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?

The other day, kcmmmmm grabbed a set of replays from a match played between drawnonward and smash10101, and went through them on his stream, analyzing the games, remarking on good and bad plays, getting into the minds of the players, and saying what he would have done in various situations.  I learned a ton from this; it was incredibly educational to hear how an elite player sizes up a situation and prioritizes and makes decisions.  He talks about opening theory, planning your “banana bread” and responding to it as Sniper, and highlight and lowlight strategy, and tons of stuff, so I’m posting it here for everybody to enjoy.

He works through about 10 games in an hour and a half or so.  If you don’t have time for it all, start at 32:15 and watch that game for a few minutes, there’s some great analysis of the various moves in that one (but really, they’re all great!).

Click here to view the embedded video.

This was cool enough that I added an “analysis” category to the blog, with the expectation that we’ll get more of these!

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!

What are replays?

In a skill-based competitive game like SpyParty (or Starcraft or Counter-Strike or Go or Poker…), watching and studying games is an important part of learning and improving your skills. Right now, the only way to watch a game of SpyParty that you’re not participating in as a player is to watch a stream or a video. I stream on the SpyParty twitch.tv channel, and I post videos to the SpyParty YouTube channel, and lots of other beta testers stream and post videos too. You can catch a lot of streams by signing up for the SpyParty Streams Notifier, and you can check out all the Let’s Plays by searching YouTube, but if somebody didn’t capture their game, there’s no way to go back and study it and it’s gone forever. Even if somebody did capture the game to video, if their camera angle wasn’t right, you might miss the thing you want to see.

Replays are the solution to these problems. A replay is a recording of the game, but it’s a recording of the stream of animation commands and events and movements instead of just a stream of images like a video, so you can move around in the replay while it’s playing, freeze it and look at the layout of the party, where the Sniper’s laser is relative to the Spy, and even rewind and study a section from different camera angles. Once replays are in, they’re going to revolutionize the study of elite SpyParty games; the plan is to capture a replay of every game ever played, and add them to a database that can be queried by any beta tester to study any game. About to play in a tournament against kcmmmmm? Study the last 100 of his games against other high level players and try to get a feel for his play style. Heck, you can even sort of play the games from the Sniper’s point-of-view, trying to find the Spy, although since the Spy won’t repond to the laser sight it’s not going to be a real test. I don’t know whether this is going to benefit Spies or Snipers more,¹ but it’s definitely going to raise the level of play across the board.

After I get replays working, the same technology will be used to implement “spectation”, which will allow you to log onto a game in-progress and watch it live, which is like watching a stream, but you can move the camera and see the action from either side, or even from a different camera position. At that point, if you join the lobby and everybody else is playing, you can just go spectate until somebody else joins to play. This will be huge for streaming, since it will allow people to cast other games, and commentate on the play! I’ll even implement mini-tournaments and simple betting within a spectation match, like some of the Starcraft mods do.

First, though, will come raw replays saved locally. You’ll be able to review your games, but to see somebody else’s you’ll have to get the replay file from them. The files should be pretty small, like hopefully one or two megabytes. After the bugs are worked out for that, I’ll get the replay database server up and running, and then spectation.

I really excited about replays, and I think they’ll increase the depth of the meta-game, and help the community share and discuss strategies.

Video Previews

Here’s a video I recorded from last night’s stream for drawnonward‘s 10,000th game (!). I gave a short preview of the current state of the replay system, which is still buggy but the hard part (rewind) is mostly working:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’d like to see videos of the terrible things I did to the partygoers as I was getting rewind working, you can check out these two videos:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. my hunch is Snipers will benefit a bit more, but I don’t know

Hello! My name is Keith, or zerotka in game, and I will be bringing you weekly updates for what’s going on in the world of SpyParty. This will allow you to keep tabs on all the interesting discussions on the forums and stay abreast of all the wonderful things happening in the SpyParty community. Speaking of wonderful things happening in the community, let’s talk about Spy on the Hill!

Spy on the Hill’s sweet logo

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! 

krazycaley keeps his throne after another battle in Spy on the Hill. This will mark the 7th week in a row that KrazyCaley is king! 

Spy on the Hill is a weekly competition where a challenger dukes it out with the current king for the throne. The catch is the challenger dictates what custom SpyParty game rules they will be playing. These rules can range from slightly unbalanced game types to completely wacky ideas, as you’ll see below! 

Strictly speaking, being king just grants you the title of being King of SpyPartia, the fictional country where all the Spy on the Hill events take place. You don’t get any prizes, badges, or special powers. However, this does not stop the community from taking it a little further and having fun with it. Every week the king issues humorous decrees and he has even appointed a royal advisor. Some people chime in with “Long live the king!”, while others say “Someone end this tyrannical reign!” It provides a little competition and it’s all in good fun. 

Every game is casted live by toboshi and warningtrack over on the SpyParty twitch channel, and overseen by the Spy on the Hill creator and mastermind wodar. Here’s a quick summary of the last five matches, and links to the videos (each of which is around an hour):

• Week 1, Drawnonward vs. KrazyCaley 
  H-O-R-S-E Style. Each players pick a map and mission type. This is mostly balanced game types between two high level players. You can check out a highlights reel from this match here:
  

  Click here to view the embedded video.

  
  

• Week 2, KrazyCaley vs. KCMmmmm
  Full Random Mode. Each player will randomly pick a map and mission type. Being completely random can heavily favor the Spy or the Sniper. Having to do known mission types tend to favor the Sniper but doing any 3 of 7 favors the Spy.
  

• Week 3, KrazyCaley vs. MikeChilds
  Spies must wait 30-60 seconds between each mission. This mode puts more cognitive load on the Spy because they have to keep track of when they completed the missions and plan accordingly.

• Week 4, KrazyCaley vs. Varanas
  Snipers must say who they lowlight and neutral light. Spies can’t use their forward key. Spies now have knowledge of when they get lowlight and can get away with lots more because of this. However, not being able to use the forward key can cause some funky pathing.

• Week 5, KrazyCaley vs. SlappyDavis 
  Players win by either playing Snaps McGee (the photographer) and finishing their missions or by getting the Sniper to shoot poor Snaps. This element adds more mind games to the mix.

• Week 6, KrazyCaley vs. WarningTrack
  The Sniper must name a state in the USA whenever he or she lowlights, highlights, or shoots. States must be in alphabetical order. Snipers must know their states or be stringent with their highlights and lowlights.

• Week 7, KrazyCaly vs. Virifaux
  Each mission the Spy completes is counted as a point. Whoever has most points at the end wins. You don’t need to survive after you complete the missions, you just need to do them. This gives interesting opportunities to the Spy.

Any SpyParty beta tester can sign up to be a challenger to the throne. It’s great if you can stream, but it isn’t a requirement. So, if you are interested in ruling over SpyPartia, feel free to sign up in the beta forums and come up with your own crazy custom rules!

Will KrazyCaley remain the king for next week and issue new decrees, or will this week’s challenger come up with a clever game modification that ends KrazyCaley’s winning spree? Find out later this week! Spy on the Hill usually streams on Friday evenings around 7pm, US Pacific time on the SpyParty twitch channel.

Why is This Important?

Now, for a little editorial from my point-of-view as both a long-time SpyParty beta tester and a big fan of competitive games and streams…

In my opinion, competition brings a lot to any game. It helps build the community and allows onlookers to admire some of the best players out there, but more importantly, it helps create stories that people can relate to.

If someone new is watching the game, they probably don’t know too much about it. Sure, they can get the gist of things, but they might be missing some aspects that will make it interesting for them. Why would they watch a game if it’s mainly just gibberish to them? Stories are something that everyone can relate to, and they make the game better for both new players and for people who are well-versed in the game. One classic story that often emerges is “the underdog”. Research has shown time and time again that we love to root for underdogs. This is something we can all get behind, regardless of our knowledge of the game.

Another good example is the story of “the comeback”. In this story the current champion gets beaten and after some time passes they get a shot at being the champion once again. Everyone knows that they are capable of being a champion but are they able to do it again? 

With Spy on the Hill, we get a glimpse of the future of competitive play in the game. Also, you may recall this isn’t the first competition SpyParty beta testers have held. Previously we’ve had other player-organized tournaments, including the “New Years Cup” and the team-based ”Pre-Open Beta Tournament”. I am sure there will be many more to come, especially when spectation and replays make it into the game. What better way to test a feature than to use it?

The community has done some pretty amazing things and will continue to do so. Spy on the Hill is just another thing to add to the list.

As you will recall from the pilot episode writeup featuring r7stuart,  the SpyParty Masterclass is the streaming show where I get the elite players to mentor me in-game and on-stream, so I can learn to suck a little less at the video game I’m making.  

When you’re trying to design a deep player-skill competitive game, you have to be able to make tuning and balancing decisions, and to do that you have to have a clue about the way the game plays at elite levels.  It’s a great feeling when players beat you at your own game (literally), but I felt like I was falling too far behind, so I decided to get some lessons from the top of the leaderboard, and to stream it and then upload it to the SpyParty YouTube channel afterwards so the whole community can learn from the lessons too!

This next episode will feature kcmmmmm, the player at the tippy top of the leaderboard, who you may remember lost me a bet with Seth Killian at Evo.  

There are a few different things about this episode:

• I’m going to stream my side live on Raptr’s twitch channel, http://twitch.tv/raptr, and kcmmmmm is going to stream his side to the SpyParty channel at http://twitch.tv/spyparty.  I recommend watching the dual-stream view so you can see both sides at the same time!  I will edit them together before posting the final episode, like last time.
  
• We’re on Raptr’s channel because they’re working with extra life to raise money for Children’s Miracle Network and they invited me to stream, so I thought this would be a cool way to help out a good cause.  You can join the Raptr extra life team here. 
• We are going to keep it to one hour!  The last one was almost four hours long, which is too long to watch and too long to edit!  I’ll probably do some Q&A in the twitch chat on Raptr’s channel for a bit afterwards if folks are interested.

If you missed the last episode and have a spare 4 hours to go deep on SpyParty, here you go:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This one was a little more nuts than usual, and that’s saying something.  Allow me to enumerate the additional levels of difficulty this year:

• FOUR DAYS LONG instead of three, for 33% more exhaustion!
• Getting the new artwork playable¹ in the game.
• SpyParty was chosen as the secret final game for the PAX Omegathon, and I was adding bugs to the game up until the last minute!

All things considered, though, it went really well, thanks as usual to my incredible volunteers from the SpyParty community.  This year, John and I had tireless help from zerotka, drawnonward, wodar, canadianbacon, zapdsl, and ardonite, and we could not have done it without them!²

Actually, this year, I have even more people to thank than usual:

• Jeff Roberts, my debt to you follows the Ackerman Function.
• Ben Kutcher, for adding NUCtastic to your long list of positive personality traits.
• I’d like to thank Riot Games for setting up my booth.
• Kelly Wallick, a long-time friend who also happens to run the Indie MEGABOOTH, saved our bacon using eldrich equipment magic.
• My daughter, for making a SpyParty t-shirt for me, and telling me I had to wear it in the booth.  I have no idea how a 10-year-old knows what a martini is; I blame her mother.

You’d think after doing so many shows, we’d have this down, but there were a few things we kinda screwed up this year.  All were correctable, and all were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, but I figure they’re worth mentioning just for the record:

• We were so busy trying to get the new artwork into the build we didn’t think through the flow of the booth enough, and for the first half of the first day it was basically impossible to see there was anything new in the game.  We had a new level running with the new characters and environments alongside the old levels, but since all the machines were playing the old maps, either as training, or because the new stuff isn’t balanced yet, there was no way for somebody stopping by the booth to see the new stuff.  I would occasionally take over a machine to show somebody the new stuff, but it wasn’t a natural part of the booth flow.  Thankfully, Kelly came to our rescue, and we got a big HDTV on a stand set up, and I hacked an attract-mode into the game, and that helped a lot!
• There were no signs until the last day that the beta was open, and since the majority of people who visit the booth haven’t heard of the game, or have only heard about it vaguely (see this lecture), a lot of people had no idea they could play online immediately.  You know you’re not thinking straight when you don’t even follow the advice of your own lectures on indie game marketing.
• We didn’t do a great job of line management the first day, so it felt pretty slow.  I actually didn’t realize how important this was until I noticed the lack of people and pieced together what was missing.  Unfortunately, I was so distracted by last minute programming and logistics that I didn’t notice until the end of Friday.  People who come to your booth want to know where they stand in the world, both figuratively and literally.  If it feels disorganized or if they don’t know how long they’re going to have to wait, they drift off.  Line management is really important.  As soon as we started combing out the line, letting people know what order they were in, and that they needed to read the manual, the booth felt like normal again, with a line of folks reading the manual, onlookers watching the screens, etc.  Lesson learned (and if you’re an indie with a booth, hopefully knowledge transferred)!

Omegathon

The big secret of the whole show for me was that SpyParty was selected as the final game of the Omegathon, the overarching meta-tournament for PAX.  The rest of the games are announced beforehand, but the last game is kept secret, and sprung on the two players for the finals.  Robert Khoo mailed me asking if they could use SpyParty back in late July, we plotted about the right way to do it (since the Omeganauts weren’t going to be able to read the manual!), and I prepared two laptops to play the game on stage.  On the day, Ben Kuchera and Dabe Alan came to the booth, picked up John and me, and we went to go set up.  Sadly, I had to keep even our volunteers in the dark!

The games were great!  Lt. Hummus and Nantucket did a really wonderful job playing under intense pressure, having just had their brains exploded by my rapid-fire tutorial.  Lt. Hummus was kicking himself, because he’d joined the beta a month ago but hadn’t gotten around to playing yet!

I really appreciate Jerry, Mike, and Robert picking SpyParty for the finals; they’ve been fans of the game for a while, and I think they did a wonderful job with the whole thing.  This may sound a bit odd, but as the game designer, I was most impressed by how much respect they afforded SpyParty in the proceedings.  They could have easily hammed it up on stage, or made some wacky game variation for the final match, but they (and the audience) really got the deep concentration part of the design and they totally understood and worked with my questions and concerns about using the game, and it went off nigh perfectly.  I was over the moon!

Here are some good links:

• Ben and Dabe put up a great writeup and gallery of the setup and match on the Penny-Arcade Report.
• Here’s the live stream of the event on twitch.tv. Sadly, Mike’s mic (!) had issues for the first part.
• And here’s a shaky-cam version, so you can see it from the crowd’s point of view.  What I really like about this one is hearing the nearby crowd talk SpyParty strategy while the Omeganauts are playing.

The New Art

People seemed to love the new art, once we were actually able to show it to them!  The new art will be in the public beta build this week sometime, maybe tomorrow.  If you want to check it out, sign up for the beta this way right over here.  Be warned, it is in there, but it’s not very playable, it’s more of a tech demo right now.  It’ll get more playable as time goes on, but the main maps for actually playing the game will remain the old art ones for quite some time!  Much more on this soon when I release the build and stream the release notes!

Picture Gallery

Finally, the pictures!  Since this post is all about the bullet-points, here are some highlights:

• Apparently elite players holding a sandwich while SpyPartying is now a thing:  kcmmmmm at Evo, playing, and zerotka at PAX, mentoring.
• zapdsl handicapping himself against a newbie by taking off his glasses.
• Evan Narcisse, from Kotaku, the real inspiration for Mr. D.³
• Davin Pavlas of Riot Games came by to play after our panel on player communities, and then I spotted him again on the repeat players station.  He didn’t help set up the booth, though.
• Lots of great cosplay sprinkled throughout!

1. …for some suitably liberal definition of “playable”
2. like, literally, we could not have actually done the conference without them!
3. Or so he claims…but look, a black man with a goatee who is not Morgan Freeman!!!

I don’t mean technically; it’s actually really great that YouTube now allows long videos. I mean in every other way. It’s too long to edit. It’s too long to watch. It’s too long to watch again to see if you made any editing mistakes. It’s too long to compress. It’s too long to upload. It’s just too long.

That said, the actual content of this too-long video is pretty awesome, so I apologize for the length, and I’ll try to keep these shorter in the future.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the new streaming video show I’m going to do called the…SpyParty Masterclass!

I was originally going to call it “Chris Tries to Learn to Stop Sucking at His Own Game”, but I think SpyParty Masterclass rolls off the tongue a little better.

The idea is this: every so often, like hopefully at least weekly from here on out,¹ I will invite one of the elite SpyParty players to mentor me, to teach a masterclass with me as the student. I will do this on live-stream, and I will have the mentor stream too, or at least record the match locally. We will play some games, I will lose a lot, and we will discuss why I lost after each game. I will then edit the two recordings together for better post-stream viewing, and post them on the SpyParty YouTube channel.

Here is the first episode, the pilot if you will, recorded with r7stuart on his 1 year beta birthday:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you go to the YouTube page for the video, you can see links to all the individual game timestamps in the video description. This makes it somewhat easier to navigate this giant monstrosity. I’ve put the Sniper side first in each game, so you can play along with me (losing) or him (winning) before you see the corresponding Spy view.  After both sides of the game, you can hear the discussion about what I did wrong.

Even just watching the first few games and commentary will teach you a lot about elite level SpyParty play. I will try to keep the episodes to an hour or so from here on out. As one of the players watching the stream said, “I’ve learned more in the last couple hours than I have all week.” 

I am really excited about doing this show. I love playing SpyParty, even when I lose, and I love learning why I lost, and I especially love learning things about my game I didn’t know, even though I wrote it.

When I’ve explained this to some newer players, they’re surprised I’m not the best at my own game. If I was the best at SpyParty, I’d be very worried about the depth of the design. I’m ecstatic I’m not the best at the game, and I haven’t been for a very long time. This is a good thing. The feeling of getting “beat at your own game” is an amazing one that every designer of a competitive game should strive for as early as possible. I would even claim if you have a reasonable number of players and you’re not getting beat at your own game, it either means they’re not that into your game so they’re not spending enough time to get really excellent at it, or it doesn’t have the systemic depth for them to find ways to get better at it than you. Either way, it’s a problem you need to fix!

If you’ve got feedback on the format, please post it in the comments. It’s my first even remotely complicated editing job, and it’s pretty rough. I hate editing video, it just takes forever, but I really want this show to be educational and useful, so don’t hold back with any constructive feedback!

If you want to hear about when these are going to happen, follow @spyparty on twitter. If you want to find out about any SpyParty streams, check out the SpyParty Streams Notifier.

1. although the summer is a little crazy for me with PAX right there at the end of it

At times, it was iffy.

You see, a “normal” show, like PAX, lasts from 9 or 10am to about 6pm.  At that point, the guards kick everybody out and you can close up the booth and go to bed or fix the bugs your found that day, or maybe even eat dinner.  Standing and talking about your game for 8 or 9 hours straight is pretty exhausting, though, and I rarely go out and have fun after hours at PAX because I want to be fresh in the morning for the next group of SpyParty players.

Evo, by contrast, goes from about 8am to 12am midnight.  Sometimes it goes even later, and as an exhibitor, we have to get there before the floor opens.  Yes, you are there, in your booth, talking about your game, helping people out, fixing problems, and explaining the damned over-complicated Transfer Microfilm mission for 16 or 17 hours a day.  Then you collapse, get up, shower, and do it again.  It is brutal.  Lots of exhibitors get in late or close up early, but not SpyParty; if we’re going to fly to Vegas and set up our booth, we’re going to let people play the game when they are there.  Like the Fighting Game Community itself, Evo requires a different level of commitment.

Surviving wouldn’t have been possible without the amazing help of kate, kcmmmmm, and berryalice.  John and I owe them our vocal chords.

Still, there’s nothing quite like seeing somebody visit the booth early in the show, being hesitant to read the manual, and then have them camping the unlimited play machine for hours by the end.  Even better is later seeing them online in the lobby the day after the show.

Also, if we didn’t go all-in at Evo, we wouldn’t have created a situation where this was possible, or maybe even inevitable:

Banana Bread Beer makes a hearty breakfast, in addition to a great prize.

If you have no idea what that is all about, read this, this, and this.

It was also great to see so many return players from last Evo, see if you can spot them between the two galleries!

One thing that didn’t return was the old set of Dell Zino HD computers.  The always-amazing Ben Kutcher got us some Intel NUCs, which even though they have a terrible name are pretty great pieces of hardware:

The Intel NUCs on the left replace the Dell Zinos on the right.

The NUCs are way faster than the Zinos as well as being about 1/5th the size.  I’m optimistic they’ll run the new art that’ll finally be in the game at PAX this year.  More on that soon.

The Pictures

Pictures after the jump…

Without further ado, here are a bunch of pics from Evo 2013.  Post a comment if I captured you!  And, once again, it’s worth pointing out that Evo is the most racially diverse video game show I’ve ever attended.  Look at the pictures, it’s pretty amazing and inspiring.

Edit:  whoa, ky made this amazing thing from the gallery:  GIANT IMAGE, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED