I have a zillion blog posts queued up in draft or idea form, but I don’t want to take any time away from working on the beta to finish any of them, so I came up with this (probably ill-advised) idea:  I will post the remaining items left to do before I can invite the first players to join the beta.  Then, instead of taking time to write new posts, I’ll just edit this post and strikethrough the items as I do them.  Sadly, as with most software development task lists, the items below are at vastly different time and difficulty scales, so they won’t all get checked off at the same rate, and they have an annoying tendency to spawn unforseen subtasks as one digs into them, so the list will grow occasionally too.  But, at least this way you can see my progress towards the finish line at a finer granularity than my intermittent tweets.

Even though I’m stupendously late, I’m pretty excited about SpyParty’s development right now, because almost all of the big tasks have been finished.  Stuff like auto-updating, crash dump reporting, the installer, and the security system are done, or at least beta quality.  Most of the rest of the stuff to do is the myriad loose ends that come along with getting anything ready for public consumption.  The two big remaining things are the invite-a-friend feature that I originally wasn’t planning to do for launch, but after your comments here on the blog, on twitter, and on facebook, I decided I simply had to add it, and the text chat feature, which is sort of stubbed in but needs to be improved, since communication is going to be an important part of the experience.  It’s going to be really rough to start with, but hopefully it will be good enough to get things started.

I’ve broken up the todo list into three sections:  the Website, which means anything you talk to through your browser, including payments and the private beta foums and homepage; the Server, which is the lobby, player and game database, and that sort of thing; and the Game, which is the thing that runs on your machine.

Without further ado, here is the list.  You can ask questions in the comments, but do keep in mind that time I spend explaining these things is time I’m not spending checking them off!  Also, these are just the tasks to get the first beta invites out, I have infinitely longer and less well defined task lists for later in the beta and beyond.  But let’s not think about those right now…

Website

• invite friend to join beta, one invite per person
• mail and homepage needs notes about whether you can talk about game during beta
• please do, indie games need your help to spread the word
• if you have criticisms, I just hope you’ll also tell me (post in forums or email) so I can fix them
• invites
• invite.pl
• need to update the intInviteStatus, uncomment the execute line
• do initial invites with email
• change invite.pl to not need any email, and just take a count and invite the next group
• cheating
• many ways right now, please just don’t, will make me deal with cheaters now instead of making game
• spectating
• listening for control clicks?
• even multiple people watching sniper side monitor
• switch to CentOS 6
• get backups in order, good test for this!
• audit all the code
• add user to announce mailing list
• block test ipns from doing real work
• test newline in display name? need to escape it
• style cosign pages
• login, login error
• logout
• change password
• only want while logged in for now? yes
• style
• test cosign logout
• definitely does not work in firefox the first time? wtf? look at the cookies?
• beta homepage
• style
• stats
• write introduction to beta
• link change password
• style rss
• display nicer date
• remove umich copyright
• forums
• edit account settings – disable change password & email address
• update phpbb to 3.0.9
• welcome message
• stats on profile page
• phpbb how to report bugs
• phpbb faq – update faq.php to add styles/<active>/faq/more_faq.php to the array
• error_log in all php code
• paypal note about anonymous payments, credit cards, etc.
• retry-registration needs to display a page before going to paypal
• mail with details of which cancellation on paypal error?
• test paypal flow with non-sandbox
• enable IPN, redirect back to page, etc.
• what does cc bill show as outside of sandbox?
• start downloading logs
• forward mail? probably better than running pop
• or upload to s3?

Server

• when shutting down, don’t allow new connections, just reply with failure message
• why doesn’t the stunserver work when resolving addresses?
• test relay server, at OAK?
• kerberize stun and relay servers
• initially just show spy/sniper games played, so user name is displayed as checker (45/67) everywhere
• upgrade krb to 1.9.2
• client
• server
• write lobbyclient stress tester app that spews data at server
• log in first sometimes
• use known packet types
• make this the lobbyclient app, and have it be console control as well
• send message to all connections
• don’t make this too general for now, fine to recompile for different stress tests
• need to fix pointer output in log for connect/disconnect
• send client state info to server for debugging?
• yes, at game menu, playing, etc.
• server database
• async_db clear semantics for db return codes, reg/unreg
• store game/match data to db
• users records
• ranking info
• date stamp for login
• last login, logout
• $inc login count
• $inc failed count?
• cumulative time logged in! login/match/game times & counts
• add usernames to journal filenames (urlescape!)
• checker/test for testing
• turn verifies in the lobby ctor into logs so can debug
• clients only allowed one game journal per game id
• don’t need the random number anymore, given session id in filename
• overwrite file on multiple submissions
• async_krb5 and async_db error log…have a varargs Log and pass it, also for game
• finish updating to new protocol
• client<->server
• client<->client
• hmm, track memory usage and make sure we’re not leaking
• output to log file occasionally?
• info mallinfo – dev/test/mallinfo.cpp will work on linux
• GetProcessMemoryInfo
• async_krb5
• clean up code
• disable all the built-in accounts? or leave them randkey?

Game

• “game” -> “match” in ui
• handle errors in client<->client authn
• switch to — for command line parms?
• windowed maximized borderless
• network time sync?
• it can lag by 5 seconds, which plays fine but seems terrible, better to run Zach’s simple net sync code
• merge reliable packets
• ooi in reliable packets
• test motion in joy ps3 driver
• make a list grid mode for the chooser, or just obey tabs?
• then display other players in lobby and their ranks
• want to display release notes during autoupdate?
• have lobbyserver fetch them?
• displayed while downloading, option in main menu
• send gl versions and cpuid during login?
• need to version check on clients
• journal match id on client and server
• net pause – pause is a nice thing, no?
• test keys disable
• figure out what stuff to collect in the journals, careful of machine name, etc.
• no marketing, or sharing (might publish anonymous stats)
• add the appropriate command line parms to the –help! window stuff, etc
• fix chat
• /me /e[mote] str – print “username str”
• /played /age – print playtime stats
• /? /h[elp] – print commands
• /w[hisper] /t[ell] /m[sg] <username> str – private message to username
• /r[eply] str – reply to last person who whispered me
• /retell str – send to last person I whispered
• /away /afk /dnd [str] – displays str to anyone who whispers me, /away to cancel
• /time – lobbyserver time and local time
• the chat text is totally unreadable with those colors!
• /fps – basic net and video info
  
• completion, cut & paste
• support esdf, y invert, config screen
• if not fully remappable keys, mention ablegamers list in readme and say will comply soon
• logging
• async_krb5 and async_db error log…have a varargs Log and pass it, also for game
• log printf output to file instead of console
• and gzip and send to server?
• chat messages to console?
• convert to use log function instead of stderr
• disable logging by default
• or, log to file always for now so crash dump can upload it instead of asserts log
• log to pipe and store in spypartyhelper’s memory instead of file?
• update docs/README.txt
• put the character name in highlight text? try it.

2011-11-14 18:02:07 – Checked one off already, although I must admit I did the minimum necessary to get it working.

2011-11-17 18:25:17 – Grindy bug fixy day, but finally got the async server db thread semantics clear.

2011-11-30 13:09:31 – Okay, I think the server database stuff is all done, games are saved, results are saved, the player records are updated, etc.

2011-12-06 13:59:23 – The ugliest lobby ever?  Maybe.

A team of UI designers worked on this for 5 years.

2012-01-05 11:18:54 – I am calling it for the chat system.  I didn’t get to /ignore and /stats and whatnot, but /ignore is not relevant until there are annoying people playing, which I’m sure won’t be the case for a while, and /stats are all displayed in the lobby chooser, so it’s redundant for now.

2012-01-25 16:41:04 – More red strikethroughs!  Getting really close!

2012-01-26 15:08:46 – Getting the PS3 DualShock controller to work on Windows is so much more work than it should be.  Start by installing the totally unauthorized MotionInJoy drivers! Then mess around with configurations.  Don’t even think about getting it working over BlueTooth unless you have certain USB dongles.  What year is this?  Oh well, it works:

Well, at least now I can say I support 360, PS3, and mouse+keyboard.

2012-02-03 14:24:10 – Finally grinding through the website tasks, which should go pretty quick…*cough*.  Here is a screenshot of the saddest page on the blog:

A page you don't want to see in your browser.

1. Let’s just agree not to mention my original June 16th estimate, okay?

I think it’s great the IGF gives submitters feedback, and, being on the Advisory Board for the Game Developers Conference, I know exactly how much work it is to even just grade the submissions, let alone writing up feedback clean enough that it can be sent back to submitters.  It’s something we constantly wrestle with on the GDC AB:  should we spend our time helping the accepted talks be better, or spend time giving feedback on why talks were rejected?  It’s a tough decision with no easy answers.

So, I post this feedback here both because I think it’s great the IGF does this and it’s wonderful to get feedback from people who played the game “in the wild” without me standing there, and also because I think this specific SpyParty feedback is kinda funny in its breadth, yet also brings up interesting points worth discussing.  Plus, I’m sick of trying to make sure my openssl certificates have the right permissions for the krb5kdc user to not violate SElinux policies and need a break…

I got three pieces of feedback, and they’re all about as different as can be.  First up:

I have no objection to your focus on rules and skills. But I think a more abstract appearance for such abstract interactions would be more suitable. As it is now, you have created a murder simulator of the worst kind: one in which the player kills his or her friend.

This is especially problematic considering that you don’t even seem to care about the simulation aspect of the game, submitting a project as you did with only placeholder artwork. If you don’t mean to make a game about killing one’s friend, don’t use this metaphor.

I had no idea Jack Thompson was an IGF judge!  They should really publicize that more.  I kid!  I actually have a post in draft form about how SpyParty uses violence in a different way than most games, but I haven’t had time to finish it up.  I will tease one of the questions from that post here, since it’s topical to this feedback:  I’m thinking about adding a “PG” mode to the game, where, instead of shooting the Spy, the Sniper player identifies the Spy and the guards come arrest him or her.  Does this change the game?  The sniper bullet is, at its most basic level, simply a way for the Sniper to pick a character.  You can shoot a character in the toenail and it still counts.  The game ends when that choice is made, so there is no actual violence in the interactivity of the game.  But, some people argue having “arrest mode” would ruin the game.¹ This gets to some of my opinions about how the phrase “game mechanics” is misused a lot of the time, and how the low level features are inseparable from the higher level aesthetics of the gameplay, about which I’ll write more later.

Next:

Awesome, probably the most innovative entry of the year. If it doesn’t win a prize it’s just because it feels very early in the development.

It seems to me that the main indicator of somebody being a spy is the walking flow. If you see somebody with a stuttering walk it’s over. It shouldn’t be just about that, I’d recommend some kind of automatic movement smoothing.

This topic of the “walking tell” is a really interesting one I’ve talked about a bit in interviews and comments on the blog, but never expanded on.  I originally had click-to-move as the walking interface when the game was mouse-only, under the theory the game is supposed to be about behavior, not about not accidentally walking into walls.  Makes perfect sense, right?  But, when I went to add console controller support, I faced a dilemma:  console click-to-move interfaces are always terrible, so should I make it direct-control or not?  I thought about it a little deeper, and realized that when you’re playing a shooter or any other kind of player-skill direct-control action game, after an initial learning phase, you don’t actually think about the movement very much, you just express yourself through the control scheme.  You don’t think, “now I must strafe right, which is the left analog stick”, you just do it; the controls have become transparent.  I realized this actually adds a level of physicality and kinesthetics to the play experience that deepens it.  Because you have to learn to move, the game is deeper, and more about performance.  So, I put direct-control into the console controller interface for SpyParty, and the game got better.  Yes, noobs get shot while they’re learning the controls, but the learning of the controls involves the Spy player observing the NPCs closely and learning how they walk, it involves being able to think fast on the fly and stay calm, it exposed the awesome “play it cool” mechanic, where the Spy needs to be okay with suboptimal positions and not fidget and correct, and it had a whole bunch of other interesting ramifications on the design, much like the Action Test mechanic.  After observing this, I redid the mouse interface to be direct control too!

Finally:

Wonderful asymmetrical gameplay that is very nuanced. Needs polish, obviously, but in the games I played with another judge I had a really fun time.

Not much to say on this one, but I wasn’t sure what level of polish was appropriate for IGF, actually.  In fact, I was slightly surprised SpyParty was nominated for Grand Prize this year, since, let’s face it, the game is nowhere near finished. I figured if it was going to get nominated, it would be for Game Design.  But, any nomination is a huge honor, and if I’d been on the Grand Prize committee I’d have voted for Minecraft myself!

I haven’t decided whether to submit to IGF again.  It seems weird to submit multiple times, especially if you’ve been nominated.  Plus, I’m going to be insane with the Early-Access Beta, so I’ll see how I feel around submission time.

Okay, back to the server grindstone.  My next task is to get the CoSign SSO authn system running in the private beta phpBB to talk to the LDAP directory to get the player’s email address populated correctly. Then, figure out how to create accounts in LDAP from httpd without using the default openssl LDAP crt I’ve registered in the environment because I’ve restricted its LDAP permissions tightly for security, then use this dn to create the Kerberos account, and hook it up to a web form I can use as the endpoint for PayPal confirmed purchases so invited players can actually log on.  Whee, indie games are fun!

Teaser image!

1. More up-to-the-minute opinions here, here, and here.

It’s going to be an open panel discussion, led by the excellent Noah Wardrip-Fruin, but with questions from the audience as well, and it’s open to students and the public.  Who knows what we’ll end up talking about?!

There will not be a SpyParty playtest after this, unless you’d like to playtest my new content package subsystem I’m working on for the beta.  Woohoo, exciting stuff!

Update: I also just posted a related lecture about SpyParty‘s AI system and AI programming and design in general, titled, SpyParty, A Game About AI…plus some ranting.

Update: Arthur Mason posted some pictures of the event to flickr.

Must read this before playing Hecker's game.

This is part of the Design Futures talk series, and I was invited by Elizabeth Goodman in the Halcyon Days pre-GDC+PAX East.  She was nice enough to remind me that’d agreed to speak after I woke up last week.

I’m going to try something a little different for this lecture:  I’m going to have two volunteers play SpyParty at the beginning of the talk, with one of the laptops projected onto the screen (yes, the audience will need to keep quiet), and have the audience spectate as Spy and as Sniper.  I think this will be more interesting than me babbling about the game to describe it over static slides.  I also think this will work better than a similar thing I’ve tried during previous lectures, which is me playing Spy against the entire audience as Sniper.  That’s fun, but it kind of degenerates into everybody yelling at the poor sap holding the controller.  Plus, I always win. ²

It’ll look something like this:

Two people play SpyParty at the Joystiq PAX East breakfast, while others read the fine manual, and still others scrounge for free stuff on stage. Photo credit: Ben Gilbert, I think.

As for the lecture, since the talks in this series tend to be about capital-d Design, as opposed to games and game design, I’ll probably focus on my short and long term aesthetic goals for the game, the constraints and challenges it faces, how it fits into the indie segment that some of us are calling the Golden Age of Indie Games, and other high level things like that.  I will most likely not be showing code samples.

After the lecture we’ll do Q&A, and then people can playtest.  I will bring copies of the manual, although reading it online beforehand will let you jump the line, if there is one!

1. I find it kind of awesome that the official page for South Hall at The UC Berkeley School of Information doesn’t actually have a map to South Hall, just its history and some nice pictures, so I had to look it up on Google Maps!
2. It’s not clear if I always win because I wrote the game and I’m an awesome Spy, or if I always win because everybody arguing about who I might be usually takes long enough for me to complete the missions. I have, so far, been unimpressed by the Wisdom of Crowds, at least when it comes to sniping me. :)

So, here’s the pdf, ready for half-fold double-sided printing:  The Updated SpyParty Manual

Here are some rasterized images:

So, study up, and hope to see you at PAX East!

1. okay, I actually was so exhausted I took a nap on their couch

Last night the gang came over, ostensibly to playtest the entirety of the aforementioned stuff, but the damned playtesters wouldn’t stop playing The Balcony map.  Over and over again.  If you recall, The Balcony was almost meant as a throwaway silly experiment.  I was slamming the tuning knobs of map size and complexity from one side to the other with The Balcony and The Veranda just to see what would happen.  However, after the last playtest, I made a bunch of tuning changes to the Seduce Target and Contact Double Agent missions that have sort of inadvertently made The Balcony a somewhat balanced experience.

The Balcony, in Practice Spy mode.

The changes I made look like this:

• Seduce Target – You can now flirt with the target just about anywhere people congregate on the map, including at the windows, bookshelves, and statues, not just in conversations like last playtest.  There is now an analog “flirt bar” that fills up as you flirt¹, instead of having a fixed number of required flirtations, with the distance the Spy is from the Target multiplied by the Action Test determining how much credit you get for each flirtation.  It’s tuned right now to require two perfect flirtation attempts while standing right next to the Target, three if they’re just okay flirts, and four and six flirtations, respectively, if you’re far away on the other side of the conversation circle.  Since this change is hot off the press, there is currently absolutely no animation tell if you flirt while not in a conversation…you don’t even make a move, the only tell is the behavioral one of being near the same person multiple times.  Eventually² there will be conversations that can happen everywhere, and so flirting will at least require being in a conversation, even at the windows.
• Contact Double Agent – I made it so the map could specify the number of Suspected Double Agents visible to the Sniper, and this number could go all the way to zero, and then I set it to zero on The Balcony.  Normally, the Sniper can discount all of the Suspected Double Agents since they (currently) can’t be the Spy.  This is  a nice head start on eliminating suspects, which is a key part of Sniper gameplay.  Plus, since the Sniper knows one of the Suspected Double Agents is in fact the real Double Agent, when the Sniper hears the “banana bread” audio tell, he or she can look around at the various conversation groups and pay more attention to the ones with Suspected Double Agents in them.

These two changes took the map from a quick Spy deathtrap into a relatively more balanced but still quick SpyParty-lite experience.  In fact, since the Sniper can concentrate on everyone simultaneously, it becomes a fairly high level behavioral map.  Instead of looking for tells, the Sniper can really watch for the “burgeoning relationship” of Seduce Target, or somebody who appears to be going out of their way to walk by the Ambassador.  It’s also much less stressful for the Sniper than the big maps, where statue memorization and book tracking are important but taxing skills.

One thing I didn’t mention is I’ve codified the current game types into Call Your Shot, Subset, and Opportunistic Subset, where Call Your Shot means the Sniper knows which missions the Spy is going to attempt, Subset means the Sniper knows only the set of missions from which the Spy will attempt a smaller subset, yet the Spy must pick this subset before play, and Opportunistic Subset is like Subset but the Spy can pick the missions on the fly while playing based on opportunity.  Obviously these are in order of increasing difficulty for the Sniper.

On The Balcony, if you know the Spy is doing two Call Your Shot missions, one of which is a subtle mission like Bug Ambassador or Seduce Target, and you hear the “banana bread” tell of Contact Double Agent, you pretty much have to take a shot within 10 seconds or risk losing because chances are the Spy has already done the other mission, so it becomes an interesting almost-arcade version of SpyParty, but that is still about perception and deception.

In fact, after a couple hours of The Balcony, we switched to The Ballroom, and it felt all serious and stressful, way more than it did in the past.  I hope The Balcony hasn’t ruined the playtesters!  On the plus side, it’s great that I can lighten the intensity of the game on some maps while still retaining the core aesthetic of the game.

Ian and Lauren trade the controller under the table, so Rachel never knows who she's playing!

After playing The Ballroom a bit more, we talked about how it seemed like some missions worked better on some maps, and how general the missions would be.  From a production standpoint, I need to be able to share missions across maps, and that’s proving to be true, but there do seem to be affinities between them.  Time will tell how plug-n-play the missions are.  Some customization per map is great, doing all custom missions for every map is a non-starter, so hope for the best.  :)

I leave you with some SpyParty trash talking courtesy of Ian, Master Sniper:

Lauren, trying to learn from Ian while watching him play:  “Why did you highlight that girl?”

Ian:  “Because she was the Spy.”

1. Comments about how it should be a vertical bar that engorges as you flirt will be sent to /dev/null ;)
2. Where “eventually” is defined as hopefully by GDC.

The usual SpyParty playtest suspects, sans Paul, who was crunching on DarkSpore.

The Action Test Mechanic

I playtested the Action Test mechanic back in January, and it worked surprisingly well.  Going into the playtest, there was a lot of concern all around that it would be distracting, make the game more about twitch, and dominate the behavioral gameplay.  Paul even wrote a detailed blog post titled Why I’m Skeptical About Active Reload in SpyParty right before he came over to play.

Action Test

Before playing we discussed all sorts of different aspects of the mechanic, including how often players should get each result (good, okay, and bad), how subtle the tells should be for the different results, and the like.  Being a good game designer (not to mention a highly competitive game player), Paul used the new Practice Mode I put in for the IGF to practice the Action Test over and over again, and he kept track of how he improved.

Once we started playtesting for real, a very interesting thing happened that no one expected, and was, in fact, sort of the opposite of what we expected:  the mere existence of the good result in the Action Test forced the Sniper to play the “behavioral game” more than watching for tells. In other words, because there was the possibility of the Spy performing missions in a way that was not immediately detectable, the Sniper had to lift up to watching for behavioral tells—like partygoers acting with too much intentionality—rather than just waiting to see a hard tell.  This was surprising, and yet totally awesome.  No one expected the addition of this twitch mechanic to make the game even more about behavior!

It also turns out the Action Test isn’t distracting for new players, for the most part.  It goes by in about 1.5 seconds, and if you’re not looking for it, you don’t really see it.  I will probably still unlock it after a tutorial just to keep the number of things new players need to worry about small at the beginning, but the worries about it dominating the Spy’s mental space were unfounded.

Also, the double randomization makes it so the Spy has to pay attention to the bar if he or she wants to opt in, rather than just learning the rhythm like in Gears of War, so that worked well too.

Overall, I was super happy with how things turned out.  The Action Test worked even better than I hoped on a bunch of different levels.  Any time you add something like this to a game that’s already working, you run the risk of messing things up, but in this case it really did make things better.

One thing that became clear was the Contact Double Agent mission is too hard for the Spy against an elite Sniper because it gives the Sniper so much information.  Even though it’s a “soft tell” and only eliminates or implicates suspects, reducing the field is such an advantage that it’s a death trap for the Spy.  The good result on the Action Test I implemented still requires the Spy to be in a conversation, and so it doesn’t actually help much.  I’m going to need to change it so the Spy can somehow contact the agent from outside the circle if he or she performs a good Action Test.

Edit: Paul, who has been slightly busy shipping DarkSpore, finally wrote his followup: Everything Went Better Than Expected.

The New Maps

Tonight we tested out the new Veranda and Balcony maps.  The Veranda has a lot of partygoers, three bookshelves, statues all over the place, and the Sniper can’t see the whole map from any single vantage point.  The Balcony only has a few characters and is completely visible from all angles.

The assumption was the Veranda would be very hard for the Sniper, and the Balcony would be very easy, and this turned out to be the case.

The Balcony level only has the Contact Double Agent, Bug Ambassador, and Seduce Target missions.  The Spy can choose to do only one or two of these missions, and it’s still very hard to win.  The hard tell for bugging the Ambassador, which is so difficult to see in the main Ballroom level that it’s almost a gimme for the Spy, sticks out about as much as carrying a sign that says “Shoot Me”.  The “banana bread” soft audio tell for contacting the Double Agent is basically impossible to get away with because the Sniper can immediately see who’s talking.  Having to flirt with the Target multiple times allows the Sniper to see the relationship building as plain as day.  That said, it was fun to play because it’s such a quick little map, it has very little of the long slow building stress of the regular game.  If you happen to get away with something as the Spy it feels great because it’s so impossible.  It’s almost like a little arcade minigame of SpyParty, so it’s a nice bit of variety.

The Veranda level is the opposite.  It’s so big and there is so much going on that it’s difficult for the Sniper to get any deductive traction going.  Even Ian was overwhelmed and wasn’t using the normal process of elimination and was just watching for a mistake.  We started with 20 partygoers (which doesn’t count the Security Guard and the Waiter) and eventually tuned it down to 17 during the playtest to take off some of the cognitive load.  It is also currently set for four Spy missions, but I’m going to increase it to five.  We think the walkable areas are also a little thin, because this map really highlights the crappy pathfinder I’m currently using.  Overall, the Veranda was fun and added more variety, but it still needs some tuning work before GDC.

The Seduce Target Mission

As I discuss at the bottom of the post about the Seduce Target mission, there are a lot of options on where to take this mission.  But, for this first playtest, I just did the simplest possible thing:  the Spy has to get into a conversation with the Target and flirt four times, each closer in the circle than the last, and one of the two must leave the conversation between flirtations.

Oh Brimsworth, I choose you!

The mission worked out well even in this simple state, and people loved the “fiction” behind it.  For the metrics-addicted, here were the three most popular pairings for the 43 games played, arranged as Spy ♥ Target:

♥

♥

♥

It turns out it’s really hard to get the same person into a conversation four times during the match, so we reduced it to three times about halfway through the night.  I think I’m also going to change it from an integer number of flirtations to a bar that fills up, and instead of having the progression of closeness that starts with just being in the same conversation (which is just a freebie for the Spy), I’m going to make it so the arc distance in the circle impacts how much you fill the bar each flirtation.  The closer you are, the more bar filling you get.  I’m going to tune it so it takes two very-close+good-result flirtations, and six not-close+normal-result flirtations.  So, you can ignore the closeness if you’re willing to basically follow the target around the entire time, or you can be right up next to them and try to seduce them quickly in two or three flirts.

Here are a few more metrics from tonight’s playtest.  I need to generate these straight to an HTML page at some point…

Spy ran out of time 2% (1)
Sniper shot civilian 30% (13)
Missions completed successfully 16% (7)
Sniper shot spy 49% (21)

The Spy and Sniper were mostly evenly matched tonight (Ian’s skill advantage was outweighed by the randomness of testing the new features).

Action test bad 4% (5)
Action test ignored 27% (31)
Action test good 16% (19)
Action test okay 53% (61)

The Action Test is working as designed:  you can ignore it and get an automatic okay, or you can opt-in, and usually get okay, occasionally (16%) get good, and sometimes (4%) screw yourself with a bad.

This last batch is the last Spy action completed before the Spy got shot in the games where the Sniper shot the Spy:

Remove microfilm from book 19% (4)
Bugged ambassador while walking 19% (4)
Double Agent contacted 14% (3)
Fake Banana Bread Uttered 5% (1)
30 seconds added to match 10% (2)
Transferred microfilm 14% (3)

These are a little skewed since the long string of quick Balcony matches we played at the end increased the number of deaths after bugging.  I realized tonight I wasn’t journaling the level played, so I’m glad I caught that before GDC!  This is why I love playtests!

I hope to have another mission implemented, fix all the issues uncovered tonight, and playtest again next week.

One of my requirements for the missions I work on at this early stage is that they expand the envelope of mechanics explored by the existing missions.  I’m trying to get a feel for the different design variables in play with the missions, and how they impact the feel of the game and the difficulty for the Spy and Sniper.

There are limits to this methodology, but you can pseudo-analytically break down the design-space of the missions into the different characteristics each one uses.  So, for example, Swap Statue is a mission that deals with a “fixed set of known world locations with a hard tell”, Bug Ambassador deals with a “known character with a hard tell”, Contact Double Agent has an “unknown character from a small set of known characters with a soft tell”, etc.  It would be nice if you could just make a multi-dimensional grid of all these characteristics, look for an empty spot, and say, “ah, I need a mission that has an unknown character and a hard tell”, but sadly it doesn’t usually work out that clearly.  The dimensionality of the space is very high, the characteristics are not really as independent as you’d like, and it’s hard to visualize.  Plus, there’s just an aesthetic component to coming up with a game design that’s hard to systematize.  I often talk to other designers about this, and we all keep trying to decompose the design space like this, but a lot of times you just have to take a stab at it, perhaps driven by the fictional context, or just a gut feeling.

Seduce Target looks like it’s going to be an interesting mission.  Currently, the Spy chooses a Seduction Target that is unknown to the Sniper.  The Spy then needs to flirt with the Target four times on separate occasions to win the mission.  The first flirtation can be anywhere in the same conversation circle as the Target.  For the second flirtation, the Spy and the Target need to be on the same side of the conversation, and for the third and forth flirtations, the Spy needs to be right next to the Target.  The Spy must leave the conversation between each flirtation, so they need to be spaced out over the match.

The mission is hooked up to the Action Test as well.  The description above is what happens if you ignore the Action Test, or do an “okay” result.  If you hit the “good” result, it credits you for two flirtations, so you can skip ahead.  If you hit the “bad” result, you get no flirtation credit, and the Target immediately leaves the conversation.

There are no hard tells for this mission, the flirtation animation is just the normal conversation talk animation.  The only tell is the behavioral one of, “is that character constantly trying to get into a conversation with that other character?”

I’m going to playtest Seduce Target soon, so I’ll find out if it’s too hard for either player² and it might change from the above description as I balance it.

When implementing all this, I was immediately struck by a few interesting thoughts:

• The question of authorship and an authorial voice is a fascinating one when it comes to interactive art and entertainment, because unlike a song or a book, good games abdicate authorship and put the player up on stage.  However, the game systems with which the player interacts have a different kind of authorial voice, because the rules the designer sets up constrain the player’s actions and give him or her feedback in certain ways.  So, for example, in SimCity, the rules for how taxation affects happiness are part of the authorial voice of that game, and have indirect but powerful influence on the player’s experience.  You could make an argument that these rules are a concrete expression of Will Wright’s philosophy of how cities work (or should or shouldn’t work).  The implementation of the Seduce Target mission started asking me questions about my model of how flirtation and seduction works.  For example, if the Target is talking, and the Spy interrupts him or her, should that offend the Target?  Miss Manners might say that was a no-no, but Neil Strauss might say it’s essential.  The code doesn’t care, but it wants me to decide.  Maybe I make it depend on who you’re flirting with…
• While I’m on the topic of SimCity and simulation rules, Will used to tell stories about how he’d get letters from hydrologists saying “your water model is awful, but your zoning model is great!” and letters from city planners saying “your zoning model is awful, but your water model is great!”  It reminds me of the old saw about how if you read something in the paper on a topic about which you have intimate knowledge, the article is almost always horribly inaccurate, but you don’t necessarily apply that thinking to articles on other topics, which is slightly terrifying.  I guess the analog for Seduce Target would be if some Casanova sends me a letter saying how bad my flirtation simulation is, yet the ballistics on the Sniper bullet are perfect!
• I love that the Spy player picks both the Spy character and the Target character, and the Sniper doesn’t know who the Target is, because it injects yomi into the mission, while also subtly commenting on diversity issues in games completely through player choice.  Because the Spy can be male, female, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, young, old, and any other categories I create characters in, and so can the Target, I can’t wait to see the metrics on the kinds of pairs people pick!  If you suspect your opponent has a specific opinion about homosexuality, do you have a male Spy seduce a male Target since they’d be less likely to suspect that, or would they be more likely?  Are Snipers less likely to suspect the young strapping Spy would try to seduce the old dowager, or vice versa?
• How far do I take this mission in terms of implementation?  This first version is pretty lightweight, where if you perform the flirts then it checks off the mission without any real behavioral changes on the part of the Target.  If I want to make it richer, do you need to talk the Target into meeting you out on the balcony, or (ESRB!) the bedroom?  Does the Target start approaching or avoiding you depending on how you’re doing?
• Even in tests, it’s kind of sad when the Sniper shoots the Target, sadder than if it’s just another random partygoer.  I’ll have to see this holds true in playtests, and if I can push on that a bit.
• The current design has the 4 required flirtation attempts, but I’m also thinking about playtesting a version where there’s a bar you have to fill up, and each flirtation attempt fills it by an amount proportional to how close you are in the conversation, times the Action Test result.  Although, the idea of having a bar that fills up as you flirt might be a bit too much…at least with the current UI the bar would be horizontal, not vertical!

1. I find plain old wall-clock time is a strict requirement for good game design; you can’t rush things, and it’s clear Poison Drink needs to stew a bit more in my subconscious.
2. Ian thinks it will be too hard for the Sniper, but he could use a little challenge!