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.

I’ve been heads down on trying to get the lobby scalable for open beta, so I didn’t even realize today is the one year anniversary of the first batch of invites I sent to strangers!  To celebrate this auspicious day, zerotka made this amazing video and posted it on the forums; it’s simply wonderful:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thank you so much, I ♥ you all!  More invites soon!

This build, v0.1.2487.0, was supposed to be a quicky, but it snowballed bigtime.  Here are the release notes from the private beta forums:

Uh, this was supposed to be a quick update.

• add idle timestamp to invite confirmation if player is idle
• s/In Lobby/In Room/ in lobby status
• auto-idle state in lobby after 5 minutes of no input to SpyParty
• display away message when playing
• tiebreaker for both players hitting spy or sniper at the same time in match menu – kind of a hack
• wait a bit after putting down briefcase
• couriers never stand on a pad to pick up or put down briefcase
• ambassador won’t put down briefcase unless it can be picked up without standing on a pad
• display game type and level on match results screen
• Happy Valentine’s Day (belated due to a cold) – thank zerotka for the awesome idea!
• pointier convo arrow
• reenable previous talker arrow
• add concept of “important” NPCs (like green statue swapper)
• sort important NPCs higher/lower than unknown cast
• put a grey bar on them in the portraits on result screen
• play microfilm failure animation if bailing on action test
• drink events for accept, reject, offer, waiter giving up
• okay/good/bad -> white/green/red in mission preview text
• much more visible sniper crosshairs
• try harder to find a spot if you’re forced to go to pedestal
• delay forcing swapper until outside min radius and then random timer
• finally solved the mystery of the floor pad rotations, old click-to-move ui vestige, thanks kcmmmmm!
• round event for cast member picking up pending statue
• handle room name escapes before eating whitespace
• ignore escape until endgame results synced to avoid lobby kicks and disabled Spy/Sniper menu items
• setting to not print /help on lobby entry
• allow big lobby font, allow ellipsis in settings and lobby escape menu
• Damon at least looks at the corpse, for god’s sake
• arrow ui for conversation talking turns
• version number in screenshot name
• toby offers drink and waits until accept or refuse
• break up too-long chat lines correctly with wrapping
• settings in lobby escape menu uses new lobby layout
• small timestamp font, only do time, not date (clipboard still gets full date)
• sync up /time format
• block actions while putting down or handing off briefcase
• allow Toby to go more places and offer more drinks (like the back side of Balcony, which he basically was afraid to visit)
• new walking bug tuning, midpoint, tighter radii, etc
• display autolock animation times correctly in spy disk
• move ambassador personal space radius in a bit so not as jumpy
• bulge cy2 pillar out a bit more, but NPCs really hug it, better practice this or get shot by r7
• whiter whites for your username
• fix bug if spawn at convo center you’re going to
• if you’re finishing convo because you’re lonely, and somebody shows up, go back to listening
• retry look areas if your spot is taken
• clear the customer’s queue so don’t take drinks long after waiter leaves
• make veranda front a little wider for pathing sanity
• walking people count as violating ambassador’s personal space, so spy can’t twitch
• version check content package to avoid weird bugs
• fix lobby chat crash bug
• draw cast bars with quads, size properly
• sort known-to-sniper cast members low, unknown (like seduction target, no-suspected double agents) high
• splash screen works on wineskin (non-transparent)
• expand results screen portraits on mouseover now that we have a mouse on that screen
• fix results display for multiple consecutive time-adds
• only push round events if playing
• push round event on shift-m add time
• flicker ambassador ui during leaving, not go to red (ST color)
• grey outlines in results, not yellow

So, the briefcase/floor-pad thing is kinda huge. Having to actively reject Toby is kinda huge. New green swap is big. I don’t even remember what else. Yikes.

Chris

I hope didn’t break anything important shoving this in.

Also, in case you missed the tweet, beta tester bl00dw0lf made something amazing for the end of the year:

Click here to view the embedded video.

On Friday my friends and awesome game artists Luis Antonio and John Cimino playtested.  They were only supposed to play 4 or 6 games, but kept playing for an hour, which is a good sign.  Of course, I took a bunch of notes, so here are the tasks from that:

• don’t get that click on guy selects during cast characters
• mouse overrides cursor keys in menus if over item…don’t override if key change but no mouse change
• have box with ? on side for casting characters – progress status and neat
• why is volume not working on last 30 seconds timer on sniper machine?
• sniper review tells on waiting screens
• chooser through animations playing on loop!
• require sniper okay to continue
• detailed stats stay on mouseover and off…good?
• mode on chooser that says if mouse moves off, and not keyboard select, then help goes away?
• pgup->PageUp
• ambassador was doing tapdance again…is it always the ambassador? I think so…!²
• microfilm get animation is same as put, so you get it out of your pocket, which makes no sense

I need to consolidate the recent punch lists so you folks can see what I’m working on.  I occasionally check items off the older lists in the older posts, which is kind of silly.  Sadly, the tasks on this list aren’t going to get checked off for a while due to the conference this week.

The best anecdote from the playtest was when John shot Luis and then said, “I lowlighted all of the men at the start because you’ve only ever picked women as the Spy.”   Luis realized his meta-mistake, and had to consciously start randomizing his character choices more. That is exactly the kind of know-your-opponent yomi gameplay I want to encourage!

If you notice the laptop to the left in the picture below, John is actually chatting with us using Google Talk.  Luis and John didn’t notice because they haven’t played that much yet and I didn’t want to point it out, but I could clearly hear the Spy’s mouse clicks through the connection, and they are huge tells, so I’m going to have to figure out what to do about that before I enable voice chat as a feature.

SpyParty causes bad posture.

All the auto-update, crash dump, and login stuff seems to be working really well, so I’m super happy about that.

Now, back to my talks!

1. The interview with Notch is supposed to be live-streamed on Gamespot, no link as of yet.
2. I’ve been seeing this rare bug where one of the characters would slide across the floor, jittering.  I noticed it again during this playtest and realized I always see it on the Ambassador, which is a huge help in debugging it!

Thank you, Guam!

A few things of interest:

• I started to color code the points by the time they registered, and then I thought I’d do a gif animation over the duration of the beta, and then I realized I’d already spent way too much time on this!
• I got a flurry of Japanese sign ups and tweets, mostly referencing this nice article on 4Gamer.net.  I should probably have the sign up page translated into Japanese and Korean…
• Are there really a bunch of sign ups from Arviat, NU, Canada, or is that a bug in the free IP geolocation database I used, or my code?  Also, Sao Tome?  Oh, wait, duh…Sao Tome is right near 0,0 lat/lon, so that’s probably just a bug!  Arviat is a mystery, though.
• I got the map image from here, but be warned, one of their “Mercator” projections isn’t.  I thought I had a math bug for an hour or so in the code I hacked up to render this.

Okay, back to work on the auto-updating and content packing!  Fun fun fun!

• At 17:05:12 PDT on 2011/5/11, somebody named Steven, whose IP address is from Florida, became the 5,000^th person to sign up for SpyParty beta access.  Thanks Steven, and everybody else too!  Oh, and an important note that people have been asking about:  everybody who signs up will get into the beta. I will talk more soon about how it’s going to be structured going forward, and I’ll provide a rough timeline.
• The page went public at 10:30 PDT on 2011/5/10, so that’s 30.5 hours, or about 164 sign ups per hour averaged over the entire time.  Here’s a graph of sign ups per quarter-hour:
  
• The beta announcement got a fair amount of press, which I really appreciate!  Here are some links, most with comments:
  SpyParty Beta Starting Soon, Here’s How to Sign Up – Stephen Totilo, Kotaku
  SpyParty ‘Early-Access Beta’ sign-ups begin, costs $15 when beta opens – Ben Gilbert, Joystiq
  Spy Party To Unwrap “Paid Beta” Access – Jim Rossignol, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
  SpyParty Goes the Minecraft Route, Launching Paid Beta – Patrick Klepek, GiantBomb
  Early-access beta sign-ups open for SpyParty – Jordan Devore, Destructoid
  SpyParty early beta sign-ups begin – Steve Watts, Shacknews
  I’ve Been Invited to a Party…. A Spy Party – David Liao, 4 Player Podcast
• There were a bunch of threads in various places, here are some major ones:
  Spy party beta sign up $15 – Reddit
  SpyParty Early-Access Beta Sign-up – NeoGAF
  SpyParty – You’ve done it Checker. I want to play this game. – Quarter to Three
  Spy Party: Read the Fucking Manual - Something Awful
  The SpyParty Facebook Page
• And, of course, Twitter.  See that bump right there in the middle of the signups?  That’s Markus Persson, a.k.a. Notch, waking up Europe with a very nice tweet to his 174,000 followers.  Markus was very helpful answering my questions while I made the decision to do the Early-Access Beta, and the tweet was an extra helpful icing on the cake.  So, of course, I asked him to tweet again mentioning @spyparty…
  
• One of the reasons I structured the Early-Access Beta this way, with the sign up first, was that I couldn’t really predict how many people would be interested, so I didn’t know how to scale the game server for the unknown load, and I figured it’d be easier to scale a simple sign up form than the entire game lobby and backend.  I spent a fair amount of time loadtesting and optimizing the webserver, and in the end it purred like a kitten the entire time, barely breaking a sweat.  One of the ways I prepared was using Amazon’s CloudFront Content Delivery Network for most of the static assets on www.spyparty.com.  Here’s that data…
  You can see the US and EU daylight hours pretty clearly here.  My total CloudFront cost from the past two days: $6.03
• Once I had the static assets on a CDN, I just had to worry about the dynamic page traffic on my server.  I’ll write a more technical breakdown of this on my personal website some time soon, but the loadavg on the server rarely went above 0.2, even when the Reddit article was on the front page of /r/gaming.  Here’s the bandwidth, with a 5 minute average (blue is outbound, green is inbound, it’s a log plot):
  You can clearly see Notch’s tweet here as well.  The big spike off to the right is the last load test I did before launching.  It’s interesting to see the quicker falloff of the tweet and EU daylight, compared to the fatter area when all the news sites were posting.  The double-hump in the first hit is when the Reddit post made it to the front page of /r/gaming.  Reddit drives an insane amount of traffic, even from subreddits, and even from the bottom of the front page of subreddits.
• Here’s a breakdown of the domains of the emails that registered with 10 or more registrations from that domain.  gmail.com clearly dominates amongst SpyParty beta testers!

  gmail.com	3216
  hotmail.com	522
  yahoo.com	273
  hotmail.co.uk	68
  googlemail.com	56
  comcast.net	36
  aol.com	35
  live.com	33
  msn.com	30
  me.com	24
  live.co.uk	14
  yahoo.co.uk	13
  mac.com	12
  web.de	10
  others	766

Overall, I’m very happy with how things have gone so far.  I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect, but the initial 1/2/7 day estimates I made were 2,000/3,000/5,000, and we basically blew through that in a day.  I’ll be interested to see how it evolves over time.

Now I need to stop checking my stats, and get to work on making this beta more than just an email sign up!

The Line Forms Here

Well, you all asked for it, so I’ve spent the past month trying to figure out exactly how to make it work, and I think I’ve finally got all the pieces figured out.¹

So, here we go:  I’m taking sign ups for the SpyParty Early-Access Beta, starting right now!

The sign up page is here.

I’m so excited!  This is going to be a lot of fun!

1. Famous last words…

Okay, here is the slightly infamous Four Page Instruction Manual for playing SpyParty at PAX.  I felt like I had to print this because of the one downside of the Depth-first, Accessibility-later development methodology I’m following.

My goal with printing up this document is to save my voice for actually new and interesting conversation.  I’m 100% confident I will lose my voice every day, but I’d like it to be from talking to fans about the gameplay, not repeating what the A button does over and over again.  I really have no idea whether anyone will read it at all.  I’ll report back on Friday.

I’m sorry I didn’t get this up yesterday, not only because it deprived you, the wonderful fans, of a day of plumbing its mysteries, but also because I literally finished it and hit send today, 11 minutes after the absolute latest deadline the printer gave me.  I didn’t even have time to read the whole thing.  I hope it’s not completely opaque. If I’d put it up yesterday I could have taken feedback and made it better, but as Donald Rumsfeld always said, “You go to PAX with the Four Page Instruction Manual you printed.”

Here is the print-ready PDF, which assumes you can print two-sided, and then you fold it in half to get the four-page booklet.

This document represents a fairly accurate beginner’s view of the state of SpyParty right now.  After you play a few times, you start to get to even more depth that I couldn’t fit on here (as if it’s not way too dense already!).   Let me know what you think in comments, or if parts are confusing, or if it makes sense.

Here’s a teaser of our booth while under construction this evening:

Monaco & SpyParty PAX Booth #3004, WIP

I’m having the two players face each other, and the big HDTV is duplicating the small HDTV closest to me taking the picture.  I’m counting on good sportsmanship from the other player by assuming he or she will not turn around!  And, hopefully the crowd won’t yell out spoilers.