even figured out that you can use the delegation to force the Ambassador to go to the bar, so you can get a fingerprint from the drinks later! It’s a good test for the upcoming “recommendations” feature I want to add. More on that later.

The other major gameplay change is some pathing and movement tuning to hopefully eliminate some of the “hard tells” associated with trying to move through congested areas. Time will tell how these pan out and if they help Spies not get shot in doorways.

Irene Adler

Some have asked about the name of the pub, The Irene Adler. My daughter and I are currently reading our way through the Complete Sherlock Holmes, and Irene Adler is an interesting character in one of the stories, A Scandal in Bohemia. It turns out Carole Nelson Douglas wrote some fun books from Irene’s point of view, so we’ve been reading those too. I figured, if Holmes gets a pub named after him in London (you can see it in the reference images above), Irene can have one too!

An Experiment

This build was actually a bit of an experiment with the beta process as well. Unlike previous new art maps, this time I didn’t release the ugly prototype version for public playtest. zerotka and I played it a bunch with internal builds, but I decided to try going straight to the finished art version for the public release. I would say this experiment was a bit of a failure, like I expected it to be. There’s incredible value in getting the prototype level out there for people to pound on, and doing the final version takes a lot longer, so during that time people could have been testing it. Plus, beta testers seem to like getting access to the ugly version and then seeing it hit with the pretty stick. Not that my version of it didn’t have a certain charm…

Beta players couldn’t have handled this much awesomeness.

From here on out, I’ll probably go back to releasing the prototype version first. I think that’s the better and faster way to get to an awesome level with fewer expensive changes needed to the high quality version.

We’re going to update again early next week with some minor changes and tuning, but Pub and these changes is live online, so if you’re in the beta just hit Play on the main menu and you’ll get them, or join the SpyParty beta and check them out yourself. Or if you want to check it out live on Twitch, you can follow the main SpyParty account, or follow @SpyPartyStreams to get notified when anybody streams!

If you’re not yet in the SpyParty beta or if you are but don’t check the (awesome) private beta forums,1 you may not know there was a tournament going on for the past few months. As usual, since I’m too discombobulated to do much of anything, it was a beta-tester organized tourney. This time around, bloom put it together, and decided it’d be the first ever “New Art Tournament”, so it was played entirely on the two maps in the new art style, New High-rise, and Modern.  Two maps is not a lot, but there are two different competition-worthy game modes on these maps, “Any 4 of 7” and “Any 3 of 5” on New High-rise, and “Any 2 of 3” on Modern and “Any 3 of 5” on Double Modern.2 These modes play completely differently, so there’s a fair bit of variety even give the limited number of maps.

We’re putting the final touches on a new new-art map that will be released imminently, but that’s for another post.

There were some awesome matches played during the whole tournament, and I’m sorry I didn’t have spectation implemented yet.  Some of the matches were streamed by the players, but spectation, which I will hopefully do Soon™ will allow casters to stream the matches with play-by-play and color commentary, which is always more fun.  For the final match between kcmmmm and scientist, though, we came up with a cockamamie hack to work around this using the replay system and DropBox’s directory watching, so toboshi and warningtrack could live-cast the whole thing, and it worked pretty well!  It was an amazing match, especially since scientist fought his was back from the losers bracket, and kcmmmmm was the one who put him in the losers bracket earlier in the tournament!

Here’s the video from the cast.  It’s long, at about 2 hours, with a pre-game show and everything. Some amazing elite-level SpyParty games and great analysis here:

Here’s the whole bracket if you want to see scientist‘s long voyage…

1. which I plan to make read-only-public at some point soon since they’re such a great information resource for the game [↩]
2. which is just Modern with another conversation circle, 10 guests, and a known Double Agent [↩]

I’m a big fan of the French term l’esprit d’escalier and its German counterpart, treppenwitz. A while back, Matthew RF Balousek posted a joke response to one of those “how do you spell esports?” threads with the most excellent l’esports d’escalier, which delighted me.1

Last week on the weekly Tuesdays at Ten on Twitch stream, I was playing wodar and I realized after a game where I failed to realize a good play right at the end that I’d had a real-life l’esports d’escalier moment:

1. I discovered and favorited it a week later, and this happened: https://twitter.com/mrfb/status/543916041483452417 [↩]

A fun time was had a Day of the Devs this weekend, courtesy of Double Fine, iam8bit, and a whole lot of cool people from the Bay Area playing games!

As you can see in the pics below, we were in a vault in the basement of The Old Mint in San Francisco. It was basically a metal box with a tiny armored door, with the acoustics and ventilation you’d expect from that description. To combat the accoustics and visual problem, we scavenged for furniture, adjusted the lighting with spare cloth and plastic bags, and John (who lives a couple blocks away) went and got a lamp, and we managed to turn the place into a bit of a cocktail lounge, which is fitting. The touch I’m most proud of is cutting a hole in the plastic light shade I put on the back light so there was a spot on the poster on the back wall. Indie game development is all about making it work!  For the ventilation problem, I brought an industrial shop fan, and it helped, but you still hit a wall of moist when you walked in the door.

Like last year, slappydavis came to town and helped out in the booth, and was awesome.

We also had child labor! Day of the Devs was all-ages this year, so my daughter and a friend came and helped out with training people to play. They did a great job. Of course, they only wanted to train adults; as soon as another kid came up in line, they scrambled to take a break, because bossing adults around the map is fine, but training another kid? NO WAY TOO WEIRD!

We sold copies of the game again with the awesome code cards, and did pretty well. Which reminds me, I need to write up the full report on the sales at PAX and mix in DotD as well.

More pics from the rest of the event are here, and then there was this:

It’s that time of year again, when friends at Double Fine and iam8bit throw a big game party in San Francisco and everybody is invited! And this time, it’s all ages, so I mean everybody!

It’s on November 1st, at the Old Mint building in SF, from 4pm to 11pm.  Lots of cool indies will be there, like the Firewatch folks, Miegakure, Escape Goat 2, and like 20 more (including SpyParty, of course), so click the flyer below and check them out. There’s also an RSVP link so they can get a feel for how many folks are coming.

It got a little crowded last year, but this year the venue is WAY BIGGER…

We had a great time last year, and I will be bringing more of the awesome codecards to sell with the special in-person discount of 2-for-$20.

The list of games was too long, I had to fade it out.

I hope to see you there!