I have a zillion blog posts queued up in draft or idea form, but I don’t want to take any time away from working on the beta to finish any of them, so I came up with this (probably ill-advised) idea:  I will post the remaining items left to do before I can invite the first players to join the beta.  Then, instead of taking time to write new posts, I’ll just edit this post and strikethrough the items as I do them.  Sadly, as with most software development task lists, the items below are at vastly different time and difficulty scales, so they won’t all get checked off at the same rate, and they have an annoying tendency to spawn unforseen subtasks as one digs into them, so the list will grow occasionally too.  But, at least this way you can see my progress towards the finish line at a finer granularity than my intermittent tweets.

Even though I’m stupendously late, I’m pretty excited about SpyParty’s development right now, because almost all of the big tasks have been finished.  Stuff like auto-updating, crash dump reporting, the installer, and the security system are done, or at least beta quality.  Most of the rest of the stuff to do is the myriad loose ends that come along with getting anything ready for public consumption.  The two big remaining things are the invite-a-friend feature that I originally wasn’t planning to do for launch, but after your comments here on the blog, on twitter, and on facebook, I decided I simply had to add it, and the text chat feature, which is sort of stubbed in but needs to be improved, since communication is going to be an important part of the experience.  It’s going to be really rough to start with, but hopefully it will be good enough to get things started.

I’ve broken up the todo list into three sections:  the Website, which means anything you talk to through your browser, including payments and the private beta foums and homepage; the Server, which is the lobby, player and game database, and that sort of thing; and the Game, which is the thing that runs on your machine.

Without further ado, here is the list.  You can ask questions in the comments, but do keep in mind that time I spend explaining these things is time I’m not spending checking them off!  Also, these are just the tasks to get the first beta invites out, I have infinitely longer and less well defined task lists for later in the beta and beyond.  But let’s not think about those right now…

Website

• invite friend to join beta, one invite per person
• mail and homepage needs notes about whether you can talk about game during beta
• please do, indie games need your help to spread the word
• if you have criticisms, I just hope you’ll also tell me (post in forums or email) so I can fix them
• invites
• invite.pl
• need to update the intInviteStatus, uncomment the execute line
• do initial invites with email
• change invite.pl to not need any email, and just take a count and invite the next group
• cheating
• many ways right now, please just don’t, will make me deal with cheaters now instead of making game
• spectating
• listening for control clicks?
• even multiple people watching sniper side monitor
• switch to CentOS 6
• get backups in order, good test for this!
• audit all the code
• add user to announce mailing list
• block test ipns from doing real work
• test newline in display name? need to escape it
• style cosign pages
• login, login error
• logout
• change password
• only want while logged in for now? yes
• style
• test cosign logout
• definitely does not work in firefox the first time? wtf? look at the cookies?
• beta homepage
• style
• stats
• write introduction to beta
• link change password
• style rss
• display nicer date
• remove umich copyright
• forums
• edit account settings – disable change password & email address
• update phpbb to 3.0.9
• welcome message
• stats on profile page
• phpbb how to report bugs
• phpbb faq – update faq.php to add styles/<active>/faq/more_faq.php to the array
• error_log in all php code
• paypal note about anonymous payments, credit cards, etc.
• retry-registration needs to display a page before going to paypal
• mail with details of which cancellation on paypal error?
• test paypal flow with non-sandbox
• enable IPN, redirect back to page, etc.
• what does cc bill show as outside of sandbox?
• start downloading logs
• forward mail? probably better than running pop
• or upload to s3?

Server

• when shutting down, don’t allow new connections, just reply with failure message
• why doesn’t the stunserver work when resolving addresses?
• test relay server, at OAK?
• kerberize stun and relay servers
• initially just show spy/sniper games played, so user name is displayed as checker (45/67) everywhere
• upgrade krb to 1.9.2
• client
• server
• write lobbyclient stress tester app that spews data at server
• log in first sometimes
• use known packet types
• make this the lobbyclient app, and have it be console control as well
• send message to all connections
• don’t make this too general for now, fine to recompile for different stress tests
• need to fix pointer output in log for connect/disconnect
• send client state info to server for debugging?
• yes, at game menu, playing, etc.
• server database
• async_db clear semantics for db return codes, reg/unreg
• store game/match data to db
• users records
• ranking info
• date stamp for login
• last login, logout
• $inc login count
• $inc failed count?
• cumulative time logged in! login/match/game times & counts
• add usernames to journal filenames (urlescape!)
• checker/test for testing
• turn verifies in the lobby ctor into logs so can debug
• clients only allowed one game journal per game id
• don’t need the random number anymore, given session id in filename
• overwrite file on multiple submissions
• async_krb5 and async_db error log…have a varargs Log and pass it, also for game
• finish updating to new protocol
• client<->server
• client<->client
• hmm, track memory usage and make sure we’re not leaking
• output to log file occasionally?
• info mallinfo – dev/test/mallinfo.cpp will work on linux
• GetProcessMemoryInfo
• async_krb5
• clean up code
• disable all the built-in accounts? or leave them randkey?

Game

• “game” -> “match” in ui
• handle errors in client<->client authn
• switch to — for command line parms?
• windowed maximized borderless
• network time sync?
• it can lag by 5 seconds, which plays fine but seems terrible, better to run Zach’s simple net sync code
• merge reliable packets
• ooi in reliable packets
• test motion in joy ps3 driver
• make a list grid mode for the chooser, or just obey tabs?
• then display other players in lobby and their ranks
• want to display release notes during autoupdate?
• have lobbyserver fetch them?
• displayed while downloading, option in main menu
• send gl versions and cpuid during login?
• need to version check on clients
• journal match id on client and server
• net pause – pause is a nice thing, no?
• test keys disable
• figure out what stuff to collect in the journals, careful of machine name, etc.
• no marketing, or sharing (might publish anonymous stats)
• add the appropriate command line parms to the –help! window stuff, etc
• fix chat
• /me /e[mote] str – print “username str”
• /played /age – print playtime stats
• /? /h[elp] – print commands
• /w[hisper] /t[ell] /m[sg] <username> str – private message to username
• /r[eply] str – reply to last person who whispered me
• /retell str – send to last person I whispered
• /away /afk /dnd [str] – displays str to anyone who whispers me, /away to cancel
• /time – lobbyserver time and local time
• the chat text is totally unreadable with those colors!
• /fps – basic net and video info
  
• completion, cut & paste
• support esdf, y invert, config screen
• if not fully remappable keys, mention ablegamers list in readme and say will comply soon
• logging
• async_krb5 and async_db error log…have a varargs Log and pass it, also for game
• log printf output to file instead of console
• and gzip and send to server?
• chat messages to console?
• convert to use log function instead of stderr
• disable logging by default
• or, log to file always for now so crash dump can upload it instead of asserts log
• log to pipe and store in spypartyhelper’s memory instead of file?
• update docs/README.txt
• put the character name in highlight text? try it.

2011-11-14 18:02:07 – Checked one off already, although I must admit I did the minimum necessary to get it working.

2011-11-17 18:25:17 – Grindy bug fixy day, but finally got the async server db thread semantics clear.

2011-11-30 13:09:31 – Okay, I think the server database stuff is all done, games are saved, results are saved, the player records are updated, etc.

2011-12-06 13:59:23 – The ugliest lobby ever?  Maybe.

A team of UI designers worked on this for 5 years.

2012-01-05 11:18:54 – I am calling it for the chat system.  I didn’t get to /ignore and /stats and whatnot, but /ignore is not relevant until there are annoying people playing, which I’m sure won’t be the case for a while, and /stats are all displayed in the lobby chooser, so it’s redundant for now.

2012-01-25 16:41:04 – More red strikethroughs!  Getting really close!

2012-01-26 15:08:46 – Getting the PS3 DualShock controller to work on Windows is so much more work than it should be.  Start by installing the totally unauthorized MotionInJoy drivers! Then mess around with configurations.  Don’t even think about getting it working over BlueTooth unless you have certain USB dongles.  What year is this?  Oh well, it works:

Well, at least now I can say I support 360, PS3, and mouse+keyboard.

2012-02-03 14:24:10 – Finally grinding through the website tasks, which should go pretty quick…*cough*.  Here is a screenshot of the saddest page on the blog:

A page you don't want to see in your browser.

1. Let’s just agree not to mention my original June 16th estimate, okay?

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!

I hinted at the second experiment at the bottom of the post…we indies have to stick together, and much like the awesome Firehose Games did for SpyParty last PAX East, this year I’m inviting two other indie games to demo at the booth so fans and press alike can check them out. 

For an hour each weekend day morning, a different indie game will take over all 6 playtest stations…

The Unannounced New Hotness from Carbon Games, Saturday, 10am-11am

I can’t say anything yet about what the folks at Carbon Games are going to show on Saturday morning, but they’re the same people who did the PS3′s Fat Princess, so you can be pretty confident it will be a unique and polished experience.  They’re going to announce the game sometime early next week, so watch their twitter feed for more information.

This is not the game they're showing at PAX.

Miegakure, Marc ten Bosch’s Brain Bending 4D Puzzle Platformer, Sunday, 10am-11am

Sunday morning, Marc ten Bosch is going to set up the latest build of Miegakure at the booth.  My advice is to grab a coffee and get there as soon as you can so you can camp a playtest station, because you will want as much time as possible to try to take your slow and lumbering morning brain from its sleepy 3D existence to its enlightened 4D state.

How to get to the other side? Like, duh.

I’ve blogged about working with Marc before, so maybe you can spot the similarities in this shot I took of him last week…

Every picture I take of Marc looks like this...

Once again, SpyParty has a booth, but as evidenced by my previous two PAXes, apparently I have to do it differently each time.  So, here’s the deal this time around…

SpyParty has its own booth this year, #3002.  It’s an awesome booth, and I’m really excited I was able to nab it during the crazy-sold-out-PAX-booth-registration-period.  I know it is awesome because it was the booth next door to ours last year, and it’s just perfectly positioned and sized for a single indie game.  I admit to ogling it on occasion during PAX last year, and fantasizing about it during those long, cold winter months.

Here’s a detail of the floorplan of 3002 and the surrounding booths.  You can see The Behemoth, Twisted Pixel, and Uber Entertainment are SpyParty’s next door neighbors.²

PAX West 2011 Floorplan Detail

Uber is in the booth Monaco and I were in last year, so my playtest table was set up just about where the number “3004″ is on that image.  You might recall Dust-Off was in 3002 last year, and if not, here’s a picture I took the first day of PAX West 2010 looking in that direction.

No, I will not have a tent. Sadly.

Booth #3002 is so awesome because it’s a 10′ x 10′ island, which means it only has a wall behind it, and no immediate neighbors.  This means people can gather around three sides, and I can fit more stuff in the booth without it feeling too cramped.³  It’s also right next to the entrance.

Enough about the location, what about the contents of the booth?

The goal for this year’s booth is to give people a better taste of SpyParty’s depth and subtlety.  I’ve been incredibly fortunate to always have a long line whenever I set up at a convention, but the downside to having a line is I have to kick people off the game after they’ve played one game each of Spy and Sniper.  Your first game of SpyParty bears almost no resemblance to your 10th game of SpyParty, so I set about trying to figure out how to give people a taste of the real gameplay.  Some dedicated fans would get back in line multiple times, but when the line is an hour or more long, this is really asking a lot of people when there’s so much other cool stuff to see at PAX.  I think I’ve come up with a solution.

I’m going to set up three 1v1 SpyParty stations in #3002, so a total of 6 computers and monitors.  These three stations will be allocated as follows:

1. The first station will be exactly like previous playtests at GDC and PAX East, where you can sit down, play a quick tutorial, and then play once as both Spy and Sniper on the Beginner Ballroom map.  That’s if there’s a line.  If there’s no line, feel free to play as long as you want, but if there is a line, you get one game as each role and then you have to get up so the next two people can play.
2. The second station is for people who have played at least once before.  When you sit down at this station, you don’t have to play the tutorial if you don’t want to, and you and your partner can jump straight into playing.  You can play any map you want, and any missions.⁴  On this station, you can play two matches, so two Spy and two Sniper games each.  Now we’re starting to get past the initial “Why am I walking into a wall?” and into the “I’d better cool it in this conversation for 12 seconds before bugging the Ambassador”.  Still, once you’ve played a couple matches, you get the boot and you have to get back in line if you need another fix.
3. The third station is where I’m conducting a bit of an experiment on the PAX attendees…this station has no time limit for players.  This means that if you show up right at the show floor opening, and are first in line, you can play all day and no one is allowed to bother you.  If you get in line for this station, you might not get to play at all; the line might not move.  Sorry, but that’s how it goes when you’re trying to make a deep game and let people experience it.  There are some rules:  only one of the two players can’t stay, both have to get up or stay.  I’ll probably let small groups alternate amongst themselves, so three or four people can rotate in and out, but I’ll have to see how that goes.  My goal with this station is not to get lots of people through it, it’s to get a few people to experience the advanced game.

It’s going to look something like this:

Cramped? Nah, let's use the word 'cozy'.

I have no idea if the third station is going to work, or cause fist fights.  Like last year, I’m going to have an HDTV up on a stand, and I’m thinking I’m going to mirror one of the third station monitors, because those are going to be the most interesting games in terms of advanced play.  Will there be peer pressure to get up and give others a turn?  Will there be ad hoc player organized tournaments?  Will somebody play long enough to start beating Ian and Paul?  I can’t wait to find out.

Secret Guest Games

The other wacky thing I’m doing this year is I’m going to have two guest indie games that will take over the booth for the first hour of the day on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  I’ll announce those games in another post very soon.

See you at booth #3002 in 7 days!

1. Yes, I know they call it PAX Prime, but that’s silly, it should be PAX West to complement PAX East, and so that’s what I’ll call it.
2. The official maps are here and here.
3. …he declares, optimistically.
4. You might want to play the tutorial for the new missions if you haven’t played them yet.

Yes, that's John Travolta. Again.

 Oh, here’s the email if you’re curious:

I’ve finally solidified my plan for the Early-Access Beta pricing, so I want to describe that here and hopefully answer any questions you might have in the comments.

There are going to be two pricing options:

1. $15 USD — Like I’ve said elsewhere, $15 has become the de facto price point for AAA Indie Games, and it’s almost certainly what I’ll price the final game at on the various platforms, assuming XBLA, PSN, and Steam are still operating when I ship in 100 years. ²  I’m really happy there’s a “standard” price point for high quality indie games now, because it not only means I don’t have to think about it, but players also know what kind of experience they can expect for their money.  $15 doesn’t mean “budget game”, it means “awesome indie game” now, and that’s great for innovation and creativity.

   Your $15 gets you access to the beta SpyParty and all the updates during the beta, access to the private beta website, which includes forums for announcements, finding games, and discussing strategies, and eventually a bug/feature tracking system.³  You’ll also get the game for free when it releases on PC.  I can’t say for certain right now, but I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to give you a key for activating it on Steam or your digital distribution platform of choice.  If/when I end up doing a MacOS port, you can have that version too as part of the deal, in case you’d rather play there.  I probably won’t be able to give you a console version, but if I can figure out a way to do that, I will.

2. Pay what you want above $50 USD — A significant number of people have asked if they can contribute more than $15 to help me make SpyParty, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, and I think I’ve figured out a neat way to let those who are interested do this.  When you get your invite mail, there will be the $15 option above, or an option to pay $50 or as much over $50 as you want. ⁴

   As you may have read, I am quite wary of extrinsic motivators and rewards, so I want people who contribute at this level to do it because they want to help me make a new and different kind of game.  They are not going to get any badges or stars next to their name in the game or in the forums, or any exclusive gadgets in the game, or a special plaid jacket, or a fancy hat, or anything like that.  If you’re playing the game, you will have no idea if your opponent paid $15 or $500 for SpyParty; it has been and always will be a pure player-skill game.

   I am incredibly grateful to everyone who joins the Early-Access Beta, at whatever price you decide to pay. I’m also incredibly grateful to the fans who follow the game and aren’t going to join the beta, but will buy SpyParty when it comes out, or even just help spread the word and contribute ideas because they think the game sounds interesting.

   However, as a special way of saying thank you for generously helping to fund the game, I am planning on putting everybody who contributes $50 or more in the game credits. There aren’t going to be any credits in the game until it ships, so again, this is not going to create a two-class system during beta testing. This is just a way of giving thanks and recognition to the people who put a little (or a lot) extra in when the game needed it most.

I got the idea for this credits thing from Dan Verssen at Dan Verssen Games.  Dan makes board games, and since board games have an up-front cost for printing, he takes preorders to both judge the popularity of a game and to fund its initial print run.  To thank the preorderers, he prints their names on the box, which I think is a wonderful way of including fans of the games in the development process.  Here’s the back of  his game U-Boat Leader as an example:

The heartfelt message from Dan at the bottom is how I feel about everyone who has shown interest in SpyParty as well.  It’s a pretty incredible feeling.

Okay, back to work.  Post any questions you have or clarifications you need in the comments.

1. …as you wonderful folks are quick to point out at every opportunity! ♥
2. That’s a joke, internet!
3. Intially I’m just going to use a subforum for bugs and features, but I’ll set up something like bugzilla or one of the other open-source ones once things are rolling.
4. To be honest, I think I limit the input box to 5 figures.  I will gladly make exceptions to this if you email me!

No, really, this Boeing 707 belongs to John Travolta.

No, not that 707.  That one belongs to John Travolta.

The 707 I’m talking about are the seven hundred and seven people who signed up for the SpyParty Early-Access Beta without knowing that’s what they were signing up for.  You see, back on Valentine’s Day, I quietly put up a sign-in form on the sidebar of this blog, “below the fold”, just to test it out.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the list of names at that point, but I figured it’d be good to start gathering them.  A few folks noticed immediately, but I wasn’t ready to announce anything, so I just left it up there, slowly gathering email addresses for some unspecified “future playtest”.

In all, 707 people signed up between February 14th and April 15th, when I took the form down to get the backend code ready for accepting Early-Access Beta signups.  A few of those are my test accounts, but most were just people who came to the site and entered their email address.

The good news (for them) is they are first in line for the Early-Access Beta.  If you tried to sign up after the announcement but were told you were already subscribed, then you must have signed up during the spring and are one of the 707.

The bad news (for them) is since I didn’t have any of the beta stuff figured out back then, I’m going to ask them to reconfirm their sign-up to keep their place in line.  As I’ve said before, I want to make sure a high percentage of people I invite will actually pay and register for the beta so I don’t have to churn through tons of invites to get a given number of registrations.  I’d like to be able to send 20 emails and know I’m going to get about 18 registrations, or something close to that.  I don’t want to have to send 500 emails to get 20 signups, because then I might randomly get 150 signups, and that would screw up my work on slowly scaling the backend.  I don’t want to invite 500 and then have 480 people see an “oops, sorry, already full” message, because that’s annoying too.

So,  I want to make sure people who have signed up are going to register.  Since the 707 had no idea what they were signing up for, or that it would actually cost money, I’m going to send them all an email with a link to reconfirm their subscriptions.  The email will explain the situation, link to the details of how the beta will work,¹ and ask them to click a link to reconfirm.  There’s no time limit on this, and I’ll always invite in order of earliest sign up date,² so if you are in the Antarctic and don’t get the mail immediately, you’ll still be able to reserve your place in line, you just won’t get invited until you confirm.

I’ll have more details about the registration process in a few days.  Sadly, I still have a bunch of work to do, but I’m getting closer.  Thanks for being patient!

Oh, and since I was asked on twitter, there are currently 8006 people signed up and confirmed, or 7299 if you don’t count the 707.  647 people have not confirmed the initial opt-in email, which is about 8%, which I’m told is very good for this sort of thing.³   I might send out a single “hey, did you forget to confirm” reminder to those people, but I’m not going to worry too much about them.  The long tail sign-up rate appears to be about 20 per day.

1. I really need to go through the comments on the sign up page and put together the Beta FAQ!
2. …maybe with a few random choices for each invite batch from anywhere in the line just to keep people on their toes!
3. So, I guess that means the tens of thousands of emails I sent while load-testing didn’t get me marked as a spammer, which is nice.

Here’s a quick text summary:

• On the polish front, I want to either support or be able to support things like Single-Sign-On, Auto-discovery of Lobby Servers, NAT Punchthrough, Relay Fallback,  Personalized Beta Homepages, Ajax Forms, Private Forums, Bug Reporting & Feature Requests, etc.
• For security, the first rule is “No DIY Security!”, so I’m using MIT’s Kerberos with an OpenLDAP backend, and then hooking it up to the University of Michigan’s CoSign Single-Sign-On platform for the website. Then I talk a bit about AuthN & AuthZ, AuthN Client↔Server & Client↔Client, using https, TLS, revokable certs, timed downloads, etc. I also talk about how none of this means the game will be “unhackable” or “unwarezable” by any stretch.  There’s not going to be any DRM, and it’s a PC game, so there’s basically nothing I could do about it even if I wanted to.  But, Kerberos will allow me to always associate and authenticate a real account with a play session, and an honest client will be able to authenticate other clients and servers and know they are “official” and in good standing.  Of course, being the PC, nothing is going to stop people from hacking the client and even making their own servers, except that’s a bunch of effort for not much gain except “see, I did it”, and hopefully people will be more into playing the game as I update it, and supporting the development of new and interesting indie games.  We shall see!
• I’m trying to make it scalable, so if a lot of people want to play, I can let them!  Scalable means Very Few Centralized Services, the very few Centralized Services are Replicatable, and need Few Writes, the rest Runs in the Cloud, and is Load Balanced.  I talk about the importance of Load Testing Everything, and Assuming Nothing before testing.  And, I talk about how I did the email signup to support an Incremental Roll-out.
• Finally, I talk a bit about flexibility, and how there are going to be lots of ways the code sucks, at least at the beginning, so knowing where it will suck and knowing how I’m going to fix it when the time comes is important.

I also try to pre-emptively answer the most common questions at the end, namely, Why do all this yourself?, Why not use Steam/XBLA/PSN/etc?, and Why not start with the “MVP” and iterate?

Hope you enjoy it.  It’s pretty short, about 20 minutes with 8 minutes of Q&A at the end.  Feel free to ask more questions in the comments!

1. Or you can download the raw ppt and mp3.

The talk is going to be about the SpyParty network backend, and my goals, hopes, and dreams for it, and why I’m so late getting the Early-Access Beta up and running (sorry!).  When I say “short”, I mean it’s only 15 minutes, and then a Q&A session.  Then it’s back to work on the beta for me.

The good news is last night¹ I finally got the beta registration flow working.  I sent myself a beta invite email, and then clicked the link, filled out the form, got forwarded to PayPal, paid myself pretend money from the PayPal Sandbox test environment, got forwarded to the page that waits for the payment to be completed, clicked through to the beta homepage, which automatically redirected me to the login page, logged in with the new account, got to the beta homepage, clicked the link to the beta forums, and I posted an unintelligible message to myself.  Progress!

Of course, an unspeakable amount of stuff happened behind the scenes in about 5 different languages to make all that work smoothly.

Not waving.

1. This morning?  It all blurs together…

I think it’s great the IGF gives submitters feedback, and, being on the Advisory Board for the Game Developers Conference, I know exactly how much work it is to even just grade the submissions, let alone writing up feedback clean enough that it can be sent back to submitters.  It’s something we constantly wrestle with on the GDC AB:  should we spend our time helping the accepted talks be better, or spend time giving feedback on why talks were rejected?  It’s a tough decision with no easy answers.

So, I post this feedback here both because I think it’s great the IGF does this and it’s wonderful to get feedback from people who played the game “in the wild” without me standing there, and also because I think this specific SpyParty feedback is kinda funny in its breadth, yet also brings up interesting points worth discussing.  Plus, I’m sick of trying to make sure my openssl certificates have the right permissions for the krb5kdc user to not violate SElinux policies and need a break…

I got three pieces of feedback, and they’re all about as different as can be.  First up:

I have no objection to your focus on rules and skills. But I think a more abstract appearance for such abstract interactions would be more suitable. As it is now, you have created a murder simulator of the worst kind: one in which the player kills his or her friend.

This is especially problematic considering that you don’t even seem to care about the simulation aspect of the game, submitting a project as you did with only placeholder artwork. If you don’t mean to make a game about killing one’s friend, don’t use this metaphor.

I had no idea Jack Thompson was an IGF judge!  They should really publicize that more.  I kid!  I actually have a post in draft form about how SpyParty uses violence in a different way than most games, but I haven’t had time to finish it up.  I will tease one of the questions from that post here, since it’s topical to this feedback:  I’m thinking about adding a “PG” mode to the game, where, instead of shooting the Spy, the Sniper player identifies the Spy and the guards come arrest him or her.  Does this change the game?  The sniper bullet is, at its most basic level, simply a way for the Sniper to pick a character.  You can shoot a character in the toenail and it still counts.  The game ends when that choice is made, so there is no actual violence in the interactivity of the game.  But, some people argue having “arrest mode” would ruin the game.¹ This gets to some of my opinions about how the phrase “game mechanics” is misused a lot of the time, and how the low level features are inseparable from the higher level aesthetics of the gameplay, about which I’ll write more later.

Next:

Awesome, probably the most innovative entry of the year. If it doesn’t win a prize it’s just because it feels very early in the development.

It seems to me that the main indicator of somebody being a spy is the walking flow. If you see somebody with a stuttering walk it’s over. It shouldn’t be just about that, I’d recommend some kind of automatic movement smoothing.

This topic of the “walking tell” is a really interesting one I’ve talked about a bit in interviews and comments on the blog, but never expanded on.  I originally had click-to-move as the walking interface when the game was mouse-only, under the theory the game is supposed to be about behavior, not about not accidentally walking into walls.  Makes perfect sense, right?  But, when I went to add console controller support, I faced a dilemma:  console click-to-move interfaces are always terrible, so should I make it direct-control or not?  I thought about it a little deeper, and realized that when you’re playing a shooter or any other kind of player-skill direct-control action game, after an initial learning phase, you don’t actually think about the movement very much, you just express yourself through the control scheme.  You don’t think, “now I must strafe right, which is the left analog stick”, you just do it; the controls have become transparent.  I realized this actually adds a level of physicality and kinesthetics to the play experience that deepens it.  Because you have to learn to move, the game is deeper, and more about performance.  So, I put direct-control into the console controller interface for SpyParty, and the game got better.  Yes, noobs get shot while they’re learning the controls, but the learning of the controls involves the Spy player observing the NPCs closely and learning how they walk, it involves being able to think fast on the fly and stay calm, it exposed the awesome “play it cool” mechanic, where the Spy needs to be okay with suboptimal positions and not fidget and correct, and it had a whole bunch of other interesting ramifications on the design, much like the Action Test mechanic.  After observing this, I redid the mouse interface to be direct control too!

Finally:

Wonderful asymmetrical gameplay that is very nuanced. Needs polish, obviously, but in the games I played with another judge I had a really fun time.

Not much to say on this one, but I wasn’t sure what level of polish was appropriate for IGF, actually.  In fact, I was slightly surprised SpyParty was nominated for Grand Prize this year, since, let’s face it, the game is nowhere near finished. I figured if it was going to get nominated, it would be for Game Design.  But, any nomination is a huge honor, and if I’d been on the Grand Prize committee I’d have voted for Minecraft myself!

I haven’t decided whether to submit to IGF again.  It seems weird to submit multiple times, especially if you’ve been nominated.  Plus, I’m going to be insane with the Early-Access Beta, so I’ll see how I feel around submission time.

Okay, back to the server grindstone.  My next task is to get the CoSign SSO authn system running in the private beta phpBB to talk to the LDAP directory to get the player’s email address populated correctly. Then, figure out how to create accounts in LDAP from httpd without using the default openssl LDAP crt I’ve registered in the environment because I’ve restricted its LDAP permissions tightly for security, then use this dn to create the Kerberos account, and hook it up to a web form I can use as the endpoint for PayPal confirmed purchases so invited players can actually log on.  Whee, indie games are fun!

Teaser image!

1. More up-to-the-minute opinions here, here, and here.