So, naturally, given my competence in this area, I’m going to start yet another mailing list!  Hmm, I need a cute name for it…right now I’m just calling it the SpyParty News.

This new one doesn’t require you to be in the beta to subscribe, so if you’re holding off on joining the beta, but still want email updates on SpyParty, this is the list for you.  You can see the place to enter your email address over there on the right side at the top of the sidebar.   Oh, too far to move your eyes?  Okay, here you go:

Enter your email to get SpyParty News!

Subscribe

Email address invalid!

There’s more!  I’m also going to start actually sending to these mailing lists a little bit more frequently.  I’m going to shoot for one mail a month to this newsletter list and see if I can stick to that.  Baby steps.  Making indie games requires wearing a lot of different hats, and time management is not my strong suit, but hopefully I can handle sending out a mail every month talking about what cool stuff I worked on for the game.  I think the mails to this newsletter list will be different from the mails to the beta announcement list, since the former is mostly for people who aren’t in the beta, while the latter can be more specific about build numbers and have links to the beta forum threads and whatnot in it.  If you’re already in the beta, feel free to subscribe to the newsletter to receive more of my inspiring prose, but don’t feel like you must to avoid missing things if you actively check the forums and follow SpyParty on the social interwebs.

The other thing I’m going to do is add the 25k people who signed up for the closed beta but that haven’t joined yet, and who I haven’t emailed since the beta opened.  These people expressed interest in the game, but  if they don’t check the social media outlets or the blog manually, I’ve completely neglected to let them know what’s happening with SpyParty.  I’m constantly seeing comments and tweets from people who don’t even know the beta is open and are pleasantly surprised to find it is; as I said in a GDC talk a couple years back:  No One Knows About Your Game.

Gallery

And if you made it this far, here’s a teaser image from the new map I’m working on, called Gallery, that should be out soon, maybe tonight if everything goes smoothly.  The idea behind Gallery is to recreate one of those SOHO art gallery spaces, long and narrow, and the Sniper can only see in the end, so there’ll be a bunch of character-based-occlusion.  It should be pretty different from the existing maps, which is in line with my goal of exploring the space of maps and missions.

Hopefully Toby won’t serve drinks out on the sidewalk. Going to have to add that to his AI.

Didn’t like the dumpster? Fine, have a restaurant YOU CAN NEVER VISIT.

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:

Anyway, to make up for my tardiness, in addition to talking about the environment art style, inspirations, and design goals, I’m going to post a bunch of behind-the-scenes shots of the levels and how they look to John in Maya and Photoshop, so you can see how they’re made. Nothing says behind-the-scenes like a screenshot with wireframed polygons in it, right?

We got some great press coverage when we revealed the new environments, here’s a good sample:

• In SpyParty’s Bloodless Cat-and-Mouse Chase, Your Life Ends Here, Evan Narcisse, Kotaku
• SpyParty invites you to the garden party: New art for old environments, Jess Conditt, Joystiq
• SpyParty’s new environments are warm, cool, & Scooby Doo, Patrick Hancock, Destructoid
• SpyParty’s stylish makeover extends to its beautiful new architecture, Michael McWhertor, Polygon
• So, Uh, We Got Chris Hecker To Interview Himself, Chris Hecker,¹ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The articles and interviews listed above introduce a bunch of the important aspects of the new environment art style, and I’ll go into more detail on each here!

The Style

Finally, we have a place to stand!

The first requirement for the SpyParty environment art style was that it complement the new character art style. Since the game is fundamentally about people and their behaviors, John and I spent a long time coming up with the character art style first, and then applied those lessons to the environment art style. If you want the full background on the overall artistic goals, you should read that post as well, but briefly, we designed the art style to be timeless and illustrative. Timeless means it doesn’t look retro or futuristic, or from any specific time period, it could be taking place at any and all times. By illustrative, we mean we aren’t shooting for photorealism nor cartoons, but for a style that looks like it is the 3D version of the sophisticated illustration work from the early 20th century.

Applying the timeless and illustrative aesthetics to the environments meant we wanted to support a wide variety of architectural styles, and so for the reveal we decided to show examples of the aesthetic applied to both a traditional mansion and a modern one. We needed to test out the aesthetic, and make sure it had the dynamic range necessary to render any kind of architecture we could throw at it.

Because the characters are the stars of SpyParty, we want the environments to fade into the background, but still be beautiful stages on which the parties can unfold. The key to this was to settle on a bi-chromatic palette, with a clear warm/cool separation between the world of the Spy and the world of the Sniper. Our friend, Ocean Quigley,² helped us push it even further, by pointing out an old artist trick of increasing the color saturation in shadows, rather than decreasing it as would happen if you just rendered normally in most computer graphics tools like Maya, so shadows go to saturated colors instead of black. As you can see in the images of the new environments, the levels are warm hues wherever the Spy can move and interact, but they are cool outside this area. This will hopefully provide subtle but useful visual feedback to both players about what the gameplay bounds of the level are, and where they need to focus their attentions. There’s actually a third and fourth level of background in the environments, where the 3D modeled trees and the 2D silhouette trees spend their time, fading farther and farther back.

In keeping with our illustrative aesthetic, the shapes, surfaces, and edges should have more of an architectural sketch look, rather than a photographic look. This means very little texture on the surfaces, big, simple shapes, and clean lines.

Frank Lloyd Wright sketch of Falling Water

We’re still developing the aesthetic for the active objects themselves, but the current plan is to use brighter more saturated colors and completely artificial stage lighting to make things like statues and bookshelves pop visually, denoting them as belonging to the foreground instead of the background. I think of old cartoons like Scooby-Doo, where you could always tell when a character was going to pick up a telephone before they actually did so, because the phone was drawn on a cel instead of painted into the background.

If you take these statues a giant boulder comes down the hallway.

Inspiration and Reference

Since we’re going for a naturalistic illustrative style, we want both our environments and characters to be loosely based on reference. We treat real-world reference like Goldilocks treats the temperature of her porridge: we want just the right amount, not too much, not too little. It’s really quite difficult to imagine all the subtleties of an actual physical object—whether a house or a person—if you’re not referring to reference while you’re creating. This sense of authenticity is very hard to achieve and a lot of games don’t seem to even strive for it.³ At the same time, you need to know when to simplify, and what structures are important for solidity and naturalism, and which are superfluous detail.

The two reference buildings for the environments revealed here are the incredible James C. Flood Mansion in San Francisco:

 …and SAOTA’s amazing Cove 6 house in South Africa:

Development

As promised, here’s a small gallery of the environments in Maya and Photoshop. A few highlights:

• You can see how many layers there are in the concept render shot in Photoshop. The finished concept renders don’t actually exist anywhere in 3D, they’re composed of multiple renders and a lot of touchups and post-production to get the look we wanted. This is why the current realtime level doesn’t look as good yet, not only is it not raytraced, but it also doesn’t have the full lighting models and shaders on it that will emulate what John did in post. The concept renders are the visual targets, though, so we hope to get pretty close.
• If you look closely, you can see the triangle-count difference between the concept and realtime Modern map: about 10x. The concept model doesn’t even really have textures on it, it’s all done with surface shaders, while the realtime does to bake in the lighting for performance.
• In the closeups of the bar and fireplace, you can see how John saved polygons when reducing the level, using transparent textures instead of modeling leaves, simplifying shapes, etc.
• Let’s not even talk about the water.

Galleries and Wallpapers

Here are the full galleries for the new environments! The first image in both galleries is a high resolution 16:9 2560×1440 image, suitable for use as wallpaper. The rest are 1280×720. One cool thing is each gallery has a series of images from the Sniper’s point of view, and you can use the lightbox that pops up as a way to preview how the level might look with a rifle in your hands.

First, modern:

Next, traditional:

Finally, here’s the trailer we released last week with the new artwork running in the game:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you have any questions about the new environments, leave them below!

Never forget!

1. by way of Craig Pearson
2. former Art Director of Spore, now making indie games at Jellygrade!
3. By contrast, Jonathan Blow has gone as far as to hire architects to consult on the Witness structures!

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 

Edit:  this happened, and it was a ton of fun!  KY asked some great questions, Vinny showed up and asked questions about Spore, and the vinesauce crew had some great audience questions and played mass-Sniper!  KY posted the whole thing:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was supposed to go 1 hour, and we went 2 hours and 41 minutes.  Oops.  Since it’s so long, here are some highlights KY picked out:

0:00:00 SpyParty Discussion
0:15:16 Match: Veranda, Courtyard
0:22:00 SpyParty Discussion
0:41:37 Match: Balcony
0:53:10 Spore Discussion (Interviewer: Vinny/Vinesauce)
1:11:43 SpyParty Discussion
1:31:05 Jedi Snipe
1:50:14 Match: Ballroom
2:18:08 Chris says “Banana Bread”
2:20:23 Promotion Replay, Closing Statements

KY streams at vinesauce.com, a fun community with hundreds of people watching the stream every night.  There were around 400 when he was streaming SpyParty last night, for example.  The chat there blazes by so fast I think I can only read 1/10^th of it even when I’m paying full attention.  KY assures me I don’t have to try to read it while he’s interviewing me.

It occurs to me now as I’m writing this post I should have taken a screenshot when KY was streaming SpyParty last night, but instead, have a tank.

I’m going to stream the interview as well at the SpyParty twitch.tv account, so you can watch both sides of the games we play.  We’ll both post the archives on youtube, and I’ll link them here when they’re up.  If you’re going to listen to both sides, you probably want to mute one or the other unless you like a lot of reverb in your life.

KY has been very patient.  He’s been wanting to interview me about SpyParty since he joined the beta. His playtime is 40:15:02, he’s played 869 games, and he’s going to destroy me when we play, just to be clear. When he first asked, I told him to hold off on the interview until the beta was open, which I assured him would be sometime in October.  Last year.  Since then he’s been playing a lot of SpyParty, being a great member of the community, mentoring new players, and occasionally inquiring about that interview, always politely, until finally I felt bad typing “so close, just hold off a bit longer” for the 50^th time, and we decided we’d do an interview now and then another one after the beta was finally open.²

Should be a fun time, so tune in tonight!³

1. ky in-game because I don’t support capitals in usernames, to the perpetual chargin of ZeroTKA, who will forever be zerotka
2. Sooooon!
3. Does “tune in” work any more as a saying?

Do or do not...there is no open beta yet.

My plan seemed like a good one at the time I made it:  get the lobby server backend scalable, use the remaining 12595 uninvited people¹ to test that scalability, and then open up the beta, all before PAX West 2012.  Then, when people played SpyParty at little old booth #3002, instead of telling them they had to sign up to get in line, I could just tell them to go home and start playing immediately!

Alas, it turns out I ended up more on the try side of Yoda’s quote than the do side of the quote.  I still think it’s a good plan, I’ll just have search-and-replace “PAX West 2012″ with some other upcoming event²  in the Official Plan Documents™. ³

As the clock started ticking down, I started scrambling and contemplating worse and worse hacks to make my deadline, until I finally took a step back and realized I had way more to lose by screwing up the open beta launch (and potentially the wonderful community that’s developed in the beta so far) than I had to gain by opening it up before PAX.  Plus, given how close to the wire I was getting, I would have been busy on the show floor in the booth without internet while something terrible could have been happening with my server.  Trust me, I want to open it up, but I want to do it right, and it looks like that’s going to take a little more time.

So, the new plan is to finish up the rooms support I’ve been working on, and invite bunch of new folks in over the weekend to test it, but then hold off on more invites until I get back from PAX.  Then, when I’m back and slept, I will try to open up the beta.

And, since I never like to keep things simple, I think as consolation to myself I will try to add a new map and mission to the game for PAX.  The new map is going to be called Courtyard, and it’s a patio area surrounded by shrubs, with a small plant right in the middle with some statues around it.  The Sniper can move in a loop the entire way around the map, but the plant in the middle obscures at least one of the statues at any given time.  The new mission was actually suggested by beta tester monaters, and it’s a really great idea:  Toby carries around an item on his tray, and you can chose to take it as your Spy move when taking a drink.  The Sniper needs to notice the item is gone, and then backtrack to who took a drink recently.  It’s simple, but rich with potential.

Storyteller, the Special Guest Indie

When I was thinking about this post, I realized I have had or been a guest indie game every PAX.  First, in 2010, we had Jonathan Blow’s The Witness in our booth.  Then, I was the guest in Firehose’s booth at PAX East.  Last year, I had Marc ten Bosch’s Miegakure (and almost AirMech) as the guest indie in the SpyParty booth. 

This year, continuing in that tradition, I am hosting Daniel Benmergui’s Storyteller Saturday and Sunday mornings, 10am – 11am, booth #3002.  This is the same great little corner booth I had last year.

Storyteller delights me as a player and as a designer, and I can’t wait to see where Daniel takes the game, and how the PAX folks react to it!  Daniel will be hanging around the SpyParty booth all weekend if you miss the 10-11am playtest slots and want to talk to him about his awesome game.

See you soon!

1. The current beta signup scorecard so far:  19340 hit submit on the beta signup, 17114 confirmed, 4705 invited, 1842 joined.
2. maybe “IndieCade 2012″?
3. Hint: there are no official plan documents.

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

Anyway, the idea behind this party was to get the hardcore playtesters playing together in-person and say “Thanks!” with beer and snacks, but also to get them mentoring the folks from the press, who haven’t seen much of the mid-game yet because they haven’t played enough games.  I don’t know how well the mentoring thing worked out since it was not exactly a quiet contemplative training environment, but everybody seemed to have a good time, and that was the main goal.  Huge thanks to Jonathan Blow for letting me use his suite for the party, and to Luis & Mylene and John & Alice for bringing the food¹ and drinks!

I took some pictures, maybe you can recognize some playtesters and press…

And, now we’re in the home stretch for the next batch of invites.  I’m plowing through the list of bugs and feature requests from the first batch, and the next invites are going out really soon™.  Here’s the current todo list:

• put portraits up along side for cast characters
• also spy!
• how to center text? allow two lines worth of space? uneven spacing?
• have box with ? on side for casting characters – progress status and neat
• don’t get that click on guy selects during cast characters
• character/level chooser mouse tip for select versus next/prev
• mouse overrides cursor keys in menus if over item…don’t override if key change but no mouse change
• why is volume not working on last 30 seconds timer on sniper machine?
• sniper review tells on waiting screens – sort of
• basic infrastructure for this
• chooser through animations playing on loop!
• text title and description support
• require sniper okay to continue
• bug_ambassador
• double_agent
• inspect_statues
• seduction
• steal_statue
• transfer_book
• check_watch
• mouse clicks are going to background window on spy side
• does spy side keep mouse cursor on results screen?
• sniper camera moves on results screen
• pgup->PageUp
• fix statue pad size
• multiple affordances controls
• display bumpers/QE/mousewheel?
• update action test text as affordance changes for Signal Double Agent?
• or kill it if it’s not an active affordance, so have to restart?
• document action test is same button?
• put small icon next to it?
• update while in lobby
• Update Failed on download bar…needs to test more
• remove briefcase verbs? or ignore them?
• write forum welcome/intro/faq posts
• update readme, or just empty it and point to the focum post?
• how to report bugs post
• post threads for known bugs
• tutorial video, walk through Spy and Sniper practice mode as if I was showing you how to play at a playtest
• ctrl-delete delete next word, use ctrl-right code…uh, and fix that
• updated lobbyserver won’t accept old connections, even to update, idiot!
• start sniper while other on results -> no -> sniper -> assert(level) – yay, found it!
• needs to zero play id on starting sniper because still current
• need to fix gameid/playid thing…I’m constantly stomping the gameid
• store gameid/playid pairs from server, then look up based on playid
• store playid on server as well
• can’t escape from sniper results after play attempt? IsLobbyGameOver busted
• add string wrap to property parser, or general line continuation?

I haven’t decided how many people to invite in the next batch, but it’ll be somewhere between 20 and 50, depending on how confident I’m feeling.  Yikes, 50 strangers from the internet!

2012-03-23 15:19:45 – Crossed some stuff off.  Working on the missions preview code, so people will be able to see what all the tells look like before playing.

2012-03-30 13:24:10 – Added a bunch of stuff I’ve been working on that wasn’t on the posted list!

2012-04-03 17:18:30 – Well, it turns out the mission tell preview took a lot longer than I thought, and I still didn’t manage to hook it up to the Sniper waiting screens, so it’s just in the practice menu for now.  I shouldn’t have done this one now, but once I started I failed to stop working on it.

1. Mylene’s homemade guacamole was awesome!

Welcome to professional tradeshow booth planning!

So, how did the experiment in depth-based-playtesting-at-a-tradeshow go?

I think it went pretty well, and as you can see from the pictures below, it seems like the attendees agreed.  We had people playing at the “unlimited playtest station” for well over an hour without getting up, and a small community of regulars—including a bunch from last year, see if you can spot them—camping the station and helping others learn the advanced game.

I think it really helped people get a feel for the deeper game that is hard to experience in that kind of environment, and I think I’ll do it again, maybe at PAX East.  The one problem I noticed has an online equivalent:  matchmaking is hard!  Often a single player would come up and want to play, but there wouldn’t be anybody else at their skill level available, so they had to wait a bit for another single to show up.  This problem lessened over the course of PAX as more players became experienced and started hanging around the unlimited station, but I think next time I’ll have announced times when players can come and make a date with somebody for later in the day.  So, maybe at 11am and 3pm unlimited players can come and make arrangements with other unlimited players, or something like that.  Manual matchmaking, indie style!

Here were the three signs I made for the different stations:

One other flaw with the depth based testing was I didn’t have any way for players to log in and use a persistent username, so I couldn’t track metrics for each player.  I’ll post the metrics from all the PAX games soon, but they’re just going to be a jumble of every game played, which is fine when everybody just gets to play two matches, but I really wanted to track longer term data on the unlimited station.  I thought about a lot of different ways to do this, but they were all clumsy and error prone.  Then Matt Gilgenbach from 24 Caret Games stopped by to chat and told me about what they did for their Retro/Grade leader boards:  card readers!  Hardcore players were given a magnetic strip card like a credit card, and they could swipe this to log in before they played.  So quick and easy and tradeshow-floor-compatible!  Matt said they got the card readers for cheap on ebay.  I’m totally stealing this idea for next time.

Before I go any farther, I have to thank all the folks who helped me with the booth this year, they were amazing!  First off, Sean Willoughby, the PAX Enforcer assigned to the SpyParty booth, went way above and beyond the call of duty in helping me set up.  You can see him in the pics below helping me make signs!  He was an incredible help.  GDC volunteer Roger Hanna returned and did an awesome job of saving my bacon yet again.  He was joined by some game industry friends from the Spore days, Thomas Vu, Steven Lim, and their friend Tony Lee (who I’d never even met before he showed up out of the blue with Thomas and Slim and then proceeded to rock booth duty like a seasoned pro!) .  Paul Sottosanti, who you may recognize as one of my elite playtesters, and who has recently gone indie himself, also helped a bunch, as did Marc ten Bosch, creator of Miegakure.

Speaking of other indie games and helping each other out, I had planned on having Carbon Games show off their new game AirMech, and Marc show off Miegakure, but the Carbon guys ended up getting a fulltime booth at the last minute through some friends, so we had Miegakure set up both weekend mornings.  You can see it mixed in with the pictures below.  People had a great time playing it for an hour, and I let some real hardcores play until well past lunch since they were having such a great time!  I really want to thank the Carbon folks, and especially James Green and Ken Klopp, for being so cool…they lent me a big screen tv and stand even though they ended up not showing at my booth.  I owe them bigtime.  Indies rock!

Okay, on to the pictures, and thanks a ton to all the people who came and played!