So, uh, I have been a little busy lately.  I know it’s surprising, but the Early-Access Beta has lots of bugs, needs lots of tuning, and the (slowly) growing community needs lots of questions answered and lots of design decisions explained.1

I haven’t processed all the numbers yet, but some super simple database queries indicate I’ve sent something like 762 invitations, 357 people have registered,2 and 246 people have greater than zero seconds of game time.

These early-early-access people have managed to create a really wonderful community already.  As I’ve said before, the main reason I’m not just inviting all 13047 of you3 into the beta right now is the game’s lobby server and backend technology is not scalable yet, so everything would just melt.  However, there’s a secondary reason, and it may be even more important in the long run: growing a healthy community is a difficult and delicate thing to do, and a good community is incredibly important, especially for a game as different as SpyParty. Because there’s no in-game support yet for mentoring, or ranking, or cheat protection, or replays, or tutorials, or any of the important stuff that tries to keep player-skill game communities on the interenet from hating each other instantly, I’m counting on the beta testers themselves to be good people, help newbies, and teach each other to play better.  They are doing a fantastic job, exceeding even my very high expectations.  But, like growing a company, it’s important to introduce new people into the culture slowly so as not to overwhelm it. As the beta progresses, I will be posting lots of stuff from the private beta forums, including strategy guides, data analysis, opinions about tuning and balancing, and all that serious stuff.

This post is a little different.

Beta tester zerotka (otherwise known as Keith here on the blog and facebook) has been called the Jane Goodall of SpyParty, because he studies the NPCs4 and then writes about their behavior, sometimes uncovering serious bugs in my code in the process.  However, because he stares at the party so long…well, better to use his own words:

zerotka:  I had recently decided to go into practice mode and watch how the AI partied. I decided to start off with watching the waiter and how party members would react after getting a drink. I was hoping to find some tells so i spent quite a bit of time with it. I think after about the 10th or so game, i had to write a short-story-like-thingy. I had shared it with a couple other testers and they thought i should post it on the forums. I was hesitant at first, but alas, here i am.

---

Toby
The other day I had taken a few minutes and watched the waiter, Toby. 
I watched him from outside the ballroom.
He walked about, person to person, and offered drinks.
The guests had no respect for Toby in anyway.
The more i watched, the more overwhelmed with sadness i had become.

He would approach a guest and extend out his tray
And politely wait….
He received no form of acknowledgement. 
They all simply ignored him.

If they happened to be thirsty, they’d turn around,
grab a drink from the tray and immediately return to the conversation.
Not a “Thanks”, Not a, “How’s your day”,
Nothing. 

Sometimes, a guest would turn around to grab a drink
but when they saw it was Toby they would return to the conversation.
After i saw that, i..
..i lost control of myself.
“Don’t let them do that to you Toby!” I had screamed.
He was completely invisible to them.
They would even run into him!

Several minutes of constant disrespect had drained the life out him.
He began to believe what everyone was doing to him–He believed he was a robot, an AI.
If i had enough bullets, I’d shoot every one of those jerks for you Toby!
But i only had one bullet.
And even if i had enough to kill all of them, more would spawn to replace them.
A tear had formed in my eye.

I had grabbed my sniper and centered Toby in the sights.
He had walked toward the window and stared at me.
I could tell by his blank expression 
that his life had somehow spiraled out of control
And he knew there was only one way out of it.
I switched the safety off. 
I’m sorry Toby.

The tear had fallen down my cheek and onto the ground.
The glasses on the tray had crashed to the floor,
Guests had screamed and cowered in fear. 

Even though the spy had gotten away
I still felt like it was a small victory.

I hope in digital heaven, they serve you alcohol.

---

The real ending was actually me during the 11th game and shooting the first person who refused a drink from Toby.

 This thread, as you might expect, blossomed. 

sirlaitier: Here’s a haiku:

Security Guard
Can’t be bothered to squat down
Stands over the dead

zerotka:

I think Chris Hecker
Just forgot to put knee caps
On the character

 A few builds later, I snuck a little something into the game…it took a few days for people to notice.

Before and after fanfic inspiration!

The thread continued…

quirken:

♫Who’s the spy?
Oh sniper, don’t shoot me
Don’t shoot me no more
Oh, sniper don’t shoot me
Don’t shoot me no more

Who’s the spy?
Yeah

Oh, I don’t know why you shot me
I gave you no clue, but you didn’t care
So what is right and what is wrong
Gimme a sign♫

hunter4hire:

Memoirs of Virginia Vulpes
I’m not a rich person, and I don’t associate myself with them.
but when my best fried Girta, told me she has tickets to a grand opera, I couldn’t refuse.
When the day finally came, I put on my best. My orange Sunday dress.

We arrived at the theater late, and the opera was about to start!
how exciting, that it was, but not as exciting as the Intermission.
Guests flooded the veranda balcony for cocktails and cigars.
we walked through big french doors, and took a fresh breath in.
there were fine sculptures and a charming bartender, handing out 
cocktails and brandy.

Girta and I started chatting about the opera, and a few guests
have joined our conversation. That’s when I noticed something strange.
This young gentlemen seemed to have grabbed another gentleman’s high knee!
What was stranger, is that he didn’t react to it! Later I found he was an Ambassador of some foreign country.
Girta saw it too, and we just looked at each other puzzled, and we both knew, something odd was going on.

I strolled over to one of the bookcases, while Girta was fraternizing with a young fellow. 
I could see she was already infatuated with the young man. 
I was surprised to the amazing book collection, but then I saw that gentleman from before!
he was a few not a foot away from me, as he was looking at a golden statue of some sort of bird.
I tried not to stare, when he gave me a wink! and pulled out a similar looking statue from beneath his coat!
he quickly swapped the two, and whispered to me, “If you tell anyone, I will kill you.”
I stood there in shock clutching “Sun Tsu’s Art of War” in my hand.
my heart started to beat fast.
I took a deep breath and turned around. I saw Girta coming towards me, I couldn’t wait to tell her what happened, when suddenly a sharp quick sound of a muffled gun fired! 

I could swear the following few seconds lasted many minutes.

Girta… she took one step forward, and fell to her knees.
as she fell to the floor, her blood has started to spill..

Dear God…

My friend..

My best friend..

Who would hurt such an innocent woman!?
People started to scream as I saw that nasty man who has stolen the statue, flee inside.

The next day, I packed a few baggs.
I swore to myself and to Girta.. may she rest in peace.. that I would find that man.
and kill him, for I am certain it was him.

It was my fault…

He was aiming for me…

If I hadn’t gone to the opera, I would have never spot that man, doing his dirty deed.
oh Girta… I’m so… so… sorry.

I’m off to find your killer. I don’t know how I will find him.

But I must.

This is my last entry.

Then it started bleeding into other threads, like the one where people were discussing whether the Sniper should have a personification in the world outside the window, instead of just being a disembodied laser.

quirken: The sniper should be the silhouette of the banana suit guy that dances to the PB&J Time song. A bit of a quick mock-up for you all to enjoy. Obviously, the banana is not to scale.

And the inevitable response…

moomanibe:  ….The artist in me would not let me ignore this.

I’m sorry.

And a subtle reference back in the original thread…

zerotka: My quick rendition of what families feel like when the darn sniper misses the spy.

Make sure you click to read the article.

Okay, back to trying to figure out why the lobbyserver is leaking 130kb when it times out dead clients.

1. or irrationally defended [↩]
2. which is 47%, and is very close to my most optimistic estimates of 50%, and I haven’t even sent retries for these mails yet! [↩]
3. as of this post [↩]
4. buxx immediately said “NPCs in the Mist” when this idea went around the lobby [↩]

One of the best things about finally having regular players in your game’s beta is you get to watch the server logs for bugs, or just snoop on your players chatting with each other before and after games.  In fact, this is so addictive, and you learn so much about how your game really works with players by doing this, that I had to basically stop myself because I was sitting there all day watching the logs scroll by rather than, you know, fixing bugs.

That said, I thought you’d like a taste of this server voyeurism yourself, so I asked arbaard and dbfclark if I could repost their chats from a series of games a few nights ago.  These chats are great, because they show two very good players (both were at PAX 2010 when I first showed the game, arbaard was in the tournament, and dbfclark is the person who noticed that the line watching the games was getting implicit Sniper practice).  You can see them helping each other after each round, discussing what went right and what went wrong, changing the game types as they handicap the games, and sharing information so they both can improve.  Plus, they’re funny.

I’ll do more posts from the beta soon!  I’m slowly inviting folks from the beta sign-up in now, and it’s working out great so far.  Lots of bugs reported, lots of bugs fixed, and people are playing a ton and seem to be having a great time!  Here’s the leaderboard as of right now, look at some of the play times and remember a lot of these people have only been in there a few days!

Seventeen and a half hours played in four days!? So. Awesome.

This is the Welcome post for the SpyParty Early-Access Beta forums, including the tutorial video I recorded last night, which will hopefully help the complete newbs I’m about to invite in from getting frustrated (and shot).

Welcome to the SpyParty Early-Access Beta!

This welcome post is going to be a living document, which is to say I’m probably going to accidentally leave out 97% of the information that should be in here. I’m going to edit it constantly, hopefully trending eventually towards leaving out only 95% of the information that should be in here!

When you figure out something I should have put in this post, you should reply to it and I’ll slowly merge the additional information into the post itself.

Getting Started

If you’re reading this, then you registered and logged into the beta website correctly, so the next thing you should do is download and install SpyParty! On your beta homepage you should find a Download Latest SpyParty Setup link. If you click that, you will get a download for the latest version of the SpyParty installer. Sadly, some newer versions of Google’s Chrome browser are claiming the file is malicious, which I really don’t appreciate, but I’m trying to work it out with them.

After you run this installer, you should have your copy of SpyParty installed, along with the PDF of the manual and the README.txt file. You should read those first before playing. Yes, I know, reading about games is boring and playing games is more fun, but SpyParty is a very different kind of game—so your previous game experience will not carry over very well—and it’s very early in development. It has a lot of rough edges and very little online help. So, please read those documents and this post before trying to play, or else I’m worried you’ll get really frustrated and not have a very good time, and that would make me sad. Trust me, you’ll have a much better time if you read the documentation!

After you’ve read the available docs, you should launch the game and go into Practice mode, and then Practice Spy. This mode has no opponent, and you’re not playing online, so you can take your time and figure out how to accomplish all the missions.

Here is a tutorial video I recorded going through Practice Spy, Practice Sniper, and Preview Spy Missions. It’s 15 minutes of me babbling, as if I’m giving you an in-person tutorial at a conference or playtest, and it assumes you’ve read the manual and README.txt. If you want to see the Sniper laser, you probably have to englarge it up to see the full 720p resolution, but even then it’s hard to see with the video compression artifacts.

You should make sure you can complete each mission in Practice Spy mode, including the variants on the missions (like Bugging the Ambassador while in a conversation and while walking, or Transferring the Microfilm both inside and outside the book), and do them within the time limit for the map. If you can do this, you have a good chance of winning your first game playing as Spy (against another newbie, of course!).

You should also do a round of Practice Sniper, getting comfortable with the controls, including how to shoot when the time comes. If you’re new to the game, I would not bother learning highlighting and lowlighting suspects yet, but just concentrate on being aware of who is doing what, looking for suspicious behavior, remembering which statues are in place, and the like.

You can also check out the Preview Missions option in the Practice Menu. This mode will allow you to see all the Spy tells looping forever, so you know what to look for as the Sniper.

Playing Online

When you finally do go on line to play, you should try to play people at your same skill level. There is no matchmaking or ranking yet, so you’ll have to look at the number of games played in the lobby stats to know who to play. If you have to play somebody way more experienced than you, make sure you ask them to mentor you during play, let you know what you’re doing wrong, and what you should be looking for. There are also a lot of ways of handicapping different skill levels, which I can talk about in a different thread.

Also, since the beta is still in its early days, there are not a lot of people with active accounts yet, so the lobby is most likely going to be empty if you just randomly log in. You should use the forums to make dates to play with others if you can’t get a pick-up game going, or use the newly created Steam group to find other matches.

You can also leave SpyParty running in the background in the lobby if you want. The default is to beep when a chat comes in and the game is running in the background, so this will notify you if somebody shows up while you’re waiting. Some of the other early beta testers use this technique!

At some point soon, we’ll start regular playtests at regular times. I need to figure out the best time for this, and I’ll probably run a poll here in the forums.

Learning to Play

Beginners should play the Beginner Ballroom map, with its 4 pre-selected missions (Bug Ambassador, Transfer Microfilm, Steal Statue, and Contact Double Agent). You should alternate between Spy and Sniper roles while playing this map. 

After 20 games or more of Beginner Ballroom, the Sniper should start winning more than half the games. When this starts happening, the Spy should feel like it’s becoming impossible to get all the missions done with the Sniper’s laser on you constantly. You’re now ready to switch from the Beginner Ballroom to the Ballroom. This is the same room and number of partygoers, but the missions are opened up for selection, and you can start playing the “subset” game types. The Spy should choose “Pick 3 of 4 Missions” in the Choose Game Type menu, and then make the same 4 missions available as you played in the Beginner Ballroom (meaning, uncheck Inspect Statues and Seduce Target), but then only choose 3 of them on the Choose 3 Missions menu. 

The Sniper knows which 4 missions are available, but not which 3 are active for the Spy. This subsetting means the Sniper can no longer camp one of the missions, knowing the Spy will eventually have to attempt it, and instead has to weigh the risks in devoting too much attention to a mission the Spy might not even have picked! Now things are starting to get interesting! Of course the Spy wouldn’t have picked the Transfer Microfilm mission, it’s really hard! But, wait, maybe the Spy knows the Sniper will think that, so it becomes the right mission to pick?! This is known as yomi in game design, and it’s awesome.

Once you’ve played the subset game types a bunch, you can feel free to move on to the other maps and the other missions. By now, you’re ready to help other new beta testers learn how to play!

Talking about SpyParty

You are welcome to talk about SpyParty as much as you want in public. You can record videos and post them to youtube, post on your blog, or twitter, or facebook about it, comment about it on gaming blogs, or mention it and your beta testing experiences where ever you like. 

I’m even totally comfortable with you talking about it if you don’t like it, but at least post a link here or send it to support at spyparty.com so I can take a look at your criticisms and learn from them.

These beta forums are private right now so there’s a place where all the beta testers can hang out with each other, report bugs, and know that everybody else they’re talking to has access to the game, but they don’t mean you can’t talk about the game and your experiences on the internet at large (of course, don’t repost anything from the private beta forum without the permission of the author, that’s just good netiquette!). 

Indie games need all the help they can get with word-of-mouth, so feel free to talk it up everywhere!

Thanks for joining,
Chris

I just wrote this post for the Bugs subforum on the Early-Access Beta site.  I figured you all would be interested in reading it, since you’re all going to be invited into the beta soon.1

"he probably would"

Finding and reporting bugs is a learnable skill, and you don’t have to be a programmer or even a particularly technical person to do it right, you just have to be methodical and thoughtful. Reporting bugs the Right Way means I can spend more time making SpyParty awesome and less time trying to get a bug to “repro” locally.

What is a “Repro”?

The goal of a bug report is to describe the steps to reproduce the buggy behavior (whether it’s a crash that deletes your entire hard disk or it’s a word that’s not pluralized correctly in the user interface somewhere) well enough that I can step through them on my machine and see the behavior first-hand. A bug that doesn’t repro is very hard to fix, whereas a bug with a “good repro” is usually pretty trivial to fix. It can be the difference between 10 minutes to fix and 10 days to fix, literally. So, when posting a bug report, the key is to do some work on your end to be methodical and give steps to repro the bug as simply and as clearly as you can. It’s basically a recipe to make the buggy behavior happen for you (and me!).

This does not mean you shouldn’t report bugs that don’t always happen the same way or happen infrequently, or that you can’t get a good repro for, but it does mean those bugs will be much harder for me to fix. In other words, it’s more important to report the bug poorly than it is to not report it at all, but a good repro makes a huge difference.

Bug Reporting Steps

I’ll be updating these steps as the beta proceeds, and eventually I’ll switch this part of the forum over to a real bug database, but for now, threads in this forum will have to do. The basic rule is one thread per distinct bug.

1. Try to reproduce the buggy behavior on your machine. If you crashed, write down what you were doing right before the crash before you forget it, and then relaunch the game and try to get it to crash again. If you can’t repro the bug, you should still report it with as much description as you can, but as I say above, it’s way easier to fix bugs with good solid repros. The shorter the recipe for the repro, the better. As Einstein said, you want the simplest possible repro, but no simpler. A bug that repros in Practice Mode is easier to debug than one where I have to connect over the network, for example.
2. If screenshots look like they’ll help to repro or describe the bug, feel free to take them (you can do it by hitting F5 when the game is running, or use FRAPS or your favorite screenshot tool). If you hit F5, the screenshot is put in your AppData/Local/SpyParty/screenshots directory, which you can get to by going to the Start menu and typing “%LOCALAPPDATA%\SpyParty\screenshots” into the little edit box, and hitting return. I’ve enabled attachments in the forums, so please attach the images to your bug report (as opposed to using a 3rd party image service, which might delete the images after a while).
3. Make sure you have the latest SpyParty build. The easiest way to do this is to launch the game and hit “Play” on the main menu, which will try to take you to the lobby. The lobby will update your build if you’re out-of-date. If you update, try your repro steps again to make sure they still work.
4. Search this subforum for similar bugs. If you find the same bug, then read the thread on that bug, and see if there is a workaround, or if I think I’ve fixed it in an update, etc. If I think I’ve fixed it in that thread I will mark the subject with ” – FIXED”, and I really want to know if you have the same bug again! This is called a “regression” and it means I’m a bad programmer!
5. If you find the exact bug, feel free to add more information at the end of the thread. I will try to add a “vote for posts” feature so you can simply say “me too”, but until then, feel free to add a post if there aren’t already a bunch of others doing the same, or if you have additional information or slight modifications or a simpler repro that might help debug the problem.
6. If you don’t find an exact match in the current bugs, but do find bugs that seem related, keep the links to those threads so you can insert them into your bug report. A real bug database allows you to reference other bugs, so this is our ghetto version of that feature.
7. Create a new thread in the bugs forum if your bug is a new one. Use a descriptive thread title. “Game buggy” is a bad one. “Main Menu text disappears after window maximized” is a good one. I might change the title after we’ve discussed the bug a bit, but starting off with something descriptive will help.
8. At the top of the post, describe the end state of the bug, meaning what’s wrong, like “the game crashes”, “the statues are floating in mid-air”, or whatever. Describe what you expected to happen, and what happened instead. Attach an image showing the bug, if appropriate.
9. Then put your repro recipe in the post, written as clearly and as simply as possible. You can use the bbcode list tags, or just write it out, either works. Attach any more images you have to show how to repro the bug, but you don’t have to go crazy (saying “hit Play on the main menu” is fine, you don’t need to screenshot the main menu, take it into Photoshop and add an arrow with “click here” text unless the exact place to click matters to repro the bug, for example).
10. SpyParty writes out a log file every time it runs. You can find these log files in the “logs” directory (“%LOCALAPPDATA%\SpyParty\logs”). The file name for the log files has the date and time of the playtest session start (e.g. SpyParty-20120412-11-54-49.log). Attach the log file that goes with you reproing the bug with the steps you’ve posted. Similarly, if your game crashed but said it could not upload the crash dump, then attach the correctly dated dmp file from the logs directory. Otherwise, SpyPartyHelper uploaded the dmp file to my server so I can access it, but mention this in the bug report.
11. If there’s private information you need to send with the bug report, mention this in the report itself, and then send mail to support at spyparty.com.
12. If you want to attach a really big file, say over 2MB, please mention this and I’ll figure out a place for you to put it, please don’t mail giant files to support at spyparty.com.

That’s it for now! Feel free to reply to this post with suggestions of how to improve the bug reporting process and I’ll edit this post.

Eventually I will add a way to report bugs from inside the game that will take a screenshot and everything automatically. Won’t that be nice?

1. for a suitable definition of “soon” [↩]

I decided at pretty close to the last possible minute to have a small “thank you” party for the first set of SpyParty beta playtesters, and I invited some friends from the press who have been covering the game for a while.  Scheduling things during the evening at a big tradeshow like GDC is basically impossible…there are so many other conflicting events and parties and meetings that you have to just pick a date and go with it.  I picked Tuesday night, and tried to make it a short party, scheduled in-between other big events, but in a bizarre twist of fate I still ended up landing right on top of the SimCity 5 launch event, a game being made by all my old friends from Maxis.  Oops.

Anyway, the idea behind this party was to get the hardcore playtesters playing together in-person and say “Thanks!” with beer and snacks, but also to get them mentoring the folks from the press, who haven’t seen much of the mid-game yet because they haven’t played enough games.  I don’t know how well the mentoring thing worked out since it was not exactly a quiet contemplative training environment, but everybody seemed to have a good time, and that was the main goal.  Huge thanks to Jonathan Blow for letting me use his suite for the party, and to Luis & Mylene and John & Alice for bringing the food1 and drinks!

I took some pictures, maybe you can recognize some playtesters and press…

And, now we’re in the home stretch for the next batch of invites.  I’m plowing through the list of bugs and feature requests from the first batch, and the next invites are going out really soon™.  Here’s the current todo list:

• put portraits up along side for cast characters
• also spy!
• how to center text? allow two lines worth of space? uneven spacing?
• have box with ? on side for casting characters – progress status and neat
• don’t get that click on guy selects during cast characters
• character/level chooser mouse tip for select versus next/prev
• mouse overrides cursor keys in menus if over item…don’t override if key change but no mouse change
• why is volume not working on last 30 seconds timer on sniper machine?
• sniper review tells on waiting screens – sort of
• basic infrastructure for this
• chooser through animations playing on loop!
• text title and description support
• require sniper okay to continue
• bug_ambassador
• double_agent
• inspect_statues
• seduction
• steal_statue
• transfer_book
• check_watch
• mouse clicks are going to background window on spy side
• does spy side keep mouse cursor on results screen?
• sniper camera moves on results screen
• pgup->PageUp
• fix statue pad size
• multiple affordances controls
• display bumpers/QE/mousewheel?
• update action test text as affordance changes for Signal Double Agent?
• or kill it if it’s not an active affordance, so have to restart?
• document action test is same button?
• put small icon next to it?
• update while in lobby
• Update Failed on download bar…needs to test more
• remove briefcase verbs? or ignore them?
• write forum welcome/intro/faq posts
• update readme, or just empty it and point to the focum post?
• how to report bugs post
• post threads for known bugs
• tutorial video, walk through Spy and Sniper practice mode as if I was showing you how to play at a playtest
• ctrl-delete delete next word, use ctrl-right code…uh, and fix that
• updated lobbyserver won’t accept old connections, even to update, idiot!
• start sniper while other on results -> no -> sniper -> assert(level) – yay, found it!
• needs to zero play id on starting sniper because still current
• need to fix gameid/playid thing…I’m constantly stomping the gameid
• store gameid/playid pairs from server, then look up based on playid
• store playid on server as well
• can’t escape from sniper results after play attempt? IsLobbyGameOver busted
• add string wrap to property parser, or general line continuation?

I haven’t decided how many people to invite in the next batch, but it’ll be somewhere between 20 and 50, depending on how confident I’m feeling.  Yikes, 50 strangers from the internet!

2012-03-23 15:19:45 – Crossed some stuff off.  Working on the missions preview code, so people will be able to see what all the tells look like before playing.

2012-03-30 13:24:10 – Added a bunch of stuff I’ve been working on that wasn’t on the posted list!

2012-04-03 17:18:30 – Well, it turns out the mission tell preview took a lot longer than I thought, and I still didn’t manage to hook it up to the Sniper waiting screens, so it’s just in the practice menu for now.  I shouldn’t have done this one now, but once I started I failed to stop working on it.

1. Mylene’s homemade guacamole was awesome! [↩]