Obey local ordinances!

It seemed to work pretty well, we played it during the release notes stream, where I did two different “birthday games”, the first set with scientist for his 5k birthday, and then smash10101 for his 1k birthday.

I made a few subtle behavior changes for this new map:

• I made paintings more attractive on this map, and to do that I had to slightly change their probabilities on Ballroom. I think it won’t be noticeable, but we’ll see.
• Due to restrictive local ordinances, open containers of alcohol cannot be consumed or served on the sidewalk. Some people flout these ordinances, but most partygoers are responsible citizens.
• The conversations are a little less crowded now. People will still stand close to each other, but they won’t all jam into a tiny conversation circle, so you have to be a little more aware of how the NPCs behave around crowded conversations. I had to be careful with this code so I didn’t break the delicate balance of Balcony, but I think I was successful. I’m sure the beta players will tell me if I screwed it up!

Also in this build, I worked around a bug in Wineskin so MacOS beta testers should have their replays directories updated properly now.  

If you’re a beta tester already, come try out the new map, it’ll be there after you auto-update. If you’re not, what are you waiting for?

Here’s the video, and if you want notification of videos like this, you can subscribe to the SpyParty YouTube channel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Omegathon

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

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

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

Here are some good links:

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

The New Art

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

Picture Gallery

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

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

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

I’ll write more about this change later, but the impetus for doubling up the statues at the front of Veranda was a series of player-designed and requested game modes. First, people have been playing “Known 3 Soft Tells” on Ballroom lately. The Spy always chooses Contact Double Agent,¹ Inspect Statues, and Seduce Target. The Sniper knows these are the three missions, which is usually a camping deathtrap, but you can’t really camp “soft tell missions”, and so the mode is fairly balanced, and has a great feel, still well within the aesthetics of the game, but with a distinctly different flavor. Of course, this led to more experimentation, and the question became whether it was possible on Veranda, the map that’s really hard for the Sniper. Well, after adding “Known 3″ as an available game mode, it turns out “Known 3 Hard Tells” works on Veranda, since it’s such a big and busy map, but the soft tells version didn’t work because all the statues were far apart, so you had to inspect them one at a time, and NPCs rarely visit the status three times on Veranda. The soft tells version was harder than the hard tells version on the easiest map for Spies?! Game design is confusing. Anyway, I doubled up the statues and we’ll see how that changes the balance of the map. It’s one of the least-played maps, mostly because it’s such a big time and attention investment, and so I think this will breathe some life into it, for a while, at least.

I also managed to stream the release of this build, which I’m going to try to make a regular thing. I went through the bug fixes, and then played the always-awesome kate for a bunch of games of “k3 soft” and “k3 hard” on the new Veranda, and had a blast and a pretty big audience considering it was 2am PDT. I’ve uploaded the video to the SpyParty YouTube Channel, and here it is (the games start at 18:23):

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are a few things I’ll fix next time I do this, and please post a comment below if you have additional things you think I should do:

• mic farther from mouth!
• don’t bother going through the old build’s bugs, it’s not incredibly interesting, it takes forever, and OBS does a horrible epilepsy inducing flicker (at 14:40) during restart
• get TeamSpeak and whatnot set up before I start streaming :/

Here are the official release notes:

• double up front statues in veranda, yikes!
• push modal message background farther back in the hopes of making text visible
• try to fix more lobby list scroll bugs by clearing selected client
• finally (?) fix the lobby state sort
• don’t set last keyboard time on repeats, so now menus work with keys down for teamspeak
• mask spy/normal keys for HL/LL if typing chat string
• flirt % in seduction HUD
• display number of required inspects in mission name
• added –nosound command line for debugging directsound issues…better to use –mute if you just don’t want sounds
• true up lobby details and /who so awayis last (for easy /who -> ctrl-c action)

1. aka. “Banana Bread”

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!!!!

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Observation

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

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

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

Strategy

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

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

Patience

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

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

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

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

Luck

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

Boom, headshot.

“YES!”

Poker versus Go

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

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

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

Benjamin Franklin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hunter4hire, dbfclark, and canadianbacon decompress after a long first day of training PAX attendees to play SpyParty!

This year’s Guest Indie, Storyteller by Daniel Benmergui, showed incredibly well both Saturday and Sunday mornings, and players were lined up to play it.  You can see some of the great reactions to Storyteller in the pics below!  Daniel also was on booth duty and did a great job as a SpyParty tutor!  I think I may have him do the tutorial voice; the Argentinian accent lends the directions a certain gravitas.

So, have a ton of pictures!  If you were at PAX and came by the booth, see if you can spot yourself or your friends!  Oh, and check out Jeff and the other awesome enforcers who helped out throughout, but especially at booth breakdown…the PAX enforcers are incredibly helpful!

1. I have no idea what is going to happen next year, when they’re supposedly extending it to 4 days; it’s already life-threateningly brutal to stand in a booth talking for 3 days!

I have to admit, I was slightly worried we’d get beat up or something, but actually my first experience with the Fighting Game Community was really positive, and they really seemed to appreciate the depth of the game and what I’m going for.

I want to thank Tom and Tony Cannon, and Seth Killian for making this possible, it was a really great time.

Below are a ton of pics.

And, speaking of mentoring, here’s a video recorded by some hilarious Soul Calibur folks who became big fans and who played for hours on the last day, and then invited two more from their crew over and dropped them right into a game, even though I tried to make them practice first! Warning: there’s some mature language in the vid!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I did a few interviews at the show, so I’ll update this post when they show up.

I particularly like this first picture…zoom in until you see the wall of people down the hall.

1. The show floor hours were 8am to 12am!!! Holy cow that’s exhausting…PAX hours are like 10am to 6pm!

I don’t think anyone knows exactly what these differences will feel like in 50 or 100 years, but I think we can get whiffs of them in current games, and for me, the scent is especially strong in competitive player-skill games.  There is something about a competitive player-skill game that gets to the essence of interactivity, the thing that makes games different from the other art and entertainment forms.  The players, interacting with the game systems and each other, using their physical and mental skills to achieve a clearly defined win-state…it can be magic.  Although there are many different-yet-amazing competitive player-skill games, like my old flame Counter-Strike, but also obviously Starcraft, and DOTA/League of Legends,² I think the magic I’m talking about is most clearly captured in this famous clip of a Street Fighter tournament:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There have been articles written about these seconds of gameplay, it has become internet-famous, and I have used it in several of the aforementioned lectures.

This magical thing happened at a fighting game tournament called The Evolution Championship Series, or more commonly, Evo.

It’s always been one of my design goals for SpyParty to be regarded as a competition-worthy player-skill game, to try to attain the depth of a game like Counter-Strike or Street Fighter, but by emphasizing a very different set of player-skills from the current crop of competition games.  However, to be included in that pantheon your game has to be able to stand up to thousands of hours of play, and designing a game like that turns out to be very hard.  Luckily, I’m patient, but I’m expecting it to take years for SpyParty to get to that level, if it ever does. Eventually, once the game was balanced and tuned and deep enough, I hoped people would start running tournaments, and maybe those tournaments would grow, and then, who knows.  But I’m getting way ahead of myself…

The Email

This is all by way of saying I’ve been fascinated by Evo for a while, but hadn’t spent much time thinking about how it relates to me and my game right here and now.  And then my friend Seth Killian emailed me, “Would you be interested to bring SpyParty to Evo this summer?”

Whoa.

He went on, “Obviously your game isn’t a fighter, but what’s interesting about these guys is that they aren’t just good at fighters–they’re good at games, and breaking down systems, period. They like games that involve psychology, competition, or are just insanely difficult.”

Now you’re talking.

The Show

So, after I said “YES” as fast as I could, Seth introduced me to Tom Cannon, and it’s happening, and I’m nervous but very excited!  Did I mention the nervous part?  The fighting game community is well-known for their, um, honest feedback, and I’m hoping they like SpyParty, but if they don’t, I’m hoping they’ll tell me why, and not just beat me up or something.

In fact, to this end, I offered to invite a bunch of Evo attendees into the beta before the show, so they could read the manual, practice, and play some games online with the current beta testers to increase the level of play once we get there.  Tom put a signup form on the announcement and got over twice as many signups from registered Evo attendees as we planned, so he had to shut it down.  I was originally going to invite 50, but I may try to invite even more of them this week.  I expect some of them will be pretty good by the time the show starts if they practice.  I’m going to do a similar setup to last year’s PAX booth, so three 1v1 stations, but this time I’m also going to try to get two of them on the internet so people in the beta lobby can play people at Evo.  I hope some of the expert players will hang around the lobby to give hands-on demonstrations of SpyParty‘s current player-skill depth!

Even better, it turns out Tom and Seth wanted to have a bunch of player-skill competitive indie games at the show, so they’ve got a great lineup for their Indie Showcase, including Aztez, BaraBariBall, DIVEKICK, Nidhogg, Super Comboman, and Super Time Force!

But, the coolest thing of all is that I found out the Evo expo is open to the public and free on July 6th and 7th!  So, if you’re in the Las Vegas area, or within driving distance, come by and play SpyParty and all these indie games!  Oh, and I’m sure there’ll be a couple fighting games around somewhere to play if you look hard enough.

Postscript

I have my work cut out for me trying to make SpyParty deep enough to be a competitive gaming title, of course.  There have been a few different articles about the game’s upcoming appearance at Evo, with comments ranging from “awesome!” to “wtf?!”, but my favorite comment was on the Kotaku piece:

1. This is why I wish people would stop wasting their time making big movie-wannabe games with big movie-wannabe linear stories the player has to fight/shoot/drive/fly their way through, and instead play our unique strengths.
2. or non-digitally, Go and Poker, or even sports like basketball

Welcome to the SpyParty Early-Access Beta!

This welcome post is going to be a living document, which is to say I’m probably going to accidentally leave out 97% of the information that should be in here. I’m going to edit it constantly, hopefully trending eventually towards leaving out only 95% of the information that should be in here!

When you figure out something I should have put in this post, you should reply to it and I’ll slowly merge the additional information into the post itself.

Getting Started

If you’re reading this, then you registered and logged into the beta website correctly, so the next thing you should do is download and install SpyParty! On your beta homepage you should find a Download Latest SpyParty Setup link. If you click that, you will get a download for the latest version of the SpyParty installer. Sadly, some newer versions of Google’s Chrome browser are claiming the file is malicious, which I really don’t appreciate, but I’m trying to work it out with them.

After you run this installer, you should have your copy of SpyParty installed, along with the PDF of the manual and the README.txt file. You should read those first before playing. Yes, I know, reading about games is boring and playing games is more fun, but SpyParty is a very different kind of game—so your previous game experience will not carry over very well—and it’s very early in development. It has a lot of rough edges and very little online help. So, please read those documents and this post before trying to play, or else I’m worried you’ll get really frustrated and not have a very good time, and that would make me sad. Trust me, you’ll have a much better time if you read the documentation!

After you’ve read the available docs, you should launch the game and go into Practice mode, and then Practice Spy. This mode has no opponent, and you’re not playing online, so you can take your time and figure out how to accomplish all the missions.

Here is a tutorial video I recorded going through Practice Spy, Practice Sniper, and Preview Spy Missions. It’s 15 minutes of me babbling, as if I’m giving you an in-person tutorial at a conference or playtest, and it assumes you’ve read the manual and README.txt. If you want to see the Sniper laser, you probably have to englarge it up to see the full 720p resolution, but even then it’s hard to see with the video compression artifacts.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You should make sure you can complete each mission in Practice Spy mode, including the variants on the missions (like Bugging the Ambassador while in a conversation and while walking, or Transferring the Microfilm both inside and outside the book), and do them within the time limit for the map. If you can do this, you have a good chance of winning your first game playing as Spy (against another newbie, of course!).

You should also do a round of Practice Sniper, getting comfortable with the controls, including how to shoot when the time comes. If you’re new to the game, I would not bother learning highlighting and lowlighting suspects yet, but just concentrate on being aware of who is doing what, looking for suspicious behavior, remembering which statues are in place, and the like.

You can also check out the Preview Missions option in the Practice Menu. This mode will allow you to see all the Spy tells looping forever, so you know what to look for as the Sniper.

Playing Online

When you finally do go on line to play, you should try to play people at your same skill level. There is no matchmaking or ranking yet, so you’ll have to look at the number of games played in the lobby stats to know who to play. If you have to play somebody way more experienced than you, make sure you ask them to mentor you during play, let you know what you’re doing wrong, and what you should be looking for. There are also a lot of ways of handicapping different skill levels, which I can talk about in a different thread.

Also, since the beta is still in its early days, there are not a lot of people with active accounts yet, so the lobby is most likely going to be empty if you just randomly log in. You should use the forums to make dates to play with others if you can’t get a pick-up game going, or use the newly created Steam group to find other matches.

You can also leave SpyParty running in the background in the lobby if you want. The default is to beep when a chat comes in and the game is running in the background, so this will notify you if somebody shows up while you’re waiting. Some of the other early beta testers use this technique!

At some point soon, we’ll start regular playtests at regular times. I need to figure out the best time for this, and I’ll probably run a poll here in the forums.

Learning to Play

Beginners should play the Beginner Ballroom map, with its 4 pre-selected missions (Bug Ambassador, Transfer Microfilm, Steal Statue, and Contact Double Agent). You should alternate between Spy and Sniper roles while playing this map. 

After 20 games or more of Beginner Ballroom, the Sniper should start winning more than half the games. When this starts happening, the Spy should feel like it’s becoming impossible to get all the missions done with the Sniper’s laser on you constantly. You’re now ready to switch from the Beginner Ballroom to the Ballroom. This is the same room and number of partygoers, but the missions are opened up for selection, and you can start playing the “subset” game types. The Spy should choose “Pick 3 of 4 Missions” in the Choose Game Type menu, and then make the same 4 missions available as you played in the Beginner Ballroom (meaning, uncheck Inspect Statues and Seduce Target), but then only choose 3 of them on the Choose 3 Missions menu. 

The Sniper knows which 4 missions are available, but not which 3 are active for the Spy. This subsetting means the Sniper can no longer camp one of the missions, knowing the Spy will eventually have to attempt it, and instead has to weigh the risks in devoting too much attention to a mission the Spy might not even have picked! Now things are starting to get interesting! Of course the Spy wouldn’t have picked the Transfer Microfilm mission, it’s really hard! But, wait, maybe the Spy knows the Sniper will think that, so it becomes the right mission to pick?! This is known as yomi in game design, and it’s awesome.

Once you’ve played the subset game types a bunch, you can feel free to move on to the other maps and the other missions. By now, you’re ready to help other new beta testers learn how to play!

Talking about SpyParty

You are welcome to talk about SpyParty as much as you want in public. You can record videos and post them to youtube, post on your blog, or twitter, or facebook about it, comment about it on gaming blogs, or mention it and your beta testing experiences where ever you like. 

I’m even totally comfortable with you talking about it if you don’t like it, but at least post a link here or send it to support at spyparty.com so I can take a look at your criticisms and learn from them.

These beta forums are private right now so there’s a place where all the beta testers can hang out with each other, report bugs, and know that everybody else they’re talking to has access to the game, but they don’t mean you can’t talk about the game and your experiences on the internet at large (of course, don’t repost anything from the private beta forum without the permission of the author, that’s just good netiquette!). 

Indie games need all the help they can get with word-of-mouth, so feel free to talk it up everywhere!

Thanks for joining,
Chris

"he probably would"

Finding and reporting bugs is a learnable skill, and you don’t have to be a programmer or even a particularly technical person to do it right, you just have to be methodical and thoughtful. Reporting bugs the Right Way means I can spend more time making SpyParty awesome and less time trying to get a bug to “repro” locally.

What is a “Repro”?

The goal of a bug report is to describe the steps to reproduce the buggy behavior (whether it’s a crash that deletes your entire hard disk or it’s a word that’s not pluralized correctly in the user interface somewhere) well enough that I can step through them on my machine and see the behavior first-hand. A bug that doesn’t repro is very hard to fix, whereas a bug with a “good repro” is usually pretty trivial to fix. It can be the difference between 10 minutes to fix and 10 days to fix, literally. So, when posting a bug report, the key is to do some work on your end to be methodical and give steps to repro the bug as simply and as clearly as you can. It’s basically a recipe to make the buggy behavior happen for you (and me!).

This does not mean you shouldn’t report bugs that don’t always happen the same way or happen infrequently, or that you can’t get a good repro for, but it does mean those bugs will be much harder for me to fix. In other words, it’s more important to report the bug poorly than it is to not report it at all, but a good repro makes a huge difference.

Bug Reporting Steps

I’ll be updating these steps as the beta proceeds, and eventually I’ll switch this part of the forum over to a real bug database, but for now, threads in this forum will have to do. The basic rule is one thread per distinct bug.

1. Try to reproduce the buggy behavior on your machine. If you crashed, write down what you were doing right before the crash before you forget it, and then relaunch the game and try to get it to crash again. If you can’t repro the bug, you should still report it with as much description as you can, but as I say above, it’s way easier to fix bugs with good solid repros. The shorter the recipe for the repro, the better. As Einstein said, you want the simplest possible repro, but no simpler. A bug that repros in Practice Mode is easier to debug than one where I have to connect over the network, for example.
2. If screenshots look like they’ll help to repro or describe the bug, feel free to take them (you can do it by hitting F5 when the game is running, or use FRAPS or your favorite screenshot tool). If you hit F5, the screenshot is put in your AppData/Local/SpyParty/screenshots directory, which you can get to by going to the Start menu and typing “%LOCALAPPDATA%\SpyParty\screenshots” into the little edit box, and hitting return. I’ve enabled attachments in the forums, so please attach the images to your bug report (as opposed to using a 3rd party image service, which might delete the images after a while).
3. Make sure you have the latest SpyParty build. The easiest way to do this is to launch the game and hit “Play” on the main menu, which will try to take you to the lobby. The lobby will update your build if you’re out-of-date. If you update, try your repro steps again to make sure they still work.
4. Search this subforum for similar bugs. If you find the same bug, then read the thread on that bug, and see if there is a workaround, or if I think I’ve fixed it in an update, etc. If I think I’ve fixed it in that thread I will mark the subject with ” – FIXED”, and I really want to know if you have the same bug again! This is called a “regression” and it means I’m a bad programmer!
5. If you find the exact bug, feel free to add more information at the end of the thread. I will try to add a “vote for posts” feature so you can simply say “me too”, but until then, feel free to add a post if there aren’t already a bunch of others doing the same, or if you have additional information or slight modifications or a simpler repro that might help debug the problem.
6. If you don’t find an exact match in the current bugs, but do find bugs that seem related, keep the links to those threads so you can insert them into your bug report. A real bug database allows you to reference other bugs, so this is our ghetto version of that feature.
7. Create a new thread in the bugs forum if your bug is a new one. Use a descriptive thread title. “Game buggy” is a bad one. “Main Menu text disappears after window maximized” is a good one. I might change the title after we’ve discussed the bug a bit, but starting off with something descriptive will help.
8. At the top of the post, describe the end state of the bug, meaning what’s wrong, like “the game crashes”, “the statues are floating in mid-air”, or whatever. Describe what you expected to happen, and what happened instead. Attach an image showing the bug, if appropriate.
9. Then put your repro recipe in the post, written as clearly and as simply as possible. You can use the bbcode list tags, or just write it out, either works. Attach any more images you have to show how to repro the bug, but you don’t have to go crazy (saying “hit Play on the main menu” is fine, you don’t need to screenshot the main menu, take it into Photoshop and add an arrow with “click here” text unless the exact place to click matters to repro the bug, for example).
10. SpyParty writes out a log file every time it runs. You can find these log files in the “logs” directory (“%LOCALAPPDATA%\SpyParty\logs”). The file name for the log files has the date and time of the playtest session start (e.g. SpyParty-20120412-11-54-49.log). Attach the log file that goes with you reproing the bug with the steps you’ve posted. Similarly, if your game crashed but said it could not upload the crash dump, then attach the correctly dated dmp file from the logs directory. Otherwise, SpyPartyHelper uploaded the dmp file to my server so I can access it, but mention this in the bug report.
11. If there’s private information you need to send with the bug report, mention this in the report itself, and then send mail to support at spyparty.com.
12. If you want to attach a really big file, say over 2MB, please mention this and I’ll figure out a place for you to put it, please don’t mail giant files to support at spyparty.com.

That’s it for now! Feel free to reply to this post with suggestions of how to improve the bug reporting process and I’ll edit this post.

Eventually I will add a way to report bugs from inside the game that will take a screenshot and everything automatically. Won’t that be nice?

1. for a suitable definition of “soon”