Update:  we’ve shown them animating!

I’m super excited because it’s time to introduce the next five new SpyParty characters!

Say “hello” to the new folks!

And here are all ten of the new characters posing for your aesthetic edification! This images looks like a cast photo from a wacky mystery movie, and this is only half of the twenty (!) playable characters we’ll have in the end.1

Half of the SpyParty Cast, Done!

As I’m sure you remember, we’ve chosen what we call a natrualistic and illustrative style for the new SpyParty artwork, and I’m so incredibly happy with how it’s coming out. The characters are varied and diverse, but all feel like they fit into the SpyParty universe. John Cimino, our amazing artist, has outdone himself again, and the work just keeps getting better!

Diversity

Before I introduce each character individually, I want to talk for a second about diversity in SpyParty. I did a long interview with Evan Narcisse over at Kotaku a while back where I talked about the different kinds of diversity I want to explore in the game, including how important a diverse and inclusive community is to me, but for the purposes of this character reveal I want to talk about diversity in the character designs.

I want SpyParty to be “the most diverse game ever”, which is a kind of silly hyperbolic statement, but it is a good guiding principle for us to follow when we’re concepting characters. Less hyperbolically, I would like the characters in SpyParty to represent a wide variety of people who don’t normally appear in video games. This list includes women, minorities, old people, and people with disabilities. Furthermore, I’d like all of these diverse characters to be playable, and have them all be competition-level tuned and balanced, even though they retain their diverse characteristics. By this I mean the elderly woman will walk like an elderly woman—so mostly likely slower than a fit young person—and because of this, a player choosing her as the Spy will have to compensate with better time management for accomplishing missions. However, the design of SpyParty is such that this walk-speed-disadvantage will contribute to the meta of the game, and so players will be less likely to choose her, so she’ll be less suspicious, so they’ll be more likely to choose her, and down the yomi rabbit hole we go! I’m lucky that I’m working with a game design that allows me to explore diversity with no compromises. If I was working on a game with serious space marines in it, it’d be a lot harder to include a playable elderly woman…

The axes of diversity we’re actively exploring with the SpyParty characters are: age, gender, ability, race, and body shape. We’re also addressing sexual orientation, but in the game mechanics themselves, rather than in character design: there’s a mission called Seduce Target, where you can choose who you’re going to seduce, and it allows any combination of characters to seduce one another. It’s not a terribly deep exploration of sexual preferences, but it’s there and it’s real gameplay. There are many other axes worth exploring; one important one we are skipping for now is class/income-level, because I couldn’t figure out a way to address that meaningfully in a game about a high society cocktail party while still keeping the game focused on the core perception and deception skills.

We’re also looking to keep the cast diverse in the sense of the archetypes we include. We definitely acknowledge and embrace some spy and mystery cliches, but we want to tread carefully and push further. Is it okay to have a character in a traditional aristocratic outfit from a country as long as there are others of the same race in more modern business or party attire? I think so, but we need to be careful to not slip into racial stereotypes and harmful cliches.

On a more superficial note, we also look at aesthetic diversity, especially when it comes to the silhouettes of the characters. This is a very inspirational sketch showing the diversity of silhouettes in the Corpse Bride movie:

In SpyParty, the silhouette is incredibly important for instant visual recognition, even when lowlit. The less confusion between characters, the better the Sniper can keep track of suspects. Hats and interesting hair styles are a big part of creating the character’s silhouette, as you can see in the group shots.

The New Characters

Okay, enough generalities, here they are! Remember, these names are all placeholders until we pick real names for them. I think we’ll probably end up involving the community in naming the characters, but it’s not time for that yet. Each character has an interesting fact or anecdote about them, so I’ll introduce them each individually…

Ms. F

We use photo and video reference when we create the characters, because we want a level of naturalism that you can’t really get if you’re just making stuff up out of your head. There are tons of tiny details that give weight and believability to a real person in a real space, and it’s easy to miss them if you don’t have reference. Well, the reference for Ms. F is actually John’s girlfriend Alice! Alice has helped out a bunch in the SpyParty booths at PAX and Evo, training newbies to play the game, and giving them pointers to play better.Here’s a great photo of Alice cosplaying Ms. F…will her appearance in the game change her real life mentoring behavior?

Mr. G

Mr. G is the first character in the new art style who has a direct analog in the old art, so he allows us to do embarrassing before/after shots like this one.

Ms. H

SpyParty characters are made of about 12000 triangles on average. Ms. H’s hair has 23767 triangles in it. Put another way: there are two full characters’ worth of triangles in her hair alone. It’s also rigged, meaning it has a skeleton inside it so it can animate plausibly while she moves her head and talks. It’s worth it to spend so many triangles on her hair because it looks so awesome, and it really makes her silhouette distinct. We actually spent a ton of time during the original character art style development phase working on how hair should look. I think hair simulation usually looks terrible in games (and CG movies), so we wanted something stylized and animatable, but that didn’t need a zillion bones or a special hair system and that fit our illustrative style. This hair technique we settled on, where the hair is kind of “clay-like”, works really well. John can animate parts like ponytails and mustaches, but we aren’t stuck simulating and rendering individual strands, which is expensive and usually looks terrible.Here’s a shot of Ms. H’s hair showing the polygons:

Mr. I

We just added vehicles to SpyParty. Initially Mr. I is going to move around like the other characters, which will probably look terrible since wheelchairs do not move by the same rules that walking people do, but eventually he’ll get a completely custom wheelchair movement system. He’s lower to the ground than the other characters, so he might be a good choice as Spy because he’ll always have good cover, but then again, that makes him suspicious. I think the dot-com billionaire turtleneck snob look is going to get him shot a lot.

Ms. J

Yes, the purse dog is fully animated. Well, it doesn’t have a lower body, but the head is articulated and it can look around and react to what’s happening. I don’t know if people are going to shoot the dog or not. Technically, it’s part of her mesh and skeleton, so you can shoot Ms. J by shooting the dog just like you can shoot any character by shooting them in the hair or in the shoe, so I’d have to add special code to disallow shooting the dog, but on the other hand, I can’t imagine adding a sound effect for shooting the dog, that seems like it’s going too far. There’s a glass breaking sound if you shoot somebody having a drink, so there is precedent for special sound effects… This needs serious design thought, and consultation with an ethics committee.The dog is modeled after Alice’s dog, which may also affect the decisions in this area.Also, Ms. J is drinking a Pimm’s, complete with a cucumber. And didn’t John do a fabulous job with that hat?

Group Shots

Here are some posed conversations with the new and old characters:

Technical Details

One interesting difference between this reveal and the last time is these renders are all of the in-game realtime models, not concept art models with millions of polygons. When we did the first reveal, we hadn’t created the runtime models yet with their posable skeletons, and so we had to pose the million polygon models, which was a giant pain in the butt. We decided never to do that again, since posing the concept models is basically a complete waste of time in terms of developing the game. So, this time we waited to reveal them until we had the full in-game models decimated, textured, and rigged. John’s already animating them and so we’ll reveal their talk animations soon, probably after E3.

There are some non-realtime rendering tricks and a bunch of post-processing on all these shots, but the meshes and textures are the same as appear in the game.  The foam on the beer is totally faked in Photoshop, however.

Since we’re releasing these new characters rendered with the in-game models, let’s also re-release the old set of characters, but this time rendered from their realtime meshes so they match up:

Next Steps

Now that we have 10 new art characters, we can finally make a real playable competition-worthy map, and that’s the goal for PAX 2014. I’ll talk about this in more detail in the near future, but as you probably know, the original 5 characters are in the game now, but it’s more of a technology demo than a playable map since 5 people isn’t enough of a crowd to make a real SpyParty level.  But with 10 characters we can really do something! Currently the existing Balcony level has 7 partygoers, and Ballroom has 13, so we’re going to make a new map that’s between the two sizes, and get it tuned up and even use it to replace Beginner vs Beginner Ballroom as the tutorial map, so when people sit down to play at PAX or in the beta, they’ll be playing the new artwork from the beginning.  Eventually they’ll want to start exploring the other maps, and they’ll find the old art, but hopefully by that point they’ll understand the depth of the game and not care too much about the visuals. That’s the theory, at least.

We can also try replacing Balcony with a new artwork map with 7 partygoers, but that’s a bit of a terrifying prospect given that Balcony is one of the premier competition maps and is very finely tuned. But, it’s gotta happen sometime!

More generally, we have 10 more new characters to do to give us a total of 20 playable partygoers. If you look at that group shot at the top of this post, it’s going to be a very crowded picture.  I think we’re going to have to either widen the image or make some people sit down. Heck, even this this crazy picture of the giant Downton Abbey cast has only 18 characters in it, so imagine an even more crowded cast than that!

Wallpapers

Finally, if you want higher res versions, here are direct links to the 2560×1600 ones.  If you need other aspect ratios, let me know in the comments.

 

1. And that’s not counting the waiter and the security guard, so 22 total, yikes! [↩]

So, we made a trailer last week, which may have inspired beta player jecat to make this awesome SpyParty parody of the famous Dead Island Trailer:

Ye Olde

That long image there to the left is a picture of the current spyparty.com homepage as I write this. As you read this, there will be a new fancy doesn’t-look-like-a-default-WordPress-install homepage. Welcome to the 21st century, spyparty.com!

Plus, to go along with the new homepage design, we made the first SpyParty trailer! More on that below.

The development blog is staying the same old design for a while,1 but I wanted people who came to the site looking for information about or to play SpyParty to be able to find it easily, which was not the case with the old homepage.

So, I went with a design like most indie game websites, with the name, a trailer, a short description, some screenshots, and a “buy button”, all near the top of the page. Of course, since I am…well, let’s just say I’m never at a loss for words…you can keep scrolling and get more information about the game.  I wanted to highlight all the various ways to follow the game and get more info, talk about how cool the community is, call out some of the great quotes from the press, acknowledge that I have no idea when the game will be done but that I will keep making it cooler, and finally talk about John and Keith a bit. Oh, and proudly display the game’s laurels, as required by Indie Game Law.

I wanted to show some of the new art on the page, but also mix in the old art since it’s the art you actually play right now.

Also, there’s finally a link to the beta site login for existing players to find the forums or re-download the game, which has been requested a million times here and elsewhere, except I probably hid the link too well so no one will actually see it. I also think I might make the blog link a little more obvious. I’ve got a way to put a headline near the top of the page for important news, but I also might make a section for the latest headlines from the blog, and maybe even a list of live streams currently playing, kind of like the streams page.

One important goal of the website was to make it fully responsive,2 since apparently these mobile telephones and tablets are a thing now.  I got a bunch of help from the totally awesome Chris Remo with how to implement my design in HTML and CSS and make it use CSS media queries to work on small-ish devices.  You can resize your desktop browser window to see all the dynamic stuff happening as the width shrinks, I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

One thing I’m not happy with is how it appears to be basically impossible to write a javascript lightbox that doesn’t suck.  If you click a screenshot on the homepage (or most places on the blog), the lightbox will pop up.  I’ve used a heavily modified version of Lokesh Dhakar‘s lightbox script for a while, and given my effort to make the page work well on phones, I tried to update the lightbox to do touch interactions seamlessly. Well, as far as I can tell, it is basically impossible to implement a lightbox that does not allow the user to scroll the lightbox off the screen, allows native pinch zoom in the browser (not emulated crappily by javascript), and allows swipe to change images when at the edge or one finger scroll if zoomed in, and is cross browser and degrades gracefully.  Basically, I want a lightbox that acts like a native photo gallery app, but it does not appear to be possible.  I decided native pinch zoom was the most important feature because I’m always frustrated when a mobile site disables it when there are images on the page, so I prioritized that and ended up allowing the lightbox to scroll off the view, which is bad, but was the least worst of all the tradeoffs I found.

The Trailer

As part of this homepage redesign, we finally made a trailer for the game!  Keith did a great job with it. We’ve had trailers for specific features before, like the New Art Trailer, and the Replays Trailer, but never for the game as a whole.  Here it is:

I wanted this trailer to give the flavor of the game, but not explain too much. It should have a bit of a narrative arc and tell a light story, but nothing too distracting. In the end, I think it might be a bit confusing for complete strangers to SpyParty, but I hope people can figure it out from the video and the short description, and hopefully the trailer makes people who are just hearing about the game want to learn more.  I also worry that the trailer implies there’s a fixed character who’s the Spy, but it wasn’t clear how to correct that without a lot of exposition that would have messed up the flow.

You’ll notice this trailer is almost completely the old art and is completely in-game footage. This is intentional, because the last thing I want is somebody watching some super polished pre-rendered trailer and then loading the game and feeling misled. Of course, this means the Spy pours a drink down her face in one shot because the runtime code for taking sips from a drink isn’t aligned with the mouth properly in the old art. Oops.

The one place where we diverged from the game was having music in the trailer. The music was a relatively late addition; we were originally going only have the crowd walla, but in the end it felt necessary and I think it really helps tie the whole thing together.

We’ll be making new trailers every so often now that there’s a good place for them right there on the shiny new homepage, so as the new art comes in expect the new trailers to reflect that. I’m also thinking about inviting fans to make trailers to see what people come up with; I really liked it when Minecraft showed fan-made trailers on their homepage.

Also, here’s to the little details:

Bugs and Comments

Please post comments below if you have trouble with the new page on your preferred internet viewing device. It’s impossible to test all the different ways to browse the web, so I’m hoping my limited stochastic sampling found most of the big stuff, but I’m sure I missed some things. If you want to report a bug on the page, mention your browser and device and what you saw when things went wrong.

Thanks!

1. mostly due to priorities and time constraints, not any particular love of the old design [↩]
2. which, the last time I made a web page, was called liquid, and also get off my lawn [↩]

I was playing a birthday match1 today with jecat, and after one of the games where I was the Spy and thought I was highlit the entire game but in fact was lowlit, we got to talking about often this happens, even in elite games. In fact, the Spy often thinks the Sniper knows (or strongly suspects) who he or she is, and so Spies often find themselves playing conservatively even though they know from experience that when they’re Sniper, it’s very hard for them to figure out who’s the Spy; you usually feel pretty snowed under with information.

I got to thinking about it, and this Spy world-view, where you always think you’re the center of attention, even though there’s an entire party going on around you filled with people doing their party things, seems really narcissistic, or egocentric, or solipsistic…I’m not sure which, maybe all three? Fighting that assumption that you’ve already been made and forging ahead is one of the core biases to overcome as the Spy. You see it at all levels of play from newbies to elites, which I find very interesting.

This is all related to one of my core aesthetic goals of the game, namely forcing consequential decisions with partial information, which I’ve always thought of as primarily occurring on the Sniper side, but it really does happen on both sides. As the Spy, you have to decide to do something (accomplish missions), and then what to do (which mission), even though you don’t really know if you’re a suspect or not. How you go about this “doing” is obviously very important, but just the act of overcoming your confirmation bias and starting at all is something you can feel when playing.2 This is one of the parts of the game that I’m most happy with, because I think this concept of embracing uncertainty and making decisions even when you’re not sure is very au courant, in that most big decisions in modern life are made with only partial information, but you still have to make them to the best of your ability.

Here’s an edited clip of the stream with parts of this game and the discussion after it:

If you want to see the whole stream, it’s here.

In the stream chat, varanas had a nice quote on this topic:

Sometimes when I think I’m done for I’ll just start taking crazy risks because I think I have nothing to lose. I think it’s best to assume that if you’re not dead then there’s still everything to play for.

Given how often the person who thinks they’re doomed ends up winning, I have to agree.

1. usually round numbered games like 1000, 5000, but in this case, 12 games around his 2222th game, since we missed his 2000 [↩]
2. This idea of games making these thought processes explicit is covered nicely in Frank Lantz’s GDC talk, Hearts and Minds. [↩]

Two years ago checker invited internet strangers into his game and I was lucky enough to snatch an invite from the very first group. I had been following the game closely before I got the invite, and that is obviously still the case today. Over the years I have observed a lot of changes in the game itself and in the “meta” surrounding the game.

Last year I made a video that highlighted my first year playing SpyParty.  This year I asked myself a simple question:  how have the meta and balance changes evolved over my career as a player? Here is my personal recollection of how everything went down. First and foremost let me set the stage for SpyParty v. 1919 (April 17th, 2012)…

SpyParty v1983

Maps:
Balcony
Ballroom
Veranda

Missions:
Bug the Ambassador
Contact Double Agent
Transfer Microflim
Swap Statue
Inspect Statues
Seduce Target

Balanced Game Type:
Pick 3 of 4

Game Type Evolution

Way before the beginning of the closed beta there were two elite players named Ian and Paul. They felt that Pick 3 of 4 was the balanced game type for its time. Pick 3 of 4 means the Sniper sees 4 missions but the Spy only needs to complete 3 to win.  The Spy picked the 4 visible missions and the 3 to accomplish before the game started. By contrast, Any 3 of 4 means the Sniper still sees all 4 missions, but the Spy can do any of the 4 as long as they get 3 done. 

The Pick 3/4 preference was passed down to the newly recruited beta testers as the standard game type. Over time, the new closed beta players began figuring out how the game works, and they soon surpassed Ian and Paul in game time played. With more people came more feedback, and one day it was decided to try out Pick 4/5 and see how that felt. This was an experiment to see how people liked or didn’t like it. Over the course of 24 hours, Pick 4/5 became the new standard of balanced game play. Needless to say people loved it! Pick 3/4 never saw the light of day again.

There were a lot of discussions about balance between the Spy and Sniper. Some statistics checker has been collecting showed Snipers were a bit favored and we were encouraged to try the game type Any 4/5. This was a slight Spy buff because with Any, the Spy could be more opportunistic and take what the party gave them. This new game type was overwhelmingly popular and once again the balanced game type changed. From that day forward, Pick was less popular than Any.

By this time there were tons of strategies, tutorials, and guides posted for both the Sniper and the Spy. People were just starting to break into the quadruple digits of games played, and the Spy win percentage vs Sniper win percentage was still pretty close, but it could be even closer. A Sniper strategy that started to show results and popularity was the idea of camping the hard tell missions. At the time there were still 6 missions, which meant on any given balanced map and game type you were still required to do at least 1 hard tell mission. This allowed the Sniper to watch two missions and catch the Spy with reasonable success. The Spies received a buff once again and tried Any 4/6, requiring Snipers to watch an additional mission. This was met with welcoming arms and Any 4/5 died in favor of Any 4/6. 

People seem to enjoy playing with a slight bias toward Snipers winning. It’s no fun if it’s too hard as a Sniper, while winning against stacked odds as a Spy makes you feel good. However, can’t the reverse be said? Why don’t people feel just as good for winning as a Sniper when the odds are stacked against them? Why can’t it be no fun if it’s too hard for the Spy? 

I can not  shed any light on that but what I do know is people continue to play slightly favored Sniper games as the balanced game type. There’s obviously something going on here if we’ve been doing it for awhile now. We started off with a slight Spy bias and now we are at a slight Sniper bias with Any 4/6. However that does not mean the win rate for either one strays far from 50/50; it’s actually really close.

The Story of the Courtyards, Panopticon, and Map Tweaks

Courtyard 1

Courtyard 1+2
The first new map to be introduced to the SpyParty beta community was Courtyard. Everyone rejoiced with little butterflies in their stomachs as they got a new medium sized map to play on. It featured a high vantage point for the Sniper and a whopping 16 guests. There were 3 statues in the center area and no bookshelves. It was the first map that allowed a complete 360 degree view of the entire map.

This map posed a particular problem for the Spy–at the time Any 4/5 was considered balanced. There was a max of 5 missions on Courtyard and 2 of those involved statues, therefore, the Spy must visit at least one statue to complete all of their missions.

If you were to highlight anyone that went to statues you’d have a great chance of highlighting the Spy. Not only did you know the Spy has to visit statues, but the AI didn’t visit the statues very much at all to begin with. If the Spy chose to inspect, they had to visit at least two statues and two visits is a death sentence to any Spy. 

Courtyard 2

Thus, Courtyard 2 came into existence. Courtyard 2 provided more cover for the statues and the Spy no longer had to visit them more than once to get inspects done. There was an additional statue added to make 2 pairs of statues. This helped alleviate the problems Spy had with statues and there was a field of view change for the Snipers. 

In an effort to try and keep Courtyard 1 semi-balanced, as an experiment checker tweaked the settings so the AI wanted to visit the statues on that map.

Spies were also having a bit of a hard time completing missions on these two maps. The start time for them was originally 2:30 but seeing as the spies needed a slight buff, 30 seconds was added to both maps and they now reside at 3:00.

Panopticon
This leads us to our lovely and ginormous map called Panopticon. It featured a whopping 3 bookshelves, 6 statues, 20 guests, and enough window space to time add for days. That’s not the only catch here–the Sniper was on a fixed point and could not move around. The only thing they could do was look around and it was impossible for the Sniper to see the entire party at any given time.

Even though new maps are fun and experimental, that doesn’t mean the older maps didn’t get a little loving either.

Veranda
Veranda used to feature 6 single statues. Getting inspect done on this map was a nightmare. To help with this, it was decided to make the front 4 statues be paired together, 2 on each corner. This has since changed to 4 pairs to give a small buff to the Spy. The front section of the map, where Damon resides, used to be more narrow. It was widened in an effort to reduce so many collisions when trying to cross from one end to the other.

Veranda Now…

…and Previously

Ballroom
This map has only received minor changes, for example the small crossbars on the Ballroom windows used to completely block the laser, but now only the big pillars will block it.

Inside Gallery

Gallery
The newest map came in the form of an art gallery. This long and narrow map aims to provide tons of visual occlusion for the Sniper. The moment this map hit, the testers loved it, even more so than when Panopticon came out. That’s not to say Panopticon is a bad map but there’s something about gallery that settles well with the current testers. Perhaps it’s how colorful the map is compared to the others or the occlusion itself providing a unique challenge for the Snipers.

Missions Are Ever Changing

Missions have also been touched time and time again. 

Inspect Statues
To inspect 3 statues on ballroom, you had to visit 3 different statues. This is why it was popular to figure out how many times people have gone to statues. This strategy was a very easy way for the sniper to be purely deductive and still maintain a high win percent. 

After thinking on the subject, the idea was to add action tests to speed up the inspects to allow Spies to inspect statues that were near by. If you wanted to get all 3 inspects done, all you had to do was go to the middle statue and both neighboring statues would be available, assuming they weren’t being held by other guests. Each consecutive inspect takes less time as well.  Of course, this made visits to the middle statues slightly more suspicious than to the edge statues!

Swap Statue
Originally when you got a green statue swap, it would instantly change the statue shape in your hands (actually, see the comments below – checker). This was different from the white test because white tests would fade into the next statue instead of instantly changing. Against any experience Sniper this small difference is irrelevant. The solution was to have the green swap be handled by an NPC. This meant the Sniper had to know who was at statues and pay close attention to how the statue swaps (it’s slightly faster if the NPC does the swap) to know if the Spy is the character swapping the statue, or if it was the previous character.

Purloin the Guest List
Perhaps this was the inspiration for the purloin. When purloining the guest list was first introduced, a green test would give you a drink and the next NPC to take a drink would make the list fade quickly. A white test would give you a drink and the fading was longer. To make the mission feel more different from Swap, the green purloin was changed to refuse a drink, which meant the chain of drink refusers could grow quite long, making it more difficult for the Sniper to track.

Miscellaneous

Virginia “Orange Dress” Vulpes

Orange Dress
You may have heard some rumblings and jokes on streams about a character named Virginia Vulpes or more commonly “Orange Dress”. Who is Orange Dress and what’s with the attention? Let’s start from the beginning.  

Way back in the beginning, there was a beta player named skrymir. He was on a mission to make “Purple Dress”, Anna Klàvsky, the most famous of all SpyParty characters. This is the earliest example of deliberate mind gaming that I can remember. Often times skrymir would pick Purple Dress or bring her to the party with him. Every map had Purple Dress and that alone could drive some Snipers mad. 

Anna “Purple Dress” Klàvsky

After a while playing with the Purple Dress meme, an alternative game type was invented by players called MindParty. For this game mode you play on Balcony, the smallest map. The Spy has to manually pick their character and cast members. They were not allowed to take control from the AI at the beginning of the game, and they must say one sentence. It was typically about a character and it could be true or false. The Sniper had 30 seconds to shoot someone. 

This is where we arrive to Orange Dress. There are two beta testers by the names of canadianbacon and scallions. It is unclear of who originally started it, but whenever they played MindParty they would always play mind games around Orange Dress. This gave the game mode the alternative name of Orange Dress Party. The Orange Dress meme has spilled over into other testers’s games and has since become known throughout the community.

Time Adds
Enough about specific characters though, let’s talk about adding time! Adding time at the windows used to only net 30 seconds of additional time for the Spy. Players felt that this wasn’t worth the risk if you take in consideration the time it takes to walk to the window, do your time add, and walk away. Now time adds grant 45 seconds worth of time to any Spy willing to risk it.

Four Levels of Suspicion

Highlighting And Lowlighting
Next up is the ever so important Sniper tool–Highlighting and Lowlighting. Ever feel like if you had just one more level of highlights or lowlights you would win more games? Two level highlights are a thing of the past. You used to be able to mark people suspicious, and then mark them once more for an even great suspicion rating. Likewise, you used to be able to mark people as less suspicious and least suspicious.  This was changed because it felt too deductive. You could reliably keep track of who had visited statues and how many visits they’d made by using the levels as a counter. At this time, statues were still a problem area for spies. Imagine at the beginning of the game you lowlight everyone. This gives you the ability to mark up to 3 statue visits per person and you still had a lowlight to reduce the people you don’t suspect.  Losing a level of highlights and lowlights didn’t come without some resistance from the community though. However, after playing with it for awhile, the community seems to regard it as a good move by checker. 

In Conclusion

What does the future bring us? That’s a good question my friend. Maybe checker will cease production on SpyParty and become a florist instead. Maybe he continues to work hard on SpyParty and it single handily creates world peace, solves world hunger, and deflects oncoming asteroids so Bruce Willis doesn’t have to sacrifice his life for the greater good of humanity while making checker gazillions in the meantime. 

Realistically it’s probably somewhere in between those two scenarios but whatever the case, here’s to one more year.