Jonathan Blow has finally started up the development blog for The Witness, his new game post-Braid, and he’s currently talking about the rendering technology and aesthetic he’s working towards.  Jonathan and I often do “Indie Game Work Days” together (which we steadfastly refuse to call “coworking days”), where I’ll work on SpyParty and he’ll work on The Witness, and once my daughter Clementine was along for the ride and ended up “playtesting” The Witness for a bit.  She has playtested in-development software before—mostly the Spore Creature Creator—but this was her first time using a full 3D mouse-look interface.  She picked it up pretty quickly and had a great time moving around the island.  Now that he’s revealed some prototype screenshots, I can post these pictures I’ve been sitting on.

I actually think she’s trying to get her fingers on the WASD keys correctly on Jonathan’s krazy keyboard in this shot.  Also notice how Jonathan’s monitor is larger than my six-year-old.

Hmm, I just noticed she seems to be using the index finger instead of the middle finger for W, which is clearly an unacceptible technique, but now she’s moving, and note the look of intense concetration that is the hallmark of a Jonathan Blow game!

Technically, even though this post is getting published in February, I started writing it in January, 2010, so I think saying “Happy New Year!” still counts for something…

2010 is going to be the first full year of development on SpyParty, and I’m pretty excited about the progress so far.  The official Goal for the Year™ is to figure out if the core gameplay is as cool and compelling as I hope it will be based on the thinking and brainstorming I’ve done over the years.  Will I be able to achieve my design goals of making a truly deep and replayable game about subtle human behavior?  I have no idea, but this year I plan to find out.  The problem with making a game that is truly different is you can’t say with any confidence whether it will work at all.  Scary!  I think the old Albert Einstein quote is in order:

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

There are a lot of philosophical themes I’m hoping SpyParty will touch on (using interactivity, not narrative or cut scenes, of course!) that I’ll go into in more detail the future, but from a pure design process standpoint, I’m following two basic tenets:

1. Make the deep and hardcore game first, and make it accessible later in development. I’m ripping this off directly from a 2006 speech by Rob Pardo, the Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard, about how they design games for the long term.  Here’s a great quote from the Gamasutra writeup:  “First we try to come up with what are really cool things, things that will get people to play for two to three years. Then we actually start talking about accessibility, how to make the content approachable and easy to learn. But it starts with depth first.” As I said in a recent interview, I wish we had taken this approach on Spore, and developed a super consequential core game to go with the awesomely deep editors, and then worried about making it accessible. There are probably a lot of different ways to make good games, so I don’t know if this one is the best, but it feels right for SpyParty because I want to have a core game that’s highly focused on player skill (mind you, not the same player skills as most games, but skills like perception, deduction, distraction, performance, and subterfuge).
2. Playtest early and often. The game is years away from shipping, but I’m already playtesting the super-duper-incredibly-ugly-and-crufty-early-prototype multiple times a week with friends and colleagues.  These started out as truly painful sessions, where I basically couldn’t get people to play with me without bribing them with free lunch or chocolate chip cookies, but I recently had a playtest with a bunch of friends from EA, Maxis, and Zynga, and they played the game for 4 hours straight, until 1am, which blew me away.  They were having a good time, giving tons of great feedback, really competing with each other in the game, and developing strategies and counter-strategies.  The playtesters ranged from people who never played “core games” to hardcore gamer min-maxers, and the results were promising.  The newbie players would always get owned by the experienced players (where “experienced” means “played a few more games that evening”), which is right where the game wants to be at this point in development.   It’s relatively simple to make the game easier and accessible for new players by tuning and matchmaking, but making a game that doesn’t have that skill component into a player skill game doesn’t work.  I was surprised how well the playtest went, and was slightly giddy, to be honest.  I’ll post more thoughts about this later.

I will leave you with two images that are pretty inspirational for SpyParty (no, not the highly questionable image of Peter Sellers in blackface playing an Indian gentleman, that’s cringe-worthy at best, yikes!):

I’ll write more about these images soon.

Will sent me a funny article the other day that is somewhat literally related to SpyParty.  Here are some choice snippets:

Britain’s Spies Plan to Party Like 007 When MI-6 Turns 1-0-0

Guest List and Menu for Its Black-Tie Fete Are Hush-Hush, but Spooks Must Go Dutch

By STEPHEN FIDLER

LONDON — In the Hollywood version of the British foreign intelligence agency known as MI6, elegant black-tie affairs are all part of a night’s work for super spy James Bond. When his real-life counterparts don their tuxedos later this year for an elegant celebration of the MI6’s 100th anniversary, they are being told to pay their own way.

The true life version of MI6 has always been less opulent than its fictional counterpart. But in the midst of a deep recession, when British bankers and members of Parliament are being publicly pilloried for extravagance, the spy agency’s chiefs have decided that British taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pick up the tab.

The espionage ball, nonetheless, will almost by definition be one of the most remarkable and exclusive of 2009. Along with a host of spies past and present, a carefully screened guest list includes, according to people familiar with the arrangements, the great and powerful of the U.K., from members of the royal family to leading politicians.

Yet while MI6 is tripping the light fantastic, its sister organization — MI5, responsible for domestic intelligence — is celebrating its own centenary more soberly.

…

Some people in Britain’s tightknit intelligence community grumble that, even though the agency has done its best to keep the event under wraps, it is not appropriate for MI6 to be holding balls.

“It’s a secret service, for God’s sake,” said one individual familiar with the plans.

…

The rest of the event is shrouded in, well, secrecy. According to people familiar with the matter, the party has been planned for a secure location well fortified against gatecrashers. One person says musical entertainment from more than one band, dinner and dancing are planned. “C” himself signed off on the menu, this person says.

…

For much of their history, MI5 was the Cinderella organization compared with its more glamorous sister: MI6 officers were said to regard their counterparts as plodding bureaucrats. That may have changed now. But Cinderella or not, it’s still MI6 that gets to go to the ball.

I love the idea of the feuding spy organizations.  MI5 has its own new hipster TV show, so maybe they’re feeling better about themselves now.

Spies—at least, fictional spies—are unquestionably cool.

Bond, James Bond

Even spies who aren’t quite at the pinnacle of awesomeness, where our friend James here hangs out, are still pretty cool and interesting.

Over the development of SpyParty I’ve gathered some visual references for various spies, detectives, and similar mysterious characters. It’s neat to see the diverse range of archetypes you can have in this genre…from goofy to creepy, old to young, beautiful to homely, men and women, different races, countries of origin…

Here’s a sampling of the images…

Continue reading ‘Spies Are Cool’ »

Well, this site is going public a little ahead of schedule, but I will try to make the best of it!

This is the website for SpyParty, a very different multiplayer espionage game in development by me, Chris Hecker, and due for release at some point in the future when it’s awesome.  It’s currently a very raw prototype with temporary artwork, temporary UI, and temporary code, but there is unique and interesting gameplay already, so I’m optimistic it will attain awesomeness before the heat death of the universe.

You can read some early press coverage of a public demo of the game on the About page, and I will post more details soon (when I dig myself out from under all the the GDC submissions).  If you want to keep abreast of SpyParty development, subscribe to the RSS Feed, and I will also get an announcement mailing list started soon.

At a high level, the game is about giving you less of this:

…while giving you more of this:

In the meantime, here’s a screenshot of the prototype: