Come to PAX and play Monaco and SpyParty!
Been waiting to play SpyParty? Convinced your best friend would always pick the Kung Funky dude in the nehru suit when it’s his turn to be the Spy and you want to shoot him before he bugs the Ambassador? Annoyed that all the game journalists have gotten to play it and you haven’t?
Well, now’s your chance! If you can make it to Seattle, WA on September 3rd, 4th, or 5th, 2010, and get to the Penny-Arcade Expo (otherwise known as PAX) and find booth 3004, you can play Monaco and SpyParty until the person behind you in the queue kicks you off the controller! No pushing in line!
Andy Schatz, the awesome indie game developer behind the awesome indie game Monaco (and winner of this year’s Independent Game Festival, that’s Andy there on the logo at that link!), and I have gone temporarily insane and gone in on a booth together at PAX, so gamers can come playtest Monaco and SpyParty themselves! Don’t take the press’s word for it, decide if you think the games are as awesome as they claim for yourself!
Monaco is a super fun stealth heist game with a lot of similarities to SpyParty, so they’re the perfect booth buddies! The two games are not only developed by solitary guys toiling away in their artist garrets as games should be made, but they also have very similar aesthetics and fictional themes, since old heist movies and spy and mystery movies are all close siblings stylistically, and both have awesome multiplayer.
We’re going to set up a nice comfortable space at PAX to play the games with your friends (or enemies), and we’re both rolling out a bunch of new features at PAX that nobody else will have played.
Jordan Devore at Destructoid wrote up a great piece about our decision to get the booth, and our preparations! Check it out!
Wow, Anthony Burch, ex-dtoid writer, now at Gearbox, just updated the HAWP blog with this super-kind post. Quote:
In honesty, I would not be surprised if SpyParty and Monaco were the best games being shown at the entire Penny Arcade Expo.
Yowza!
Here’s the map of the show floor where we are located, and you can see there are a bunch of other well-known indies in the immediate vicinity:
Monaco & SpyParty at PAX 2010
I’ll be posting more about what’s new for SpyParty for the PAX build of the game, as I’ve started with this post on the new “bookshelf mission”.
For now, please spread the word, tell your friends, become fans on Facebook (Monaco, SpyParty), and follow us on Twitter (Monaco, SpyParty)!
Indie games live and die based on word-of-mouth, so if you think the games are cool and want to support indie game development, do your part!
Thanks!
So jealous. I live in the eastern US. Washington won’t happen for me. :(
PAX East next year, maybe!
Definitely. I would so travel for that.
At least your in the same country, I have to come all the way over from Amsterdam :'(
I’m even more jealous, I’m on the wrong continent!
I hope it all goes well over there, cant wait to play it myself
Now I’m sorry I’ll be missing PAX Prime. But you should totally come to PAX East too. Last year’s PAX East had a huge indie presence.
So, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it. But take lots of pictures/videos!!
Like Darius, I am suddenly disappointed to miss PAX West. Knock ’em dead!
P.S. I hope you meant garret and not garrote.
Clearly you are not willing to suffer enough for your art. Plus, you’re just trying to astroturf Thief, obv.
Loved the gamasutra article on your prep for the show. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to make it over the bridge to the show, but your booth will be one of the first I visit if I’m there. Good luck!
Hey Chris, I was reading the “Monaco And SpyParty, On The Road To PAX” Gamasutra featured article and read the part about how you are “going to print up and photocopy a one-sheet with directions on how to play, and hope that people read it so he doesn’t lose his voice in the first hour of the first day.” — In response to that, my gut instinct is that players never read: they like to experience, usually visually. If you want a real solution to this problem, then you should probably print a really flashy-looking poster with the basic steps of gameplay listed (1. do this 2. do that 3. win!). Make this poster big, attractive, use lots of pictures and minimal text and it could prove to be both an advertisement as well as a way to get players understanding your game… If you do this right, I would expect it to work infinitely better than something that players need to /read/.