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

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am ludicrously excited about this!  If you follow this blog and SpyParty on Twitter or Facebook,² you probably know I’ve been really interested in live streaming recently.  In fact, just the other day I set up the SpyParty Streams Notifier and I’m writing up a longer post about that and streaming in general, and I was recently interviewed by Chris Priestman on Indie Statik about the growth of streaming for indie games, along with Erik Svedäng who’s working on the awesome Clairvoyance, which makes great use of online replays. 

You may also know we’re at the final game of beta-tester insight’s SpyParty New Year’s Cup, which has been a really fun and exciting set of matches, most of which have been live streamed or at least recorded and posted after the match.  Watching the live streams and chatting with the other viewers during the games is incredible.

Even grizzled live streaming veterans are having a blast with the tournament streams!

So, what better to do than combine the tournament and the focus on live streaming and go all-in?

We are going to live commentate the finals match of the tournament between james1221 and bl00dw0lf, re-streaming both sides of the match to a single stream we can fade between the two views dynamically based on context, and we’ll have expert level commentary by virifaux and ky, with occasional color by me.  ky is going to play director while he casts, picking the best view from the two streams, just like the dude in the video truck at the Super Bowl!  We tested all the technical and social aspects of this today, it worked incredibly well, and you can see the results here, with a test game between james1221 and slappydavis:

Tune In

So, at 10pm EST / 7pm PST / 3am GMT,³ on Saturday, January 19th⁴ point your browser to the SpyParty twitch.tv channel:

http://twitch.tv/spyparty

If today’s practice session is any indication, it’s going to be totally awesome!

Assuming this goes as well as I hope, we’re going to start doing this kind of casting more often, with a rotating mix of commentators, so leave comments here on this post with feedback on what you saw and let us know if you liked it, or if there’s anything we can change to make it even better!

1. As a youtube commentor pointed out, I shouldn’t have had the winner above the video because it ruins the surprise!
2. And now Google+, because the world definitely needed another social network!
3. sorry!
4. 20th if you’re GMT

This image should be live updated. If not, click here for the updated brackets!

I hope players do lots more tournaments in the future, and I’m thinking spectation will really help with that when I get it in. Live commentated SpyParty tournaments, so awesome!

Match Schedule

I’ll post these here as they become available, and update it with archives after the games are played:

Player Stats!

tytalus has put together some stats for the players based on the leaderboard information. Eventually I’d like to make all the stats available via an API so people can do cool stuff with them.

The Tournament Rules

This is from insight‘s post on the beta forums introducing the tournament and calling for players.