This time slappydavis (in the hat) came over to help out with training newbies, and ardonite stopped by for a bit and they did a few exhibition games. Of course, I look a bunch of pictures, and here are some:

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.

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

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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

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

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

XOXO

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

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

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!!!

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 

“Didn’t I bet you in my invitation to evo last year that an evo guy would become your #1 player?   I want a beer, or at least some opportunity to be smug somehow :)” – Seth Killian

I had just emailed Seth, Tom Cannon, and Nathan Vella about SpyParty at Evo  2013, the premier fighting game convention and tournament.  If you recall, we had a great time at Evo 2012, and we’re going to be back again this week, at the Paris Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, July 12-14.  SpyParty is part of the Evo Indie Showcase, which is this awesome thing where they invite competitive multiplayer indie games to set up at the show so the Fighting Game Community (FGC) can check them out.  You can see the list of returning games from last year here, and the list of new games for this year here.

I was mailing those guys because I’d just realized that kcmmmmm (a.k.a. Korey Mueller) had taken the #1 spot on the SpyParty leaderboard about a month previously, and he had told me he’d first seen the game at Evo 2012, and kcmmmmm also lives in Las Vegas, and is going to be helping out at the booth on Friday, the 12th!   I figured I’d let those guys know; hey, wasn’t that neat?  That was when Seth reminded me of the bet from his March 16th, 2012 invitation:

“If you take me up on it, I’d even be willing to make a gentleman’s bet with you that an that an EVO attendee will be your #1 player in subsequent tests, and take down whoever the existing top players might be. I dunno which one, but I trust implicitly in these guys as a group.”

Welp.

In honor of losing this bet, of Seth’s prescience about the FGC, of flying to Evo 2013 tomorrow, and of kcmmmmm‘s leaderboard ascendance and his Friday presence at Evo, I decided to interview him about his history with fighting games, Evo, and SpyParty.

You can follow kcmmmmm on twitch.tv, where he plays some great high-level SpyParty games with live comments at http://twitch.tv/kcmmmmm

kcmmmmm

Why don’t we start with you giving me a bit of backstory about you and Evo and the FGC and whatnot? How many Evos have you been to, how’d you get into it, which fighting games do you like, why, how’d you hear about SpyParty, what’d you think of the Indie Showcase last year, etc.

I started gaming at a pretty young age, but never had a large selection of games until I got older and could afford my own. So, I was stuck with whatever few games I already had on SNES, one of which was Street Fighter 2. My brother and I were BAD. I really didn’t play many more fighting games until a friend introduced me to the Guilty Gear series. From there I was hooked on the game, and played it almost religiously with anyone I could find. Unfortunately, that was very few people. Only a few of my friends were into fighter’s, so it wasn’t until BlazBlue came out in 2008 that I finally was able to consistently find people to play online. I had played a lot of non-fighters online in the past…primarily Counter-Strike. The fighting community is so different. Since fighters rely on more than a purely twitch-response skill set, fg players tend to be more knowledgeable about the games they play. In a shooter, you only need to know map layout, relative weapon strengths/weaknesses, and how to quickly shoot someone in the head the second you see them. In fg’s, success depends on a large variety of information, most of which is not immediately apparent or available. Essentially, you need to learn which moves have higher priority, what moves can gatling or combo into each other, safe blockstrings, move properties (which usually depend on knowing the core game system), just to name a few. And just knowing it for your own character isn’t enough. Players have to learn the relative matchups, so they know their own strengths and weaknesses in any situation. The information requirement is incredibly high, so the community works together to gather all of the pertinent information. Players break down the games on a frame-by-frame level, and make that information available to everyone. The community sort of reflects this togetherness, and individual members just seem more interested in talking about their favorite games on a deeper level than players in other genres. It’s a great community because players work so hard to help each other improve – to help their opponents improve. I met some of my best friends today playing fg’s online, and even more than the games themselves, the community has kept me into the genre.

My favorite series is the Guilty Gear series. I’ve never been particularly good at it (mainly because of a lack of a decent online version). But since it reintroduced me to fg’s, it will always have a special nostalgia for me. The game has an amazing style, and matches are intense and fun. In general, I like 1v1 air-dash fighters most. Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, Persona 4 Arena (P4A), Skullgirls also counts (sort of). I like being able to dash right in and get overly aggressive on defending opponents with mixups. I usually play to one of two extremes. Either I play a slow, beefy character (like a grappler), or a quick aggressive character.

But there’s something special about the slower paced fighters that air-dash fighters lack. I was actually surprised at how much I enjoy Street Fighter 4. A lot of people complain that the game is all about footsies, and less about actual combat. It’s true, but the tension of slowly sussing out your opponent, poking at air to bait mistakes, predicting jump-ins with anti-air attacks…all of that lends this kind of chess-like feel. You don’t really get that in quicker paced games. Any good fighter allows for deep opponent-reading, but SF4 seems to hit a higher level by giving players the time to think. Somehow it strikes that perfect balance between action and meditation. At any given moment, when you’re down and almost out, you can come back with a series of perfectly read and executed responses. It’s possible in faster games…but seems more unlikely.

I enjoy watching team fighters like MvC more than playing. There’s just too much stuff going on the screen. It just feels less personal when you take away the 1v1 mechanic.

Last year’s EVO (2012) was the first I ever attended. It was…incredible. A few friends from all over the US flew in, and we spent the weekend beating each other up. I think we spent most of our time playing P4A, since it hadn’t been released yet, and we were hyped to check it out. My favorite part of EVO had to be the finals. Particularly the King of Fighters 13 finals…that game brought some amazing competition, and was so fun to watch.

As for the indie showcase, there were a few interesting games there. I remember playing a My Little Pony fg…which was actually pretty fun. DiveKick was surprisingly awesome. I thought it was going to be a bit of a joke, but it’s actually pretty damn competitive. It sort of cuts out all of the flashy combos and super moves, and instead focuses entirely on the guessing game. The loser is always the person who loses their cool and jumps or dives first, or waits too long to dive after a jump. It’s like a tribute to the pissing match. I remember playing Aztez as well. It’s a side-scrolling beat-em-up with stylized black and white (and very, very red) visuals…the combat system is actually pretty similar to a fighting game’s: you can combo, grab, air juggle, and just beat helpless enemies senseless.

However, of all of the games at EVO, one in particular caught my eye. In the midst of all of these high tech and visually-stunning games (right across from PS All-Stars’ booth, if I recall) was this sort of ugly game which looked like The Sims from 2002. I’m not a graphics whore or anything, but the game just felt very out of place. It seemed as far removed from fighting games as was possible. It caught my eye immediately. I wandered over, and there’s just this table of pamphlets and a sign telling me to read the manual first. Read the manual? What? So I pocketed a manual to read later, walked up to the guy standing next to the table, and asked “So…what am I looking at here?” I didn’t know you were the creator of the game, but you laughed and explained the game to me, and I immediately loved the idea. A slow paced 1v1 game where the players are given the time to suss out an opponent’s actions and respond? Kind of sounds a bit familiar actually.

On the topic of learning character-specific information in fighters you mention above, I can’t remember if you’re a fan of the “dossiers” idea for SpyParty, where the different characters have different backgrounds and biases, so the General might drink too much every night, Girta might be obsessed with statues, etc., but what do you think of this (or some variant on this) with respect to the amount of study necessary to get good at a fighting game?  More generally, how do you feel about having to do “homework” for games?

Well, originally I was against the “dossier” idea.  I still don’t think it would make sense in the current state of the game, but when the new art is implemented, and characters all have unique traits, animations, and personalities, it makes sense to include that personality into the gameplay.  As for how this relates to studying in fighting games, it’s hard to say.  Research in a fighting game is very different than SpyParty; it involves spending an amount of time honing combos, practicing hit confirms, learning what your character is capable of (and how they match against opposing characters), testing defensive options, gimmicks, traps, etc.  A lot of this time is spent with a direct hands-on approach, interspersed with finding and learning tech from other players, which you then practice yourself.  Learning character traits in SpyParty might end up being equally time consuming, but I think most of that time would be spent observing the “natural state” of the AI, and learning their behaviors.  Since micro is largely a non-issue in the game (compared to fighters), learning AI behavior would be paramount to taking advantage of the “dossier” concept.  In a way, I think this actually might be more difficult information to gather, because it’s more entertaining to learn stuff by actually directly tackling it than simply watching it unfold in the game on its own.  Eventually, players will make most of that information available to everyone, so you’ll be able to find it online without having to do all of the work, but reading (or observing) that information and applying it in a game are very different.  I don’t mind doing homework for games, so long as there is a reward at the end of it.  If players put hundreds of hours into studying the “dossier” behaviors, but are unable to apply that to real games, then it will have failed as a feature.  So it needs to be deep and effective to ensure that players benefit from doing their homework.

I assume you did not have a clear idea that a year later you would be at the top of the leaderboard.  How did you go from pocketing the manual to becoming so passionate about SpyParty?  Was there a point where you said to yourself “I want to be one of the top players of this game?”, or do you do that for any game you really like, or did you look up one day and realized you’d played 6000+ games, or what?  Basically, what’s your arc in SpyParty?

I hadn’t heard of SpyParty before EVO, but I was just immediately blown away by the concept.  This is a really cool idea!  I signed up for the beta a few days later, and realized then that the beta was closed and there was a waiting list.  A really long waiting list.  So, I just did what I could to follow the game here and there, reading news updates and waiting for my invitation.  From what I could tell, the game’s community was really blossoming into something special.  There was a lot of talk about expert players mentoring newbies, and people just being generally pleasant.  I guess my main goal, even before getting in, was to be a positive member of the community myself when I finally did get in.  Somehow, that translated into getting to know all of the veterans, who were happy to mentor me along the way, and helping along players newer than myself.  Next thing I knew, I was playing on even footing with the players who had mentored (and destroyed) me not so long ago.  There’s always this feeling that there’s some way I can improve, and every time I meet a personal goal, I find another one.  I couldn’t really look at the game and decide to be a top player, I just wanted to continue to improve…and at some point, I guess I got pretty decent at it.  Now that you mention it, 6000 games is a lot.

Can you compare and constrast the SpyParty community and the FGC?  Not in a “which one’s better” sense, but what are the similarities and differences, what can SpyParty learn from the FGC, etc.

Well, obviously the biggest difference between the two communities is that the FGC is a genre community, whereas SpyParty‘s is a singular game community.  So, when you compare SpyParty‘s community to all of FG’s, you find that there is just an enormous amount of diversity in interests within the FGC.  Everyone who plays and gets involved in SpyParty has this one game in common, but being a part of the FGC is a much more broad category.  There are a lot of differing opinions on what FG’s are best, where most players prefer one style of game over another, and half the time they don’t agree.  Sometimes it can get pretty ridiculous, but for the most part, everyone gets along.  There’s a lot of diversity in player preference, and a general acceptance of that fact within the overall community.  For the most part, players are willing to help each other out more often than put each other down.  Ultimately, I think the longevity of the community is probably the biggest difference between SpyParty‘s community and the FGC.  Considering the increasing number of games, wide variety of players from all over the world, and tens of years of development, the community is still incredibly strong and continues to encourage diversity.  If the SpyParty community can learn anything from that, it’s to continue to work towards helping other players develop, and continuing to work to maintain the quality.  This means nurturing each new member as a valuable part of the community, and teaching each of them to uphold the high standards we set for it and ourselves right now.

Did I get you in any of the Evo 2012 pics?

You actually did get me, in one picture.  I’m the guy in the blue shirt and glasses, standing behind the center table.  Hands in pockets, looking around confused.

http://www.spyparty.com/2012/07/13/spyparty-at-evo-2012-pics/#lightbox=dscn1536.jpg

kcmmmmm, by the numbers

“Now that you mention it, 6000 games is a lot.”

Here’s the current Top 10:

A couple notes about the current SpyParty leaderboard, since it’s a little bit different from a lot of games: 

• Right now, SpyParty ranking is based on total games played.  I don’t have a skill-based ranking algorithm implemented yet,¹ but because most elite players agree we haven’t found the skill-ceiling for the game yet, the number of games played is fairly well correlated with skill, at least to a first approximation.  A lot of the top players play mentoring games with newbies, and other wacky player-created alternative game modes for fun, so the number of games isn’t a perfect indicator of skill, but if you’re at the top of the leaderboard with thousands of games played, you are really really really good at SpyParty, way better than me, and I wrote the game.  kcmmmmm can hand me my ass without trying very hard on his worst days.
• There is another player, virifaux in the above top-10, who is an alt started about halfway through the player’s SpyParty career, and if we add virifaux and viriflod (his original username) together, they’re actually the highest ranking player, and kcmmmmm is 2nd ranked!  This is an issue sports don’t have to deal with.  “Hey, isn’t that Tiger Woods with a fake mustache?”

1. If you’re curious, I’m going to use this one.

Davey Wreden of The Stanley Parable, Robin Arnott of Antichamber’s sound design and SoundSelf, and Eduardo Ortiz of Apotheon’s sound design are throwing a SpyParty party and tournament in Austin, TX, tomorrow, at the Indiecade Annex, 1310 Broadmoor Drive, 8pm to midnight!

It’s open to the public and I’ve been told there will be free beer.  Here’s the facebook invite!

I wasn’t worried about the server’s performance this time, since the robots pounded pretty hard on it, I was mostly interested in how a crowded lobby would feel as a player.  We hit 170 people at one point, which meant we filled up Headquarters and people created overflow rooms, so that was good.  Chatting was crazy and hectic, as you’d imagine.  I need to move the Practice button from the bottom of the lobby list or no one will ever see it.  I found a few different things like that I need to fix, but best of all, I got a suggestion for fixing the lobby list moving around while you’re trying to select somebody, which is awesome!  I ♥ my players!

Beta tester KY called this “Mount Loadtest”

Original Post:  I’ve been trying to write this blog post for three days.  I am…let’s just say…a little frazzled.

As you may have read, I recently finished optimizing the lobbyserver using robots in the cloud¹ to loadtest it.  I then moved everything (including this site) to a new faster server, all in preparation for opening up the Early-Access Beta.  You’ll also notice, if you clicked through that last link, I’ve disabled beta signups now, and I’ve finally sent all the invitations, including around 5000 to people who had never been invited, and over 13000 to people who had been invited before, but hadn’t responded.  If you missed signing up for the beta, don’t worry, you’ll be able to play very soon, just check back here or follow the game on one of the social media outlets you can see on the sidebar.  I still need to send a few hundred here and there for various reasons, but I’m done with the bulk of the invitations, thankfully!  I am so happy to be out of the “invite business”, and almost into the “just buy the game and play it now” business.  Getting mail delivered on the internet in 2013 is a disaster.

On the topic of almost opening the beta, and all the new people playing the game, I want to run a loadtest with actual humans tonight.  Yes, I know, this is short notice, but I’m barely treading water here, so it’s the best I can do right now!  I need to test with lots of humans in case the robots didn’t do a good enough job pretending to be humans, testing-wise.  Trust me, they were very boring to talk to.

Sorry this is not a great time for most of the US or the world.  If you can’t log on that late, come earlier, and maybe everybody who can’t go late will make their own crowdsourced loadtest before the official one!  But, if you can be on at 10pm, whether you decide to come early and play or not, please be there!

Here’s the player graph for the lobby over the past week.  This is averaged data, so it’s a little low, but I’m told by zerotka, the  resident SpyParty historian, that the max was 53 simultaneous at that spike on Sunday evening.  Let’s see if we can beat that.  Over 100 would be awesome, because the room size limit is 100 so it’d be nice to test that code with humans.

I may try to stream the loadtest at the SpyParty twitch.tv channel.  Not sure how exciting watching a lobby list and chat is going to be, and not sure if I’ll be panicking and fixing things and have to turn it off, but we’ll see.  I’m also going to play kcmmmm‘s 5000th game with him tonight at 10:30pm, and we’ll try to stream both sides of that.

Come play if you can!  Thanks!

1. ROBOTS IN THE CLOUD!!!!

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.

http://www.twitch.tv/drawnonward

It should be fun and rather silly…he posted in the beta forums asking for ideas and people are gifting him random Steam stuff to give away to people in stream chat, he’s going to dress up as one of the current SpyParty characters (he’s not telling which one!), and I’ll be joining him from midnight to 1am to play on his stream. Sadly, my internet this week is kind of slow and terrible, so I don’t think I can stream the other side on the SpyParty channel, but I should be able to join him via voice chat.  My personal dream is that he’ll actually start using a non-default icon/image for his channel by then.

Come along, hang out in the stream chat, and it should be a good time. The big question is whether I’ll have this build done and tested before then. Maybe you can watch a brand new build fail spectacularly, live, while I curse over TeamSpeak!

PS. I think I have figured out who is killing my robots, so Part 3 of the Loadtesting for Open Beta series will be posted soon!