Deductive Depth Jamming, Beta Balance, and Megabuild Todo List
I was killed.
Wow, I have been busy, and the Early-Access Beta todo items are piling up! I will just get right to talking about stuff, no introduction necessary!
The Depth Jam and Deduction
Recently, a small group of us did an intensive game design retreat we called the Depth Jam, during which I dug into the deductivity of the Sniper gameplay. I want there to be some deductivity on the Sniper side, so the player has some method or process he or she can step through to eliminate suspects and not just completely drown in information, but I don’t want you to be able to completely grind out who the Spy is by a series of rote operations, like in a game of Clue. Since one of the aesthetic themes for SpyParty is about “making consequential decisions with partial information”, it’s very important that the Sniper not be able be 100% sure of the Spy’s identity, unless the Spy screws up and the Sniper sees a hard tell. There are a lot of places where deductivity comes into play for the Sniper, but an important one is the highlight/lowlight mechanic.
If you’ve read the documentation, you know that the Sniper can highlight and lowlight people at the party to manage levels of suspicion. This is purely a Sniper-side mechanic: the Spy doesn’t know for sure which characters are being tagged in this way or how, except that the Sniper’s laser has to hit the character to tag them, and this is visible to the Spy. The current version of this mechanic has two levels of highlight above neutral, and two levels of lowlight below neutral. The original intent was that you’d want to vary the amount of suspicion or lack thereof based on how the party is progressing, and for the most part, this worked. However, gamers are very good at optimizing things, and soon one of the elite players realized he could use these five levels as a 5-counter, using both the highlights and lowlights to count total number of visits to the statues and bookcases. Depending on the missions selected for the game, this Sniper would have a pretty good idea of who had to be the Spy.
From a game design standoint, this kind of player behavior is a delicate thing to direct in a player-skill game. Should the game help the Sniper do this bookkeeping because the player is going to want to do it anyway? Or, does the existence of multiple levels actually encourage this kind of bookkeeping? Should I nerf the mechanic, or just make the NPCs go to the statues more often so the bookkeeping is less relevant? It’s very hard to know the answers to these questions, but after thinking about it for a while, and talking to the elite players, I decided I needed to deal with this in a few different ways, and it will be an ongoing iterative design challenge:
- I proposed nerfing the Sniper’s mechanic to a single level of highlight and a single level of lowlight. Snipers could still use this as a 3-counter, but that’s less valuable, and each individual highlight or lowlight becomes more consequential. On the flip side, it removes the cognitive load associated with trying to figure out if you’re going to single- or double-highlight, which is subtle but significant. It’s also a lot cleaner controls-wise. This was the first real nerf, and the beta community responded well to the idea. There was some grumbling, but players posted thoughtful critiques and analyses of how they thought they’d be affected. I realized I was going to have to test this thoroughly, but it was easy to isolate and I chose it as my question for the Depth Jam.
- I decided against changing the NPC behavior in the short term, but in the long term, instead of simply increasing the probability that NPCs will visit the statues (for example), I might make it so some NPCs end up going to the statues a minimum number of times. However, either of these is a very complex change, because if an NPC is at a statue, it means they’re not at a bookshelf or in a conversation, so the entire flow of the party will change. This is a very nonlinear change, and it’s hard to predict what will happen.
- I can also change the missions that require the Spy to be in “deductivity-susceptible situations”. Keeping with the statue example, at the Depth Jam we ended up modifying the Inspect Statues mission so that instead of requiring three visits to the statues, the Spy could also inspect the neighboring statues if they’re not being held by and NPC. This allows the Spy to trade off duration and number of visits, and requires Snipers to have a feeling for both these quantities. There’s also a discount on the amount of time it takes to inspect each additional statue in a single visit, so you’re encouraged to inspect more than one. Finally, it makes the middle pedestal the most valuable statue to visit, because it allows the Spy to inspect either side, so characters going to the middle statue are a bit more suspicious. I love these tradeoffs, and these changes felt great when we tested them.
To give you an idea of how we went about testing this stuff at the Depth Jam, here is a screenshot of a special build we played. In it, I had the computer automatically increment two counters over the characters’s heads, one for statue visits, and one for bookcase visits, so the Sniper didn’t even need to click. This was never something I’d release to players, but I wanted to see how the game felt if the deductivity was “turned to 11”. Especially before the Inspect Statues changes, you could definitely just shoot (or at least watch) the person with the highest numbers.
Shoot Danger P. Johnson, he's got the highest numbers! Except he's the Ambassador.
I’m very happy with both the single level of highlight/lowlight and the Inspect Statues changes, and they’re going to roll out in the next build.
Beta Balance
I haven’t run detailed metrics yet, since I’m scrambling just to keep things humming along for players, but I did get curious about whether the game is even roughly balanced right now. Qualitively, I’ve been surprised by the seeming consensus in the private beta forums that the Sniper is the harder side to play. In the private testing I did with Ian and Paul, it seemed like at elite levels the Sniper had the advantage, but I wasn’t seeing people complaining about this, which I found interesting. Even more surprising was that players had settled on Pick 4 of 5 Missions on Ballroom as the balanced game mode. Back in the day, Pick 3 of 4 Missions on Ballroom was considered balanced, and even then we were worried about a Sniper advantage at elite levels.
Because SpyParty is so intensely player-skill oriented, I’ve implemented a number of game types so players can handicap matches to make up for skill differences. You can tune the Spy’s difficulty by choosing modes with more or less missions to accomplish, and giving the Sniper more or less information about which missions will be enabled. Some modes allow the Spy to complete any small subset of the missions chosen opportunistically while playing. Other modes require the Spy to divulge exactly which missions he or she will attempt. A large skill gap in favor of the Spy can be handicapped by choosing “6 Known Missions”, where choosing “Any 3 of 6” makes up for a lot of skill on the Sniper side.
Pick 4 of 5 is significantly harder for the Spy than Pick 3 of 4,1 yet people were playing it as the default mode once they graduated from Beginner Ballroom, so I decided to run some quick numbers.
The first thing I did was looked at the results of all games ever played in the beta. There are four possible outcomes of a game of SpyParty: the Spy can accomplish the missions, the Spy can run out of time, the Sniper can shoot the Spy, or the Sniper can shoot a civilian. We call the first and the last a Spy Win, and the middle two a Sniper Win. The results were even more balanced than I thought they’d be!
Total Games: 13238, SpyWins: 6494 (49.1%), SniperWins: 6744 (50.9%)
Whoa.
Okay, so this is great, but it’s pretty silly, since this includes every newbie game, every game where somebody said “shoot me because I’m stuck on the briefcase”, and the like. So, next I decided to look just at the elite games. I defined “elite game” as one played between the people on the leaderboard with more than 20 hours of game time.2 That part of the leaderboard looks like this:
The top 8 players on the leaderboard by time.
I did a few different queries here. First, all games these guys played in the last three weeks:
Total Games: 1794, SpyWins: 826 (46%), SniperWins: 968 (54%)
This includes teaching games, which these guys do a lot because they’re awesome, and everything else, so then I narrowed it to all games they played versus each other in the last three weeks, so these are the most advanced games going on in SpyParty right now…and these guys are very good…I know this because they beat me routinely:
Total Games: 266, SpyWins: 128 (48.1%), SniperWins: 138 (51.9%)
Wow, again, that’s just incredibly balanced!? I couldn’t believe it when I ran these numbers, but I’m super happy with them, and it goes a long way towards explaining why buxx said this to me in chat:
checker: "so, you've played 43 hours or whatever, do you feel like there's a ceiling for you yet, or still going strong?" buxx: "Skillwise, not even close, I still feel like I have a ton of room for improvement"
I just feel incredibly lucky to have a game this deep, this early in its development. I’m so excited to take it even farther…people in competitive game design talk about “300 hour” games, and games like Go and Poker can be played for a lifetime. I hope to take SpyParty to those levels, or as close to them as I can get.
Finally, I looked at these players versus each other at a finer grain. I’ll just post some rough numbers for buxx and ardonite, because they’re an interesting contrast:
| As Spy | As Sniper | |||||
| Total Games | Wins | Win% | Total Games | Wins | Win% | |
| buxx | 32 | 23 | 71.88% | 34 | 20 | 58.82% |
| ardonite | 24 | 12 | 50.00% | 22 | 14 | 63.64% |
buxx is the top player right now, and he wins most of the time even against the other elite players, but especially as Spy. ardonite also wins over half the time against the elites, but moreso as Sniper.
I can’t wait to delve into the metrics more in the future.
Todo
Due to the Depth Jam and other distractions, the todo list has been building for weeks. I’m finally cranking through it, but I’ve dubbed this next build the “megabuild” because of all the stuff I’m shoving into it. This is not the right way to develop software. You should do more small releases, so you can test and isolate bugs, but I’m kind of on a roll and don’t want to slow down to make a build until I get some more stuff fixed. I won’t do this entire giant list before releasing, but I will do a couple more days worth of work. I’m afraid there are going to be bugs due to the number of changes, so it’s really the build after the megabuild that is going to be totally awesome!
- misc
added matches and total match time to leaderboardsalpha punchthrough for binocs and timed text…draw afterkill “sleep too long” log messageput graphics and cpuid info in log, at least glextpack cpuid into string in journal toodon’t make duplicate logins delete cache and crash, stupid and annoyinghittest laser to world for marking, except for window muntin barsmission text in practice sniper mode buggyterrible lowercase in username entry on login pages/affordance/action/g in codehighlight/lowlight nerfctrl/shoulder slam all the way to highlight/lowlighthysteresis on actionsif it’s present in the current batch, set the index (unless it’s been manually set)if it’s not present, grey it out and fade it awaythis needs a lot of testing, it was a complex change- clean up timeouts, wins, blah text everywhere in game
- remove debug_state_transitions
- check for pdf file association in setup program
- need network test during greeting
- invite beep in practice mode?
- don’t hide mouse during sniper menus
- put stats on match menu
- mouse sensitivity config prop and readme.txt
- do in-game update with a popup window instead of modal!
sell subliminal advertising in the crowd walla- endgame and results
- not top suspects, just high/lowlights, filtering down cast
- escape confirmation on results screen with settings
- can take out the eat stuff and timer
- make Last Results on the match menu? possible?
- test invite cancel
- OT confirmation, OT happens on sniper machine for a second
- output game result into log
- shoot after timer runout still records shot person
- Shot person on sniper screen but not on Spy screen
- escape from invite to game needs confirmation?
- if sniper escapes while spy is waiting for results, game doesn’t end
- need to record actions for spy when ai before control
- briefcase
make briefcase a heavy pathing weight, not infinitebriefcase making characters float off ground- moving while putting down briefcase
- stuck in COURIER_WAITING_FOR_SCIENTIST_HOLDING when ambassador has a book…not moving
- need to put down the briefcase when the timer runs out!
- dispose is broken, courier won’t put it down!
- add pauses
- conversations
fix interruption stuff to occasionally finish talk animation- people in convo circles by themselves can read book until somebody else comes
- hmm, one frame of Read Book action, and immune to pause?
- ahh, the listen stomps it, need some kind of “interruptable” flag on anim, or priority
- can interrupt while taking drink…need to block
- people need to leave during listen idles?
- people going through middle of convo circles?
- double agent
- fake bbread not available when selected but not enabled
- banana bread double agent signal…if da leaves while action testing converts to fake
- need to have DA check to see if spy is action testing, and not leave convo if so
- how to do override in double_agent.cpp?
- double agent won’t go into circle during last minute – guarantee in last 30 seconds?
- fake banana bread is default option over flirt
- drink over conversation
- need to have cancel behavior on bbread
- okay – what to do here? person starting to talk is enough? short cough?
- bad – cough as walk away
- statue
new inspect statues design, can inspect statues next to you if not heldfinish drink at or take briefcase to pedestal like bookcasesplay sound when teleporting statue back, sorry ardonite!- swap wrong statue when between pedestals – /tmp/fraps
- two people pick up same statue
- bad statue action test is fastest, make it delay, or flicker longer
- statue swap cancel makes it disappear
- statue swap bad action test needs timer before swap happens
- maybe bad swap doesn’t actually swap, it toggles it and back?
- or, statue swap is too hard already so don’t make it worse?
- good swap statue action test
- need to prevent run out of time between good action test and swap?
- its obvious to elite snipers, worse than hiding body…
- make it swap when somebody else picks it up? too powerful?
- make it instantly warp, not alpha
- more than 5 seconds? cheesy way of buying time then…
- bug ambassador
while watch check is happening, walking bug amb is not blocked- ability to bug holding book in one hand
- bookcase
fix bookcase pileup – do vertical expanded shapeAIs wait a bit more randomly before leaving bookshelves- marking book on shelf doesn’t record character because not attached yet
- do I want to support this even? have all books be grey on sniper?
- change put book and get book to have start/end events too
- idles in book watch animations, mix it up a bit
- second book page turn? or just use the idle for a time?
- make cycling books unified, right – blue, left – green, add red as double click, then grey
- bookcases vary in color per map…need to standardize and make maya prop type
- seduction at paintings
- chat
- window size, pos, borderless, maximized through chat commands
- add @ with username completion in chat
- color code names in chat
- kill “bogger says:” in single line chat copy
- history when typing chat line
- add crlf to chat copy so notepad works
- crash on non-text data in clipboard
- hitting escape kills the chat message you’re typing
- make it clear the first whisper went through even if got the away message
- packet loss test on console
- can’t run /fps command even without connection…but can do practice in lobby
- manual & readme
- put the latest manual images up, readme, etc
- s/noob/newb/ in manual…ugh
- documentation change to security agent
- remove y button
- inspect statues
- highlight/lowlight levels and controls
- add note about SpyPartyHelper.exe to the readme
- note lag is only on sniper side
- buxx feels watch check is underutilized…
- add more time?
- at paintings? in conversations while by yourself?
- watch check with book
- cancelling watch check needs failure or is animation tell enough?
- zerotka list of helpful things for research
- unlimited game time endless practice mode
- ability to see all floor pads in sniper view
- books come out same color as shelf
- Seduction Target in sniper view
- inability to complete missions or way to clear them
- no back walls in Ballroom as sniper ( or transparent if that’s easier?) ( aka, i want to be able to see in from all angles)
- camera track be a complete circle all the way around the ballroom.
- bugs
- intel problems
- lobby message box bad z
- key and mouse button drops due to shit framerate
- fix the rare junked game bug
- put more debugging code into the drinks.cpp coreanim crash
- store things to locals to see, do memory readable check on coreanimation
- phatjax crash in stun code, assert in log first
- 0.1.1983.0-phatjax-7cs4v-e9SBihV1znwyvuFw.7z
- lobbyserver leak – use backtrace
- inviting phatjax after cancelled invite gives assert
- assert !”what do to here?”, File: .\examples\lobby\lobbyclient.cpp, Line: 1798
- fix DTScale behaviors, briefcase, waiter, have game clock
- Pick modes require the Spy to choose which missions to accomplish before the game starts, while Any modes let the Spy opportunistically choose during play. [↩]
- Important note: this is actual game playing time, not time spent in the matches overall, or time in the lobby, both of which are way higher than this. A lot of people like to hang out and chat in the lobby! [↩]
Holy mother of god.
Cool! A blog post!
It’s always nice to read about the immense consideration you put into every aspect of your game, it’s very inspiring actually! Plus the fact, that I, as a not-yet-invited, devour all the info I can get about the game. :)
Now some thoughts/questions:
The “problem” with using the high-/lowlight as a 5-counter puzzles me. Not that I don’t understand its use, but I’m surprised that counting the times a person visits the bookshelves and statues can positively ID them as the Spy. It seems to me that the Spy only needs one visit to a statue and one to each bookcase to do the Swap and Transfer missions? With exceptions, of course, like if the Sniper’s laser is on you, or if you step away from a bookshelf to remove the microfilm. And now, if the Inspect Statues mission can be done in one visit to a middle statue as well, then… Well, I realize this paragraph ended up sounding like a rant, but I assure you it’s not! I’m just curious. :)
And, how come your statistics shows that the Sniper wins more often than the Spy, when the players say that the Sniper is the harder side to play? Again, haven’t played yet, but the Sniper always struck me as – I hesitate to say easier, cause I’m going to regret that – the side with the advantage. I don’t know. But do you accredit that to a psychological thing?
How cool is it that the best player still believes that he can be so much better! (Sorry, not a question, just so cool!)
While I think that many of zerotka’s points on your Todo-list seems to benefit the Sniper a tad too much, I actually always wondered why the Seduction Target wasn’t on the Sniper View. I realize that it could be too much information, or even unfair to the Spy that the Sniper knows one more person not to be the Spy (akin to Ambassodor and Suspected Double Agents). But to me the mission just seems SO hard to detect, and a known target could be the way to balance it?
Lastly, I just want to say keep up the good work. As I said, it’s inspiring, and I can’t tell you how much I’ve been waiting for a game like this. :)
Regards
Rune
Oh, by the way: I realize you’ve been withholding my invite since you knew I was busy with work, but good news: I’ve been laid off. So the invite is safe to send now. ;)
The Inspect Statues mission required three separate trips back to the statues, which was a huge tell.
There are a lot of factors that go into one role winning…maybe they over-handicapped because they thought it was harder, maybe they played more games against worse players, etc. It’s hard to draw exact conclusions, I was more just trying to get a feel for what was happening in the wild.
Oh, and zero’s request list is for his NPC research in practice mode, not to be exposed to the Sniper in real gameplay! :)
Sorry to hear about your layoff! I was layed off, and SpyParty came out of it, so maybe this is the beginning of something great for you too!
“how come your statistics shows that the Sniper wins more often than the Spy, when the players say that the Sniper is the harder side to play?”
Call me vain (It’s probably true!), but I suspect that’s because Checker did analysis on a fairly small sample size: 8 people. I have 16.5 hours of gameplay, and while that’s not quite the 20 hours Checker was looking at, my results are a little different: total spy wins 112/177 (63.3% win), total sniper games 63/180 (35% win).
I haven’t crunched the numbers of anyone else that is in the “not quite 20 hour but close” tier (since doing it by hand is a lot of work), but I wouldn’t be surprised if other people have similar results. (One other thing to mention is that my “real” win percent as sniper is lower, as I’d say at least 20 of those wins were against someone of much lower skill level / someone I was mentoring)
It’s a funny thing how sniper vs spy works. Snipers completely set the tone of the match. Snipers are the ‘bars’ that say “okay, this is the bare minimum you need to know unless you want to get caught”. For example, if you set an excellent spy vs a mediocre sniper, then the spy doesn’t have to worry about ‘advanced’ tells such as walking through the middle of conversation circles. I mean, there’s no use for the spy to avoid walking through the middle if the sniper doesn’t know about it. It’s just wasted knowledge.
If you have excellent sniper vs mediocre spy, then spy will die most of the time until they learn all the advance tells and learns to avoid doing them. A sniper who knows about the middle of the conversation circles can always use that as a tell regardless of how skilled the spy is. Therefore no wasted knowledge.
So as snipers become smarter, they’ll start killing spys for it, and the spys go “why did you shoot me?”. The snipers relay the information and the spys will become smarter. Then it’s an ‘even’ playing field. Since it’s so early in the beta, i think the stats will skew toward the sniper side for quite some time. People are constantly learning and ‘training’ spys about tells that kill them.
Plus, i think spy mistakes are less forgiving then a sniper mistake and as humans, we definitely make mistakes.
Eventually, after x years and skills have sort of plateaued, i think spys will have the advantage vs snipers. But that’s x years away, a lot changes from now and then.
From a strategy standpoint, yeah, they kind of balance each other. But from a required skill standpoint… I find it significantly less work to improve as a spy vs as a sniper – as a spy, you just need to adjust how you do things. As a sniper… you really need to improve a less quantifiable skill.
“Shoot me because I’m stuck on the briefcase” is the single saddest thing I have ever heard anyone say.
For comparison with your balance statistics: in chess, White’s advantage over Black is about 55-45. (There are lots of draws in there, which count as half a point each, so the proportion of wins is a lot higher than 55%.) The asymmetry is actually rather interesting; it’s kind of cool that White starts out having to prove his advantage (or give up 5% of a virtual point), and that a Black win is an upset even if it’s of minor proportions. Of course having draws in there changes the dynamic a lot. Anyway, if you can keep your balance within even 60-40 (and make sure that everyone has equal chances to play both sides) I think you are doing fine.
Good point about the advantage asymmetry being a “feature”, except with SpyParty, the two roles are already asymmetric from a gameplay standpoint, and I want players to be able specialize (“I only play Sniper”, etc.) if they want after they’re beyond a certain level, so I think it’s important to keep the sides pretty evenly matched so those players don’t think they’re making a bad choice.
How does having draws change things in chess? Are there high level overview articles anywhere about this stuff?
From a very nonscientific standpoint, stalemates in chess are often pretty satisfying in a weird way. Whether it was inevitable or you did it to avoid losing, it’s still very much a part of the game.
I’ve been playing a lot of Tribes Ascend lately (it’s a capture the flag FPS). I’ve played many, many rounds of it. And only ever seen one stalemate (where even after overtime, it was tied). It was so unusual (and satisfying), I took a screenshot of it.
I think it’s something that would definitely be interesting in spyparty, but I can’t think of any way there could really be a draw.
*interesting to experiment with*
It hadn’t occurred to me that you’re not going to require players to play the two roles equally. That’s going to make things really tough on your rating system. I think you will at least want to have some sort of automatch mode which will try to keep the number of times you play each role fairly balanced over history and match you up against people of similar skill (and also handicap the match appropriately). The good chess and go servers do this. If some players don’t want to use the automatch system, fine.
The existence of the draw has a zillion repercussions in chess. You could easily imagine a draw-less game in which being stalemated (it’s your move but you are unable to make a legal move) is a loss rather than a draw. (You’d also have to stop players from repeating positions endlessly, which is the other way to make a draw.) Or maybe being reduced to having just a king is a loss too. In those cases King + Pawn vs King would be always a win for the player with the pawn rather than a win around half the time. Since KPvK is the most elementary endgame that almost everything reduces to, this effect would bubble up and end up having a large effect even in the middlegame (where the defending player might want to make a simplifying combination that sends the game into a drawish endgame).
As it is, you can find yourself in a pretty bad position where you have, say, a 50% chance of losing, a 45% chance of drawing (because you can ultimately navigate towards that stalemate), and a 5% chance of winning (due to your opponent blundering). This is a giant difference from having a 95% chance of losing and a 5% chance of winning. It is a real skill to hunker down and spend hours defending a sorry position in the hope of grinding out half a point.
It also creates a situation where, especially at the top levels, generally White is playing for a win but Black is playing for a draw (unless an opportunity presents itself). Sometimes, due to tournament situations or what have you, both players are effectively playing for a draw, which kind of sucks.
The higher the skill of the players, the more frequent draws are, because they can both see everything coming and fight their opponent off to a (figurative) stalemate. For example, the world championship match that just concluded had 13 draws out of 16 games.
One last fun thing about draws is that players can agree to them instead of playing the game all the way out to stalemate (or repeating positions 3 times). Sometimes this has annoying consequences, like two grandmasters both deciding that they only need half a point and agreeing to a draw after ten minutes. Sometimes it’s kind of fun. You can totally make tactical draw offers. Say you have a good position against me, but you have less time left than me and I have a higher rating than you, so you’re pretty nervous. I might offer a draw, in which case either a) you accept and I get half a point instead of my expected value of .4 or something, or b) you decline, and then get nervous about having to prove that you made the right decision, making it more likely that you’ll make a mistake and lose. It’s win-win for me!
Yeah, I’m probably going to track Spy and Sniper wins separately for ranking, actually, or maybe those two and combined, since all three will be different. I’m also going to have some kind of “mentor ranking” that I haven’t figured out yet, that will show how good people are as mentors.
“I’m finally cranking through it, but I’ve dubbed this next build the “megabuild” because of all the stuff I’m shoving into it. This is not the right way to develop software. You should do more small releases, so you can test and isolate bugs,” Hooray, a game-dev who gets software best practices!
“but I’m kind of on a roll and don’t want to slow down to make a build” Boo! You should be able to build in one step. Distributing that build should also be one step. :/
Oh, there’s a script that builds the versioned setup exe, auto-update packages, uploads them to aws, the lobby automatically detects them, tells the clients, they auto-update before they’re allowed to play more, etc.
That’s the trivial part of making a build.
The hard part of making a build is testing it, writing the release notes, going online to make sure it’s solid, answering questions in the lobby and the forums, and all the other soft social things that players actually care about.
Ahh, that’s what I’d call a release… http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Release-Management-Done-Right.aspx
Certainly there’s a hell of a lot more involved there. Apologies for the misunderstanding.
No problem, yeah I’d usually call it a release build, but I’m not too formal about it.
A massive blog post! Nice to see how things are progressing. I love reading about how simple design decisions such as high/lowlighting need to have so much thought put into them when unintended features emerge thanks to player ingenuity. It’s like you’re playing a game against (or perhaps with) the hivemind.
Perhaps you don’t need more inspiration, just implementation, but if you want to check out how to walk a fine line between deduction and gut feelings/tacit knowledge, you will find much in the world of board games. The obvious choice is poker, but that’s not about teams now is it? In Werewolf games with more than just a couple of roles it becomes more of a game of deduction, though still far away from cluedo. The card games “coach ride to devils castle” and “shadow hunters” are also about deduction and figuring out of roles.
Thanks, I’ll check those out. Poker is the big inspiration for some of this. I started thinking I was trying to make Go, but realized I ended up making Poker. Both are awesome, so I’m fine with that!
“- sell subliminal advertising in the crowd walla”
Crap, forgot to check that one off, thanks for the reminder.
Dangit, I was coming to make the same exact comment as Marc and he beat me to it – awesome. I cannot wait to start playing this game – there is so much hard work put into it that it’s going to take a lot of gameplay hours to appreciate all of the little things. Can’t freaking wait. The only question I had that wasn’t answered by this post is what % of those that signed up for the Beta have been sent allowances… last I remember the total sign-ups was at about 14-15k but the number of allowances was around maybe 1-2k? I’m curious to know what those updated numbers are.
Total signups are at 13477 as of this comment. Not sure how many I’ve invited in, but it’s over a thousand and less than two.
I just signed up and it looks like it will take awhile before I get to play. I hope you are able to accelerate the number and pace of invitations soon :)
Yep, that’s the plan!
Checker, how do you deal with the hordes of people asking you to sent more invites? Sounds pretty tough on you.
I think digging ditches is tough and deserves some empathy; having people excited enough about your game to ask you about playing it is not tough. :)
Great Post Chris!
I am looking forward to your new build although, relearning the nuances of your AI behavior each time you make a change is getting difficult for my limited mental capacity.
Yeah, that’s a bummer about these kinds of changes, but I don’t see any way around it!
I don’t care what anyone says, you are bishOP.
I know this kind of stuff is going to be frequent, and i hope i don’t forget to take everything out of my post each time. That’s always a nightmare.
Keep up the good work checkers
Oh come on. I HIT the reply to comment but then failed to enter my e-mail. Upon returning to the page i didn’t correctly reply to the proper place. What is this, like 4 times now? You’d think i’d learn.
Chris, you said that the graphics for now are all placeholders, correct?
Have you considered that the game might get a lot harder for the sniper once graphics were improved? After all, I expect more details to be more distracting, as the sniper would have a lot more to look at. It might change game balance quite a bit…
Yeah, I’m going to have to be careful. That said, it’s still going to be very much about the characters; the environments are going to be very desaturated so the visual focus will be characters and objects associated with actions (statues, bookshelves, drinks, etc.).