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.

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!

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 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

One of the aspects of SpyParty that I’m most proud of is its community.  It’s really hard to describe how it feels to play the game, or hang out in the lobby, the forums, or the TeamSpeak channel, or watch a stream, and see all these people who were strangers to each other before they started playing your game…and they’re friends now.  What’s more, they’re welcoming new people into the community with open arms, setting their own good examples and helping it stay healthy!  Let’s just say it’s a pretty great feeling.  It’s an even greater feeling when you know you’re making an insanely hardcore player-skill competitive game, and they’re still all helping each other out, both beginners and elite players.

Another aspect of SpyParty that’s incredibly important to me is diversity, in terms of allowing people to choose characters that fairly represent a wide array of different colors, body shapes, ages, genders, sexual orientations, and physical abilities.  In fact, I have a goal to make SpyParty the “most diverse game ever”, in the sense that you will be able to kick somebody’s ass straight into next week as the Spy while playing as a queer octogenarian of color in a wheelchair.  You might move a little slower, but you’re low to the ground, so it’s easier to hide that listening device!  I am very lucky that the fiction of SpyParty is compatible with making an intense player-skill game that can still be diverse in this way.¹ You are unlikely to see this kind of playable character plausibly slashing dragons with a sword or shooting space aliens, but as a Spy at a cocktail party?  I say it’s perfect cover!

You can see a start to see this diversity in the initial batch of new characters we’ve revealed:

They’re a good start, diversity-wise.

I’ll talk more about this “in-game diversity” in another post.

Today, I want to talk about a complementary kind of diversity, that of the community.  I don’t have any data on this, but I think these two kinds of diversity go hand-in-hand, because if the game is setting a good example with its design, gameplay, and aesthetics, I think it’s probably more likely the community will follow suit.

But, a more important part of community diversity is the community valuing inclusiveness and speaking up for it.  Below is an example from last week in the beta forums.  The influx of new people from the open beta happened, and one of the community members felt the need to post a note to the new players.  Some mature discussion happened, including some respectful disagreement, and people arrived at a consensus.  This is not how conventional wisdom says it’s supposed to work in hardcore multiplayer gaming communities on the internet, but yet, it can if everyone wants it to work that way.

I thought this thread was a perfect example of the SpyParty beta community in action.  Some of the players posting in this thread are at the top of the leaderboard, the best players in the game.  Way better than you or me, and I made the damned game.  But they’re also respectful, humble, mature, and open to the fact that there are other ideas in the world that may not come naturally but are worth the effort to consider, and they’re working to keep the community a healthy environment for all kinds of people…a healthy environment to ruthlessly shoot each other² over and over again.

If you’d like to be a part of this kind of community, you are welcome to join us!

1. There are other important kinds of diversity SpyParty probably can’t explore effectively, like class and income diversity.
2. and the occasional innocent civilian

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jonathan Blow and I will be answering—or trying to answer—questions from the audience on Wednesday, May 8th, at 7pm PDT in San Francisco as guests of the SF IGDA.  We did a kind of similar thing a while back on Kotaku, and it turned out pretty well, so hopefully it’ll work again this time.  It’s open to the public, and it’s hosted by Dolby Labs:

Dolby Laboratories Inc.
100 Potrero Ave, San Francisco, CA

Here’s the official announcement.  I assume the questions will mostly be about indie game development.  I hope most of the questions are about indie game development.  Come ask questions about indie game development, please.

This post was really just an excuse to show you this picture.

First, since Nolan’s the Sniper in this game, you can sort of play along with him, so watch this first:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, here’s Tytalus’ side, where he’s playing Spy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, on first viewing, you might not be that impressed.  “He got lucky”, “Nolan made a mistake and shot too early”, end of story, right?

I don’t think so.  I think this is a perfect game of SpyParty, and I’m going to analyze it fairly closely to explain why.

It’s important to point out the title of this post is A Perfect Game of SpyParty, not The Perfect Game of SpyParty.  I don’t want to imply this is the only or the best way to play.  Any deep competitive game—which is what I’m striving to create here—needs to make multiple overlapping strategies available to the players at any one time, and the players need to constantly react to the current situation to choose the best one, or the least-worst one.  However, this particular game exemplifies the pinacle of a certain style of SpyParty play, and I want to talk about why.

The whole thing’s a set up. A scam, a frame job.

One of the advanced ways to play SpyParty as the Spy is to try to “frame” an NPC, and get him or her shot by the Sniper.  This is quite distinct from the Sniper choosing to shoot the wrong person even though you were trying to complete your missions; that happens all the time, even in elite games.  Framing somebody is a step beyond that, where the Spy spends precious time doing certain actions in a certain way to try to implicate another partygoer, to “help” the Sniper shoot the wrong person. There’s a halfway strategy of just trying to get a lowlight for yourself, or getting a highlight for somebody else, and then using that as cover for doing missions as well.

It’s a risky gambit, because you can waste a lot of valuable time trying to frame somebody, and it’s very hard to recover when you’re running low on time, so you have to be careful if you’re going to choose this path.   Also, you have to have a fairly high level of micro skill so you can be pretty confident of being able to act like the NPCs convincingly while you’re framing another one, and to hit green Action Tests on missions, both of which which are important to effectively frame someone.

I think Tytalus’ play here exhibits incredible observation, strategy, patience, and yes, luck, or more correctly, being able to take advantage of luck when it comes your way.  I would have screwed this game up at multiple different points as Spy, and I’ll try to note those below as I talk about the game.

Observation

Tytalus’ observational skill was in play long before he started talking in this game.  He almost ran into “the Red Dress” (Cybil Disobedience) at the statues immediately on spawn (0:11), but since this is the Time of Chaos™ you can get away with a lot of jerky movement and direction changes during this beginning phase, so he just bails from the statue and goes to hang out in a conversation to see where things settle out.  This is the first place I would have screwed up.  Since the Spy spawned near the statues, I almost certainly would have at least done an Inspect Statues, and probably would have earned a highlight for my troubles, which also would have made Cybil bail from the statue and go do something else.  I’m too focused on completing missions as the Spy to observe subtle details about the party flow.

At this point, Tytalus is watching Nolan’s laser (which you can see if you set the video to HD with the little gear icon) to see what he’s looking at.  He also checks his twitch.tv chats and answers one about contacting the Double Agent.  He notices that Cybil goes straight from one statue to another, which while not exactly rare, is certainly a reason to be suspicious of somebody and probably got Cybil highlit if she wasn’t already from her “statue rush”.  This is the second place I would have screwed up, because I wouldn’t have noticed that Cybil was the object of the Sniper’s attention for the back-to-back statue visits.

Tytalus moves to the conversation group containing the Double Agent at 0:37. 

Strategy

At this point I think Tytalus has formulated a plan for framing Cybil and getting her shot.  At 0:45, from the safety of a conversation, he says, “Now he’s watching the Red Dress pretty heavily, so what I don’t want to do is scare him off right now.”  This means that if Tytalus had gone and done the Contact Double Agent action right then, the audible tell of “banana bread” would have immediately eliminated Cybil as a suspect because she was still at a statue.  This would have made her impossible to frame, so it would have gotten a mission done but flushed the opportunity to frame down the toilet.   I probably would have done that, making three mistakes.

Tytalus says he wants Cybil to go into a conversation and talk, so then he can hit a green Action Test on the Contact, making it look like he’s not talking but she is, and probably increasing Nolan’s suspicion of her.  Tytalus doesn’t know for sure he can hit a green Action Test, because it’s hard,²  but it’s worth a shot, and if he waits for her to talk, even if he hits a white action test and talks himself, she’ll still be talking and be more suspicious than he is due to the statue visits.

Patience

“Red Dress should chat…c’mon Red Dress, chat!  Chat, damn you!”

Although frustrated that Cybil isn’t talking, Tytalus is incredibly patient here.  He’s in a conversation with the Ambassador (who is in range for the bug!) and the Double Agent, and he still plays it cool.  He knows Nolan is not seeing any real tells, so is stewing in his own juices, manufacturing suspicion and starting to panic that he’s missing something.  He knows this because this is what Snipers do—this is what human brains do—they see patterns even if there aren’t any.  Similarly, Nolan knows Tytalus is higher ranked than he is, so he’s panicking even more that Tytalus is just invisible due to their skill gap, but is still accomplishing missions, and Tytalus knows Nolan is thinking this.

The Ambassador and the Double Agent leave the conversation, and he still plays it cool:  “I don’t even care, I don’t care if there’s no…” (1:03) 

I would have chased one of the two of them, or gone and done a seduce, or a statue mission.  I would have been sweating the clock, since I’d wasted so much time trying to frame Cybil.

Luck

But, Tytalus is patient, and stands there as the clock ticks down.  He knows Cybil has to go talk at some point, and at 1:21 his ship comes in.  Cybil chases the Double Agent and the Ambassador, and then sidles right up to the Ambassador, as if she wants to cuddle (or bug) him.

Boom, headshot.

“YES!”

Poker versus Go

Now, you might say luck was a huge part of this, that it was the thing that won the game, but I don’t think so.  Luck played a major supporting role to be sure, but it was Tytalus’ read on the situation, and his steadfast refusal to screw up an opportunity for a good thing to happen that won him this round.  I bet, even if Cybil hadn’t landed right next to the Ambassador, or had gone to a different conversation circle, that Tytalus would have still gotten her shot.  He’d played brilliantly up to this point, dealing with bad luck (like Cybil not talking for 30 entire seconds, an eternity in this game), and so I don’t see why he wouldn’t have responded to whatever else happened with the same virtuosity unless things had gone completely unpredictably pear-shaped.³

In poker terms, he was dealt a good hand, he turned it into a great hand with consistently excellent play, and he got dealt the perfect card on the river to take him unambiguously over the top.

I am a strong believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

Benjamin Franklin

Go has always been my favorite game, what I would consider the most beautiful game designed by humankind.  When I first started designing SpyParty, my goal was to aim for Go, with its crystaline precision, its complete lack of randomness that would—I believed at the time—dilute the player-skill aspects of a game.

Over the years, I learned more about the very different beauties of Poker, and I began to realize regardless of where I wanted to aim design-wise or what my own preconcieved aesthetics were, when I allowed the game to lead the design naturally, when I listened to the game, SpyParty was actually heading towards Poker, with its beauty coming from probabilities and expected values and seizing the opportunity as it’s presented.

I certainly don’t expect SpyParty will ever be as well-designed as Go or Poker, but I am happy that it’s inching in the direction of allowing play at the level exhibited in the game above, and I plan to encourage this and take it even deeper.

If you’re interested in this topic from a game design standpoint, you really must watch two lectures:

• Frank Lantz, Life and Death and the Middle Pair: Go, Poker, and the Sublime, GDC 2011
• Richard Garfield, Luck In Games, NYU 2011, also the article in Duelist #19, 1997

If you’re interested in watching games at this level, you should follow some of the elite level SpyParty streamers on twitch:

• tytalus
• virifaux
• r7stuart
• Or, check out all the people who stream SpyParty here in my Following section,⁴ there’s usually at least one or two a night and lots of good games to watch:  http://www.twitch.tv/spyparty/videos
• Follow SpyParty on twitter, I try to announce streams as they start up

And, yes, of course playing the game is good too!  More invites will go out tonight, and the open beta is coming soon!

1. …which is awesome, I love it when people stream both sides!
2. I haven’t run the numbers in a while, but current estimates among elite players are around 30-50%, there’s some old data here.
3. …which, of course, can happen too!
4. I’m going to start streaming soon, as well!  More on that later.

Courtyard

In the old days, we walked to the only map, the Ballroom, uphill, both ways, and we liked it.  Eventually, after a couple years of playtesting on that single map, I decided to test my working theory that making new and interesting maps for SpyParty wouldn’t be too terribly hard, at least relative to something like doing the AI and animations for a new mission.  In other words, I was working under the assumption that because most of the gameplay in SpyParty is based on the character behaviors and the perception and deception mechanics, doing new maps would be a relatively easy way to add new gameplay.  The maps would obviously be important and add a lot of variety to the game, but their layouts would not be as crucial to the feel of the game as they are in a shooter or a platformer.  I mean, Ballroom itself is just a box and everybody seemed to like it!

So, I tested this theory by adding the Balcony and Veranda maps, and I’d say the theory was proven to be true, since both of those maps worked well and people like playing them.   The Ballroom is still the go-to map for serious play because it’s the most tuned and balanced, but the other maps add some spice and hint at how the game will feel with lots of different settings and map topologies.

On the runup to PAX, I had an idea for a new map where the statues would be centrally located, but the Sniper couldn’t see them all at the same time.  I was wondering how that would change the Inspect Statue and Swap Statue missions, which have turned out to be two of the riskiest missions for Spies to attempt.  My original thought for this level was a single statue right in the center, but I decided that would be too hard, so I settled on three statues embedded in a central pillar, where the Sniper can only see one at a time.

I hacked this map together one night at PAX, and we playtested it the next day.  The initial tuning was way too hard for the Sniper, not to mention how hard it was to get your bearings.  After some tuning, and Wessel’s suggestion of using a statue of Alan Turing to give the Sniper an orientation reference point, the Courtyard seems to be working out well.   I think I overcorrected a bit and the statue missions are now a bit hard for the Spy again, and it needs more playtesting and tuning, but it’s definitely already interesting and fun to play for both roles.

Current stats for Courtyard look like this:

You’ll recall there there are currently three game types in SpyParty, “Known n” where the Sniper knows the n missions the Spy will try to accomplish, “Pick n of m”, where the Sniper knows the m missions available, but not which n ones the Spy picked, and “Any n of m”, where the Spy can choose which n to accomplish opportunistically during play, rather than having to pick them ahead of time.  We’ve started abbreviating these k4, p4/5, a3/4, and so on in the beta chat and forums.

As you can see from this table, the different modes have different levels of handicapping between the players.  I’ve just gathered these numbers from all the games on the Courtyard map, so this is totally ignoring skill differences, early games where players were just testing out the map, and the like.  But, it’s still interesting to see the balance.

Unfortunately, as you can see, the Any game types are missing their n parameter.  As I started gathering this data, I realized I’d screwed up and left that number out of the database for Any game types, so I can’t tell if the a?/5 games are a3/5 or a4/5, which is a bummer, because it makes a big difference in difficulty for the Spy and Sniper.  I’ll probably have to ignore old Any games when I do real ranking with this data.  I’ve since fixed it,¹ and although there aren’t enough games with the new correct data yet to be statistically significant, here they are:

Chat Rooms

Soon I will be opening up the beta, and this (hopefully) means a lot of people will be playing SpyParty simultaneously, at least towards the end of the closed beta when I send out the rest of the invitations and into the beginning of the open beta when anybody can sign up and play immediately.  The old lobby had a single room, and when 10 or 12 people were in there chatting, it got a bit hard to keep track of who was talking to who and what they were saying.

So, I did the simplest chat room design possible, with the goal of load-balancing the lobby if there were 30 or 100 simultaneous users chatting.  I basically decided to put all the room creation and multiple-join/leave commands on the chat console, and have the GUI only allow you to select a single existing chat room at a time.  This way advanced users can hang out in multiple chat rooms and make new rooms, but newbies can just join one and chat and play a match without thinking too hard about it.

The jury is still out on whether the current chat rooms work very well, and we’ll have to wait until I invite more people in to see if they solve the load balancing problem, but they’re certainly slightly confusing at the current density.  I tried to make sure joining “Headquarters” (the default room that’s always there) was easy enough that you didn’t have to think about it and it acts just like a single room lobby if there aren’t many people online, but I didn’t want to dump people automatically into a chat room for fear of causing problems when the game was scaled.  We’ll see how it works out.  I foresee a lot of changes in this code and UI as the number of simultaneous users goes up.

One change I made shortly after releasing the feature was adding a “Created by <username>” line in the chat room description.  Since users can create any rooms they like, this will at least keep people honest, or at least culpable!  Before I added this players were creating rooms that sounded official, which was funny but probably fraught with peril.  I also don’t support hidden rooms or password protected rooms or anything yet.  I’d like to keep the community from segregating as much as possible for the time being.

On the subject of chat, I really need to do something soon about my text rendering code, it is incredibly slow right now:

checker: /fps
SpyParty version v0.1.2202.0
19.869 ms/frame (fps: 50.33)  sort self - current frame
zone                                                     self     hier    count
 checkerlib::simple_font::DrawStringOrthoPixels       18.6377  18.6377    54.78
+chat_display                                          0.3964  16.6585     1.00
 SwapBuffers                                           0.2445   0.2445     1.00
+IdleFinal                                             0.2400   0.4846     1.00
+_global                                               0.0582  19.8692     0.00

Logging Performance, etc.

There were a bunch of other smaller fixes, one of which other programmers might find interesting:  I use the spypartyhelper.exe to write the log files now, rather than having the main spyparty.exe write them out.  The helper has always done the crash dump management (using a modified version of Google’s Breakpad) and the auto-updating privilege escalation, but now I also have it handle logging, using a named pipe from spyparty.exe.  The reason I made this change was some machines (like my main development machine) would happily write out the logs in the main process without affecting performance at all, even though I had commit mode turned on for the log file.  I used commit mode so if the game crashed, the log file would contain the most up-to-date log entries, so when the helper grabbed it and put it in the crash dump report and uploaded it to my server I could use it for debugging.  However, on some machines, the commit mode logging would take hundreds of times longer, and I couldn’t figure out what the difference was between fast and slow machines.  What’s worse, it became clear that a lot of beta testers were assuming the game just loaded slowly, which subtly (or not-so-subtly) affects how you feel about the game, even though all the time was being spent writing log statements.  Once I realized people were suffering with slow load times, I knew I had to fix it.

The weirdest bug I fixed involved the Spy playing the cough animation as soon as control was taken from the AI.  The cough animation is supposed to be played when the Spy bails out of a conversation too soon after saying “banana bread” to contact the Double Agent.  I added the cough because some people were cheesing out and running away from the circle before the contact animation had finished, and it was too hard for the Sniper to spot this glitch.  So, the cheesers got a big surprise a few builds back!  But, it shouldn’t be happening in a new game if you haven’t even done anything yet, and beta testers couldn’t get a good repro.  Well, after a bunch of debugging, it turned out I wasn’t clearing a timer in the Contact Double Agent situation on new game, so if somebody was shot within 2 seconds of a “banana bread”, then since they were moving at the start of the next game but the timer hadn’t expired, the situation decided they’d cheesed out of the conversation and made them cough.  Yay for cross-game bugs!  I guess it was the ghost of the previous victim making the Spy cough!

Mail Deliverability

Man, sending mail reliably on the internet today is fraught with peril.  I’ve been trying to figure out how often a beta invitation or confirmation mail simply doesn’t get delivered, or gets dumped in a spam folder.  So far, I’ve struggled with and been victorious getting SenderID and SPF working, and I’m still wrestling with DKIM, but I am confident I’ll prevail…eventually.  Of course, all the major mail clients use different standards.  I guess I could just pay a mail sending service to handle this for me, but it just seems crazy if I’m forced to do that to get mail delivered.  Then again, I’ve wasted a ton of time dealing with this, so maybe it would have been worth it.  I tend to think the learning and understanding I get from working through these problems myself is worth the time investment, but that could easily be rationalization, who knows?!

Update:  I think I have prevailed in the email war.  I’ve got all the major email providers² verifying my DKIM and SPF records.  I had to battle php messing up newlines which confused the hash, SELinux disallowing postfix from talking to opendkim, and whole bunch of other randomness.  My only problem now is with AOL, and their postmaster just admitted the problem was on their side and they’re fixing it.  Hopefully that is the end of any spyparty.com email going into the spam folder, woohoo!  I sent out 500 invites tonight to celebrate, which brings us to  2011-05-11 06:35:21 US Central Time on the in-order invites.³

1. I’ve tested the results with beta member “tytalus”, who was very patient!
2. Out of 20k beta signups: gmail 56%, hotmail+uk+live 14%, yahoo 7% aol 1%
3. I do 60% in-order and 40% random in each batch.

The ostensible purpose of this post is to brainstorm what topiary shape should go on top of the center pillar in the new experimental Courtyard map, pictured here:

Radial pseudo-symmetry, not good for getting your bearings.

I will talk more about the design of this map in the future, but for now I will just say it’s really hard for the Sniper.  The radial pseudo-symmetry is not good for memorizing the statues…you can’t really get your bearings, and I’ve made it so the Sniper can just keep going around in circles so there’s no feeling of beginning or end.  One playtester at PAX got unlucky and all three statues were the Maltese Falcon, and he said he just kept going around in circles trying to see a different statue shape!

So, I figure I’d put a topiary animal or something on top of the pillar.  It can’t have radial symmetry, so a Christmas Tree or whatever is right out.  I thought a banana might be funny, but it might lead to, uh, perception problems.  So, any ideas? 

1. I think it was cracked a couple weeks back, or the bad guys have really good OCR algorithms.