Obey local ordinances!

It seemed to work pretty well, we played it during the release notes stream, where I did two different “birthday games”, the first set with scientist for his 5k birthday, and then smash10101 for his 1k birthday.

I made a few subtle behavior changes for this new map:

• I made paintings more attractive on this map, and to do that I had to slightly change their probabilities on Ballroom. I think it won’t be noticeable, but we’ll see.
• Due to restrictive local ordinances, open containers of alcohol cannot be consumed or served on the sidewalk. Some people flout these ordinances, but most partygoers are responsible citizens.
• The conversations are a little less crowded now. People will still stand close to each other, but they won’t all jam into a tiny conversation circle, so you have to be a little more aware of how the NPCs behave around crowded conversations. I had to be careful with this code so I didn’t break the delicate balance of Balcony, but I think I was successful. I’m sure the beta players will tell me if I screwed it up!

Also in this build, I worked around a bug in Wineskin so MacOS beta testers should have their replays directories updated properly now.  

If you’re a beta tester already, come try out the new map, it’ll be there after you auto-update. If you’re not, what are you waiting for?

Here’s the video, and if you want notification of videos like this, you can subscribe to the SpyParty YouTube channel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, naturally, given my competence in this area, I’m going to start yet another mailing list!  Hmm, I need a cute name for it…right now I’m just calling it the SpyParty News.

This new one doesn’t require you to be in the beta to subscribe, so if you’re holding off on joining the beta, but still want email updates on SpyParty, this is the list for you.  You can see the place to enter your email address over there on the right side at the top of the sidebar.   Oh, too far to move your eyes?  Okay, here you go:

Enter your email to get SpyParty News!

Subscribe

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There’s more!  I’m also going to start actually sending to these mailing lists a little bit more frequently.  I’m going to shoot for one mail a month to this newsletter list and see if I can stick to that.  Baby steps.  Making indie games requires wearing a lot of different hats, and time management is not my strong suit, but hopefully I can handle sending out a mail every month talking about what cool stuff I worked on for the game.  I think the mails to this newsletter list will be different from the mails to the beta announcement list, since the former is mostly for people who aren’t in the beta, while the latter can be more specific about build numbers and have links to the beta forum threads and whatnot in it.  If you’re already in the beta, feel free to subscribe to the newsletter to receive more of my inspiring prose, but don’t feel like you must to avoid missing things if you actively check the forums and follow SpyParty on the social interwebs.

The other thing I’m going to do is add the 25k people who signed up for the closed beta but that haven’t joined yet, and who I haven’t emailed since the beta opened.  These people expressed interest in the game, but  if they don’t check the social media outlets or the blog manually, I’ve completely neglected to let them know what’s happening with SpyParty.  I’m constantly seeing comments and tweets from people who don’t even know the beta is open and are pleasantly surprised to find it is; as I said in a GDC talk a couple years back:  No One Knows About Your Game.

Gallery

And if you made it this far, here’s a teaser image from the new map I’m working on, called Gallery, that should be out soon, maybe tonight if everything goes smoothly.  The idea behind Gallery is to recreate one of those SOHO art gallery spaces, long and narrow, and the Sniper can only see in the end, so there’ll be a bunch of character-based-occlusion.  It should be pretty different from the existing maps, which is in line with my goal of exploring the space of maps and missions.

Hopefully Toby won’t serve drinks out on the sidewalk. Going to have to add that to his AI.

Didn’t like the dumpster? Fine, have a restaurant YOU CAN NEVER VISIT.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s that you say? You want another half-hour ramble by me showing off some major (and some minor) new replays features? Okay, well, we’ve got that too:

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. highlighted?

I am incredibly excited about the potential for replays!  I can’t use enough exclamation points!!!

I wrote about replays a bit, but seeing them in action is way cooler.  As usual, I streamed the release notes on the SpyParty twitch channel, but I cleaned up the video and put it on the YouTube channel.  It’s about 35 minutes long, and shows off some of the cool aspects of replays, and then I answer some interview questions from the beta testers until Comcast decided it was time for the stream to end:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think replays are going to really help people take their play even deeper than before.  Even in the few games I’ve played with it in the wild, it’s made me think about how things I did as a Spy looked from the Sniper side, and how better to protect my Spy actions.  I used to think replays were going to help the Sniper more, since you could study Spy moves, but now I’m not so sure…it’s really useful to be able to see your mistakes from the Sniper’s perspective, so you can learn to blend into the crowd more effectively.

And, now that the “hard part” is done, onward to Spectation and the Replays Database!

Oh, I put this note up after editing this stream:

• First up is kikar‘s 1000 game birthday,
• then, warningtrack for his 5000,
• and finally, kcmmmmm for his 10000!

This will all take place tonight at 6pm Pacific Standard Time, at http://www.twitch.tv/spyparty

I will record the games and put them on the SpyParty YouTube channel after the stream.

Edit: Hey, it’s the future, and the 2.5 hour video is up:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s the leaderboard for tonight’s matches:

That’s me, there at the bottom.

Yes, I wrote the game, but I’ve been heads down on this In-Game Replays feature so I’m pretty rusty, and so I expect to be beaten with increasing alacrity as the stream continues into the night.  Luckily, I love playing SpyParty,² even when I’m getting crushed.

Here are the full stats:

The gory details.

It should be a fun set of matches, come join the stream!  I will try to get my DIY greenscreen set up again!

Oh, and the In-game Replays are coming along really well.  It is so cool, it turned out even better than I thought it would.  I’m going to release a teaser video, hopefully tomorrow, and then the feature very soon after.

1. So sad that I couldn’t find another link to put on “see”, but I guess today’s stream will qualify!
2. Which is a very good thing after all these years!

These builds were a long time coming because I had to re-do the entire inside of the game in preparation for spectation and replays, which aren’t quite done yet, but are getting closer.  However, I put in a bunch of really important bug fixes, the cool looking “menu party”, the oft-requested “back button” on the game setup screens, and Practice Mode is now handled properly so it can be used for bug repros much more reliably.  Also, you can see some nascent spectation action developing with the addition of hitting <tab> to switch between Spy and Sniper views in Practice Mode.

Oh, and of course:

Santalanterns! Inspiration courtesy of zerotka, as per usual with our holiday Easter Eggs!

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. If you really want to see that, here is your link.

What is This Bug?

The bug that was discovered allows your laser to pass through certain sections of certain characters. This makes it seem like you miss some of your shots even though you really shouldn’t. This bug is easy to reproduce as well. All you have to do is aim at these imaginary holes and that’s it. For example, you can aim your laser at the stomach region of Alphonse “Snaps” Mcgee, or at his hat: 

Since there was a good repro, checker was able to find and fix it pretty quickly. I asked him if he could give us a more technical side to this bug and he agreed. Here is his response:

Okay, so the characters are made out of triangles. For the old characters, there are about 1.5k tris, and for the new ones there are about 11k tris.  It’s slow to do a raycast against all these triangles, so you do check on the overall bounding box of the character first, since that’s much faster.  If your bounding box is conservative, then that means all the triangles are inside it, so if the ray doesn’t hit the bounding box, you don’t have to test all the triangles.  But, since that test assumes all the triangles are inside the bounding box (hence the word “bounding”), if that’s not actually true, you won’t test the triangles at all. 

This is what the bounding box looked like before the fix:

This is what it looks like after the fix:

I looked into this bug so I could gain my own understanding of it. I noticed the holes seemed to disappear during animations and while holding a drink. I asked checker if he could give some insight into what’s happening. Here is what he had to say:

With animated characters, you really don’t want to build the bounding box from the triangles as they move around because that’s slow, and you often don’t have access to the posed triangles because that happens on the video card, so you build the bounding box from the bones themselves, and then expand it a bit (20% in this case) to get all the triangles. Well, with the old skeleton, it’s almost flat on the xz plane in the rest pose, so the expansion doesn’t do much.  When you’re holding a drink, your arm is forward, and that makes the bounding box actually bound the whole body! 

These are images with the old bounding box built from the bones:

So what was the fix?

I looked at the code, and with the current (read: slow) animation code I decided it wouldn’t actually be any slower if I just computed the triangle-accurate bounding box.  Once I optimize the animation code, I’ll have to come up with a better solution, potentially having bounding boxes for each bone authored in Maya, or something smarter, I’m not sure yet.

How was it Discovered?

krazycaley took on challenger virifaux in Spy on the Hill week 7. It was during one of these games the Sniper appeared to shoot through one of the characters to both the stream viewers and to himself.  Interestingly enough, he did!

You can hear  krazycaley exclaim “Noooo! Miss!” right after the shot. He knew who virifaux was and virifaux knew he was dead to rights. Yet somehow he was still alive. This was enough to pique the interest of virifaux and he chose to pursue it more deeply a day later. Once he discovered a reliable way to reproduce the bug, he made a quick video showcasing it in action, marking the beginning of the end for this bug.

Streaming was a big help in squashing this bug.  SpyParty doesn’t support replays yet, which makes bug hunting difficult sometimes. Streaming is probably the next best thing. If pictures are worth a thousand words then videos are probably worth a couple million. In this case, the video gave clues to virifaux for where to start looking. He knew exactly what it looked like when the bug occured. He could watch it over and over until he formulated his hypothesis. Then he could go into practice mode and test it out. 

Streaming and videos give us great insight into reproducing pesky bugs. Streaming may not always be the main tool in bug hunting, but streams and videos are almost always helpful for gathering more evidence and figuring out a clean repro.   This was the case with another bug’s story. I don’t think streaming was the main reason this bug was caught and squashed but it certainly played a role. 

Why is This Interesting?

I find it very interesting the bug was discovered only now. When first looking over the new bug report, checker made a post stating he remembers this happened a long time ago and that it was super rare, so we know this bug has been in the game for quite some time.

I am going to throw some numbers your way to help give an idea of the scope of this thing. There are currently over 11,000 people who have registered with the beta. The top 100 players have a combined total of 185,520 games played. It’s safe to say there have been a lot of games played across the entire community. This isn’t even counting the number of people who have played at conventions. In all of the games that have been played, this bug is just now being talked about and reproduced.

That’s not the only thing about this particular bug that makes it so interesting to me. Not only have there been tons of games in which it could have been discovered, the steps needed to reproduce the bug are really simple. When you combine these two characteristics together, it’s crazy how long this bug has lasted! However, thinking about it more deeply, maybe it’s not so crazy after all…

There are a few things that need to align correctly in order for this to be spotted. The main thing is looking at the character from the side. Next the character can’t be doing the vast majority of animations nor can he or she have a drink in their hands. Finally, the sniper has to aim in the correct spots. Perhaps you also need to be streaming for Spy on the Hill week 7.

Whatever the case, the bug is nearing the end of its lifetime since it’s fixed on checker’s local copy, but until the patch goes live you might be able to utilize this bug in a game mode. As beta tester virifaux said, “Now that we have a reliable reproduction, we’ll have skill shots where we shoot through McGee to hit the spy.” Bugs can be fun to play with so get in your skill shots before it’s too late!

Anyway, to make up for my tardiness, in addition to talking about the environment art style, inspirations, and design goals, I’m going to post a bunch of behind-the-scenes shots of the levels and how they look to John in Maya and Photoshop, so you can see how they’re made. Nothing says behind-the-scenes like a screenshot with wireframed polygons in it, right?

We got some great press coverage when we revealed the new environments, here’s a good sample:

• In SpyParty’s Bloodless Cat-and-Mouse Chase, Your Life Ends Here, Evan Narcisse, Kotaku
• SpyParty invites you to the garden party: New art for old environments, Jess Conditt, Joystiq
• SpyParty’s new environments are warm, cool, & Scooby Doo, Patrick Hancock, Destructoid
• SpyParty’s stylish makeover extends to its beautiful new architecture, Michael McWhertor, Polygon
• So, Uh, We Got Chris Hecker To Interview Himself, Chris Hecker,¹ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The articles and interviews listed above introduce a bunch of the important aspects of the new environment art style, and I’ll go into more detail on each here!

The Style

Finally, we have a place to stand!

The first requirement for the SpyParty environment art style was that it complement the new character art style. Since the game is fundamentally about people and their behaviors, John and I spent a long time coming up with the character art style first, and then applied those lessons to the environment art style. If you want the full background on the overall artistic goals, you should read that post as well, but briefly, we designed the art style to be timeless and illustrative. Timeless means it doesn’t look retro or futuristic, or from any specific time period, it could be taking place at any and all times. By illustrative, we mean we aren’t shooting for photorealism nor cartoons, but for a style that looks like it is the 3D version of the sophisticated illustration work from the early 20th century.

Applying the timeless and illustrative aesthetics to the environments meant we wanted to support a wide variety of architectural styles, and so for the reveal we decided to show examples of the aesthetic applied to both a traditional mansion and a modern one. We needed to test out the aesthetic, and make sure it had the dynamic range necessary to render any kind of architecture we could throw at it.

Because the characters are the stars of SpyParty, we want the environments to fade into the background, but still be beautiful stages on which the parties can unfold. The key to this was to settle on a bi-chromatic palette, with a clear warm/cool separation between the world of the Spy and the world of the Sniper. Our friend, Ocean Quigley,² helped us push it even further, by pointing out an old artist trick of increasing the color saturation in shadows, rather than decreasing it as would happen if you just rendered normally in most computer graphics tools like Maya, so shadows go to saturated colors instead of black. As you can see in the images of the new environments, the levels are warm hues wherever the Spy can move and interact, but they are cool outside this area. This will hopefully provide subtle but useful visual feedback to both players about what the gameplay bounds of the level are, and where they need to focus their attentions. There’s actually a third and fourth level of background in the environments, where the 3D modeled trees and the 2D silhouette trees spend their time, fading farther and farther back.

In keeping with our illustrative aesthetic, the shapes, surfaces, and edges should have more of an architectural sketch look, rather than a photographic look. This means very little texture on the surfaces, big, simple shapes, and clean lines.

Frank Lloyd Wright sketch of Falling Water

We’re still developing the aesthetic for the active objects themselves, but the current plan is to use brighter more saturated colors and completely artificial stage lighting to make things like statues and bookshelves pop visually, denoting them as belonging to the foreground instead of the background. I think of old cartoons like Scooby-Doo, where you could always tell when a character was going to pick up a telephone before they actually did so, because the phone was drawn on a cel instead of painted into the background.

If you take these statues a giant boulder comes down the hallway.

Inspiration and Reference

Since we’re going for a naturalistic illustrative style, we want both our environments and characters to be loosely based on reference. We treat real-world reference like Goldilocks treats the temperature of her porridge: we want just the right amount, not too much, not too little. It’s really quite difficult to imagine all the subtleties of an actual physical object—whether a house or a person—if you’re not referring to reference while you’re creating. This sense of authenticity is very hard to achieve and a lot of games don’t seem to even strive for it.³ At the same time, you need to know when to simplify, and what structures are important for solidity and naturalism, and which are superfluous detail.

The two reference buildings for the environments revealed here are the incredible James C. Flood Mansion in San Francisco:

 …and SAOTA’s amazing Cove 6 house in South Africa:

Development

As promised, here’s a small gallery of the environments in Maya and Photoshop. A few highlights:

• You can see how many layers there are in the concept render shot in Photoshop. The finished concept renders don’t actually exist anywhere in 3D, they’re composed of multiple renders and a lot of touchups and post-production to get the look we wanted. This is why the current realtime level doesn’t look as good yet, not only is it not raytraced, but it also doesn’t have the full lighting models and shaders on it that will emulate what John did in post. The concept renders are the visual targets, though, so we hope to get pretty close.
• If you look closely, you can see the triangle-count difference between the concept and realtime Modern map: about 10x. The concept model doesn’t even really have textures on it, it’s all done with surface shaders, while the realtime does to bake in the lighting for performance.
• In the closeups of the bar and fireplace, you can see how John saved polygons when reducing the level, using transparent textures instead of modeling leaves, simplifying shapes, etc.
• Let’s not even talk about the water.

Galleries and Wallpapers

Here are the full galleries for the new environments! The first image in both galleries is a high resolution 16:9 2560×1440 image, suitable for use as wallpaper. The rest are 1280×720. One cool thing is each gallery has a series of images from the Sniper’s point of view, and you can use the lightbox that pops up as a way to preview how the level might look with a rifle in your hands.

First, modern:

Next, traditional:

Finally, here’s the trailer we released last week with the new artwork running in the game:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you have any questions about the new environments, leave them below!

Never forget!

1. by way of Craig Pearson
2. former Art Director of Spore, now making indie games at Jellygrade!
3. By contrast, Jonathan Blow has gone as far as to hire architects to consult on the Witness structures!

I spent yesterday cutting a trailer to show off the fancy new characters and level:

Click here to view the embedded video.

That video spends a bunch of time ogling the new characters in their environment so you can get a feel for the quality of the models and animations in the game. I’m really happy with how they’re looking, and they’re going to get even better looking in the future: you can still see animation pops, interpenetration, and various oddnesses, and the lighting model is not even close to final, especially on the environment. Still, it’s a huge step! Poor Security Agent Damon…

I think I’m at the wrong party. Where did these people get mouths, eyelids, and fingers?

As you can see in the video, I put the new artwork in alongside the old art in a new map named Modern. The old art is going to be around for a long time because it’s where all the tuning and balancing effort has gone over the years, so you fans of nostalgia will have plenty of quality time with it. 

Modern, the new art level! Don’t expect much, gameplay-wise yet, but it’s pretty!

The new art isn’t very playable yet, since we only have the five characters so far, and only a subset of all the animations even for those. John is working away furiously on getting statues and books and drinks and briefcases and everything else supported by the new folks, and then he’ll move on to do the next batch of characters. It will be a while before the new art is tournament worthy.

I don’t want to spend much time on the gameplay for the new art until we have a critical mass of characters to make it a real competition-worthy level, but I did realize people would want to play on the new map with the new art because it’s shiny, so I made a few gameplay modifications and spent a bit of effort getting it working as a game. First, I added the option to only enable a single mission on the map, so you can do “Known 1″ or “Any 1 of 3″ game types. Since there are only five characters, it turns this map into a bit of a Balcony-lite, which is fun. Second, based on playtesting it on stream the other night, I made the Ambassador unknown to the Sniper. So, combining these, you can do “Known 1 Bug Ambassador”, where the Spy tries to get away with bugging when the Sniper knows he or she is going to do it, but the Sniper doesn’t know which character is the Ambassador! 

It’s a little silly, but it’s fun and it actually elucidated a few interesting things for me about the design going forward, including how nice the game looks from the Sniper viewpoint without the triangles on people’s heads, and also how interesting it is to try to deduce characters from their behavior. The Ambassador has a “personal space violation” mechanic that triggers if somebody stands too close, and watching for that kind of behavior is very much in line with the design aesthetics I’m going for with SpyParty. You can even pretend you’re the Ambassador by bailing out when somebody stands too close to you for too long!

I fully intended on having the art released right after PAX, but I underestimated how much stuff I had agreed to do in September, so here we are.

The new artwork is working pretty well on a wide range of machines. For the PAX booth and the Omegathon, I only had to get it working reliably on Intel HD 4000 graphics, but now I need to try to make it work on everything. Dealing with different hardware and software configurations is the only real downside to doing PC games compared to the more closed platforms, but it is a significant downside. Here you can see a bunch of machines I’ve been using for testing, what year they’re from, and what graphics chip they have:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I try to keep a bunch of old machines running for testing, and I owe huge thanks to Ben Kutcher from Intel for always hooking me up, and to Jonathan Blow from The Witness for keeping me in constant supply of his discarded old machines. Especially for a multiplayer indie game, making sure you run on older machines is vitally important because you don’t want to limit your audience any more than you absolutely have to. I also try to develop on slightly old machines, because I think it keeps you honest as a programmer. It’s easy to get lazy if you always develop on a monster machine.

You can see the new map and characters work pretty well on most of the machines in the video, most at playable framerates even before optimization. The two exceptions are the Sony VAIO from way back in 2006, that has an Intel GMA 945 graphics chip in it,¹ and the ThinkPad T500 from 2009. The latter is actually fast for a few minutes and then slows down, so I think there’s some kind of memory leak in the driver or something. I need to investigate more, because that hardware should run it fine.²

I also briefly tested on MacOS using Wineskin, and the new art loads correctly, but it won’t draw the new level on the machine I tested. I’m not actually sure how to debug this other than commenting out stuff and hoping it starts working, but I’m crossing my fingers that it’s something simple I can find. Hopefully, once I release the build, MacOS beta testers can give me some feedback on which machines work, if any. I really need to get a Mac at some point…stealing my girlfriend’s machine after she goes to sleep is not a very robust testing methodology.

Loading correctly is actually half the battle, and usually when things go wrong, they go wrong during load. So, I’ve put in some code that will detect if it’s the first time you’ve loaded the new art, and if so, it’ll keep track of whether it crashes during load. If it does, the next time you run it will prompt you for whether you want to skip loading the new art, or try again. The last remaining thing I need to do is make it so if you have loaded the new art and you try to play a game against somebody who skipped loading it, you can both still play the old art levels correctly and it fails reasonably gracefully if you try to play a new art level. This shouldn’t take long to get working. Famous last words.

XOXO

Last week I was invited by Andy Baio to bring SpyParty to the XOXO Festival Arcade in Portland, Oregon. Andy’s been a fan of the game for a while, and they had a great selection of experimental indie games this year at the festival. I had to return early so I missed the lectures over the weekend, but I believe they put videos online, and the Arcade was fun! As usual, I took pictures!

1. a chip that’s pretty much universally reviled by graphics programers, but I will try hard to make it playable on this old machine!
2. and, in fact, you can see the slower T400 runs the game well…sigh.