The new art is finally nearing release to beta testers, so if you want to check it out yourself as soon as I post the build, sign up for the beta!  I’ll post more details here when I release it, and of course I’ll stream the release notes on twitch.tv/spyparty and then post them on the SpyParty YouTube channel. Again, a reminder: it’s more of a tech demo than a playable map right now, it’ll be a while before the new art can replace the old art for real competitive play.

I fully intended on having the art released right after PAX, but I underestimated how much stuff I had agreed to do in September, so here we are.

The new artwork is working pretty well on a wide range of machines. For the PAX booth and the Omegathon, I only had to get it working reliably on Intel HD 4000 graphics, but now I need to try to make it work on everything. Dealing with different hardware and software configurations is the only real downside to doing PC games compared to the more closed platforms, but it is a significant downside. Here you can see a bunch of machines I’ve been using for testing, what year they’re from, and what graphics chip they have:

I try to keep a bunch of old machines running for testing, and I owe huge thanks to Ben Kutcher from Intel for always hooking me up, and to Jonathan Blow from The Witness for keeping me in constant supply of his discarded old machines. Especially for a multiplayer indie game, making sure you run on older machines is vitally important because you don’t want to limit your audience any more than you absolutely have to. I also try to develop on slightly old machines, because I think it keeps you honest as a programmer. It’s easy to get lazy if you always develop on a monster machine.

You can see the new map and characters work pretty well on most of the machines in the video, most at playable framerates even before optimization. The two exceptions are the Sony VAIO from way back in 2006, that has an Intel GMA 945 graphics chip in it,1 and the ThinkPad T500 from 2009. The latter is actually fast for a few minutes and then slows down, so I think there’s some kind of memory leak in the driver or something. I need to investigate more, because that hardware should run it fine.2

I also briefly tested on MacOS using Wineskin, and the new art loads correctly, but it won’t draw the new level on the machine I tested. I’m not actually sure how to debug this other than commenting out stuff and hoping it starts working, but I’m crossing my fingers that it’s something simple I can find. Hopefully, once I release the build, MacOS beta testers can give me some feedback on which machines work, if any. I really need to get a Mac at some point…stealing my girlfriend’s machine after she goes to sleep is not a very robust testing methodology.

Loading correctly is actually half the battle, and usually when things go wrong, they go wrong during load. So, I’ve put in some code that will detect if it’s the first time you’ve loaded the new art, and if so, it’ll keep track of whether it crashes during load. If it does, the next time you run it will prompt you for whether you want to skip loading the new art, or try again. The last remaining thing I need to do is make it so if you have loaded the new art and you try to play a game against somebody who skipped loading it, you can both still play the old art levels correctly and it fails reasonably gracefully if you try to play a new art level. This shouldn’t take long to get working. Famous last words.

XOXO

Last week I was invited by Andy Baio to bring SpyParty to the XOXO Festival Arcade in Portland, Oregon. Andy’s been a fan of the game for a while, and they had a great selection of experimental indie games this year at the festival. I had to return early so I missed the lectures over the weekend, but I believe they put videos online, and the Arcade was fun! As usual, I took pictures!

1. a chip that’s pretty much universally reviled by graphics programers, but I will try hard to make it playable on this old machine! [↩]
2. and, in fact, you can see the slower T400 runs the game well…sigh. [↩]

Another PAX, survived.

This one was a little more nuts than usual, and that’s saying something.  Allow me to enumerate the additional levels of difficulty this year:

• FOUR DAYS LONG instead of three, for 33% more exhaustion!
• Getting the new artwork playable1 in the game.
• SpyParty was chosen as the secret final game for the PAX Omegathon, and I was adding bugs to the game up until the last minute!

All things considered, though, it went really well, thanks as usual to my incredible volunteers from the SpyParty community.  This year, John and I had tireless help from zerotka, drawnonward, wodar, canadianbacon, zapdsl, and ardonite, and we could not have done it without them!2

Actually, this year, I have even more people to thank than usual:

• Jeff Roberts, my debt to you follows the Ackerman Function.
• Ben Kutcher, for adding NUCtastic to your long list of positive personality traits.
• I’d like to thank Riot Games for setting up my booth.
• Kelly Wallick, a long-time friend who also happens to run the Indie MEGABOOTH, saved our bacon using eldrich equipment magic.
• My daughter, for making a SpyParty t-shirt for me, and telling me I had to wear it in the booth.  I have no idea how a 10-year-old knows what a martini is; I blame her mother.

You’d think after doing so many shows, we’d have this down, but there were a few things we kinda screwed up this year.  All were correctable, and all were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, but I figure they’re worth mentioning just for the record:

• We were so busy trying to get the new artwork into the build we didn’t think through the flow of the booth enough, and for the first half of the first day it was basically impossible to see there was anything new in the game.  We had a new level running with the new characters and environments alongside the old levels, but since all the machines were playing the old maps, either as training, or because the new stuff isn’t balanced yet, there was no way for somebody stopping by the booth to see the new stuff.  I would occasionally take over a machine to show somebody the new stuff, but it wasn’t a natural part of the booth flow.  Thankfully, Kelly came to our rescue, and we got a big HDTV on a stand set up, and I hacked an attract-mode into the game, and that helped a lot!
• There were no signs until the last day that the beta was open, and since the majority of people who visit the booth haven’t heard of the game, or have only heard about it vaguely (see this lecture), a lot of people had no idea they could play online immediately.  You know you’re not thinking straight when you don’t even follow the advice of your own lectures on indie game marketing.
• We didn’t do a great job of line management the first day, so it felt pretty slow.  I actually didn’t realize how important this was until I noticed the lack of people and pieced together what was missing.  Unfortunately, I was so distracted by last minute programming and logistics that I didn’t notice until the end of Friday.  People who come to your booth want to know where they stand in the world, both figuratively and literally.  If it feels disorganized or if they don’t know how long they’re going to have to wait, they drift off.  Line management is really important.  As soon as we started combing out the line, letting people know what order they were in, and that they needed to read the manual, the booth felt like normal again, with a line of folks reading the manual, onlookers watching the screens, etc.  Lesson learned (and if you’re an indie with a booth, hopefully knowledge transferred)!

Omegathon

The big secret of the whole show for me was that SpyParty was selected as the final game of the Omegathon, the overarching meta-tournament for PAX.  The rest of the games are announced beforehand, but the last game is kept secret, and sprung on the two players for the finals.  Robert Khoo mailed me asking if they could use SpyParty back in late July, we plotted about the right way to do it (since the Omeganauts weren’t going to be able to read the manual!), and I prepared two laptops to play the game on stage.  On the day, Ben Kuchera and Dabe Alan came to the booth, picked up John and me, and we went to go set up.  Sadly, I had to keep even our volunteers in the dark!

The games were great!  Lt. Hummus and Nantucket did a really wonderful job playing under intense pressure, having just had their brains exploded by my rapid-fire tutorial.  Lt. Hummus was kicking himself, because he’d joined the beta a month ago but hadn’t gotten around to playing yet!

I really appreciate Jerry, Mike, and Robert picking SpyParty for the finals; they’ve been fans of the game for a while, and I think they did a wonderful job with the whole thing.  This may sound a bit odd, but as the game designer, I was most impressed by how much respect they afforded SpyParty in the proceedings.  They could have easily hammed it up on stage, or made some wacky game variation for the final match, but they (and the audience) really got the deep concentration part of the design and they totally understood and worked with my questions and concerns about using the game, and it went off nigh perfectly.  I was over the moon!

Here are some good links:

• Ben and Dabe put up a great writeup and gallery of the setup and match on the Penny-Arcade Report. (Now hosted on archive.org, I thought it was lost when the PA Report died!)
• Here’s the live stream of the event on twitch.tv. Sadly, Mike’s mic (!) had issues for the first part.
• And here’s a shaky-cam version, so you can see it from the crowd’s point of view.  What I really like about this one is hearing the nearby crowd talk SpyParty strategy while the Omeganauts are playing.

The New Art

People seemed to love the new art, once we were actually able to show it to them!  The new art will be in the public beta build this week sometime, maybe tomorrow.  If you want to check it out, sign up for the beta this way right over here.  Be warned, it is in there, but it’s not very playable, it’s more of a tech demo right now.  It’ll get more playable as time goes on, but the main maps for actually playing the game will remain the old art ones for quite some time!  Much more on this soon when I release the build and stream the release notes!

Picture Gallery

Finally, the pictures!  Since this post is all about the bullet-points, here are some highlights:

• Apparently elite players holding a sandwich while SpyPartying is now a thing:  kcmmmmm at Evo, playing, and zerotka at PAX, mentoring.
• zapdsl handicapping himself against a newbie by taking off his glasses.
• Evan Narcisse, from Kotaku, the real inspiration for Mr. D.3
• Davin Pavlas of Riot Games came by to play after our panel on player communities, and then I spotted him again on the repeat players station.  He didn’t help set up the booth, though.
• Lots of great cosplay sprinkled throughout!

Continue reading ‘PAX West 2013 Report and Gallery’ »

1. …for some suitably liberal definition of “playable” [↩]
2. like, literally, we could not have actually done the conference without them! [↩]
3. Or so he claims…but look, a black man with a goatee who is not Morgan Freeman!!! [↩]

Welp, doing this three times a week while I’m struggling to get the new art in for PAX is just not working, so I’ll bail on the strict Monday, Wednesday, Friday commitment, and just upload these every few days between now and the show. Remember to subscribe to the SpyPartyGame channel to be notified when I upload these and other videos.  

Oh, and you can play SpyParty right now if you join the beta!

Here’s a new animation reveal video, this time with all the characters showing new talk and listen animations in simulated conversations. These conversations are done by sequencing the animations together in the editor, there’s no AI control over the conversation flow right now, so the real game conversations will be a bit different, but these should give you and idea of how they’ll feel.

I bought a new USB soundcard to get the actual analog circuitry far away from the laptop to try to get the mic noise down.  Seems like it worked out okay, the voiceover is definitely higher quality.1

1. Well, higher audio quality, I make no claims about the voice or the content! [↩]

I think it is still Friday somewhere, like maybe Hawaii. Man, editing video is such a pain, this Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule for revealing these new character animations is going to kill me. Also, now I’m super paranoid about the amount of noise on my laptop’s mic input, so I’m probably going to have to get a USB soundcard to try to isolate it. Plus, let’s just ignore the camera still visible in the distance in Mr. C’s video, shall we?

Without further ado (and whining), here are the first talk animations for the three other characters in our first five, Mr. C, Mr. D, and Ms. E.1 If you missed Mr. A and Ms. B, you can see them here, and if you don’t want to miss any more videos, Subscribe to the SpyPartyGame YouTube Channel!

I think for the next batch I’m going to put them all in a single video so there’s not so much intro and outro overhead.

These characters and animations are all part of the run-up to PAX at the end of August, where we hope to have the new SpyParty art up and running2 in the game!

1. Yes, perhaps it was a missed opportunity to not go with “Mr. E”, but that’s how it goes. [↩]
2. or more likely, limping [↩]

As you may or may not know, we’re going to try to show off the new SpyParty artwork in-game at PAX Prime, August 30th through September 2nd, dates which are closer than they appear, and they appear pretty damned close!  I’ll post more about PAX in a bit.  On the run-up to the show, we’re going to start releasing videos of the new characters animating every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, starting today! 

If you want to get notifications whenever we upload new animations and videos, Subscribe to the SpyPartyGame YouTube Channel!

The new art will be “limping along” at PAX in a single map, more like a tech demo tacked onto the side of the game than a competition quality map at this early date.  The old art, which may be ugly but is very tuned and balanced for competitive play, will live on for quite a while as the main maps for real games.  The new art will go in as we get it working, with very limited missions available at first. Initially, it’s just going to be the conversation animations, bugging the Ambassador, and checking watches.  More missions will follow as John gets the animations done!

If you’ve joined the beta, you’ll get to see the new art come together and go from “neat tech demo” to “fully playable level” as we update it.  You’ll also get to help me find bugs in the new renderer and post in the forums about how OP the old black guy with the cane is!  I’ll probably update the public beta build with the new art right after PAX.1

Like the new environments we revealed last week,2 all the characters shown in the first art reveal last year were rendered with full raytracing and global illumination and antialiasing and other fancy settings that make them take hours to render.  The stuff we’re going to show in these animations is all rendered in real time on my two-year-old laptop.  There will be some hiccups, I’m sure, but my goal is to keep the minimum spec machine for SpyParty as low as possible; I want as many people to be able to play the game as I manage.

The Animations

I will talk more about the aesthetic goals for the animations as we go on, but at a high level, we want the animations to have that same “illustrative” quality we’re going for across the SpyParty art style.  We don’t want them to be too realistic or motion-captured, which I think leads to a bit of a dead look; these are all bespoke hand-animated movements.  At the same time, we don’t want them too exaggerated or cartoon-y, so we’re using reference videos of people doing similar motions so we can anchor ourselves with plausibility as we get a grip on the style.  Hitting just the right tone and avoiding the uncanny valley on one side, and cartoons on the other, takes constant vigilance and attention to detail across every aspect of the visuals, from pixel quality to the movements.

The first animations are of two of the characters talking, so we looked for reference of people lecturing, giving monologues, or just conversing in a stylish way.  We haven’t chosen in-game names for the characters yet, so we’re going to name them by letter for now, which sounds all spy-like and mysterious, but is mostly us just not knowing what else to call them.  I’ll probably involve the community in naming the characters when it’s time for that; I did that for the old characters and we got some really great spy fiction names.

Hope you like them as much as we do!  I felt kinda bad putting the old characters in there for comparison, but it had to be done.  You can defend their honor in the comments!

1. It’ll almost certainly have bugs and performance issues, and I can’t afford the time right now to fix those bugs before the show, hence updating after when I can actually do something about it when it all breaks for people with different graphics cards.  Yay PC games! [↩]
2. Yes, I still haven’t posted those shots to the blog, I will do so this weekend, but here are some awesome news stories about them: kotaku, destructoid, polygon, rockpapershotgun, joystiq [↩]