I sent out the 707 emails just now. If you subscribed on this site before 2011/05/10 and you didn’t get a mail from noreply@spyparty.com asking you to re-confirm your Early-Access Beta registration, check your spam folder. Since sending the mails a few minutes ago, 31 people (including me) have re-confirmed.

Yes, that's John Travolta. Again.

 Oh, here’s the email if you’re curious:

Sorry I’ve been so quiet here and there, I’ve been heads-down working on the Early-Access Beta.  I’m obviously way behind on my original estimates of “mid-June”,1 and I apologize for that, but I’m getting closer, really I am!  I’m super honored so many people have signed up to support SpyParty’s development and to help playtest the game, and I can’t wait to get you folks invited in and playing.  I think it’s going to be a great time, assuming I ever actually get it working…

I’ve finally solidified my plan for the Early-Access Beta pricing, so I want to describe that here and hopefully answer any questions you might have in the comments.

There are going to be two pricing options:

1. $15 USD — Like I’ve said elsewhere, $15 has become the de facto price point for AAA Indie Games, and it’s almost certainly what I’ll price the final game at on the various platforms, assuming XBLA, PSN, and Steam are still operating when I ship in 100 years. 2  I’m really happy there’s a “standard” price point for high quality indie games now, because it not only means I don’t have to think about it, but players also know what kind of experience they can expect for their money.  $15 doesn’t mean “budget game”, it means “awesome indie game” now, and that’s great for innovation and creativity.

   Your $15 gets you access to the beta SpyParty and all the updates during the beta, access to the private beta website, which includes forums for announcements, finding games, and discussing strategies, and eventually a bug/feature tracking system.3  You’ll also get the game for free when it releases on PC.  I can’t say for certain right now, but I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to give you a key for activating it on Steam or your digital distribution platform of choice.  If/when I end up doing a MacOS port, you can have that version too as part of the deal, in case you’d rather play there.  I probably won’t be able to give you a console version, but if I can figure out a way to do that, I will.

2. Pay what you want above $50 USD — A significant number of people have asked if they can contribute more than $15 to help me make SpyParty, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, and I think I’ve figured out a neat way to let those who are interested do this.  When you get your invite mail, there will be the $15 option above, or an option to pay $50 or as much over $50 as you want. 4

   As you may have read, I am quite wary of extrinsic motivators and rewards, so I want people who contribute at this level to do it because they want to help me make a new and different kind of game.  They are not going to get any badges or stars next to their name in the game or in the forums, or any exclusive gadgets in the game, or a special plaid jacket, or a fancy hat, or anything like that.  If you’re playing the game, you will have no idea if your opponent paid $15 or $500 for SpyParty; it has been and always will be a pure player-skill game.

   I am incredibly grateful to everyone who joins the Early-Access Beta, at whatever price you decide to pay. I’m also incredibly grateful to the fans who follow the game and aren’t going to join the beta, but will buy SpyParty when it comes out, or even just help spread the word and contribute ideas because they think the game sounds interesting.

   However, as a special way of saying thank you for generously helping to fund the game, I am planning on putting everybody who contributes $50 or more in the game credits. There aren’t going to be any credits in the game until it ships, so again, this is not going to create a two-class system during beta testing. This is just a way of giving thanks and recognition to the people who put a little (or a lot) extra in when the game needed it most.

I got the idea for this credits thing from Dan Verssen at Dan Verssen Games.  Dan makes board games, and since board games have an up-front cost for printing, he takes preorders to both judge the popularity of a game and to fund its initial print run.  To thank the preorderers, he prints their names on the box, which I think is a wonderful way of including fans of the games in the development process.  Here’s the back of  his game U-Boat Leader as an example:

The heartfelt message from Dan at the bottom is how I feel about everyone who has shown interest in SpyParty as well.  It’s a pretty incredible feeling.

Okay, back to work.  Post any questions you have or clarifications you need in the comments.

1. …as you wonderful folks are quick to point out at every opportunity! ♥ [↩]
2. That’s a joke, internet! [↩]
3. Intially I’m just going to use a subforum for bugs and features, but I’ll set up something like bugzilla or one of the other open-source ones once things are rolling. [↩]
4. To be honest, I think I limit the input box to 5 figures.  I will gladly make exceptions to this if you email me! [↩]

No, really, this Boeing 707 belongs to John Travolta.

No, not that 707.  That one belongs to John Travolta.

The 707 I’m talking about are the seven hundred and seven people who signed up for the SpyParty Early-Access Beta without knowing that’s what they were signing up for.  You see, back on Valentine’s Day, I quietly put up a sign-in form on the sidebar of this blog, “below the fold”, just to test it out.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the list of names at that point, but I figured it’d be good to start gathering them.  A few folks noticed immediately, but I wasn’t ready to announce anything, so I just left it up there, slowly gathering email addresses for some unspecified “future playtest”.

In all, 707 people signed up between February 14th and April 15th, when I took the form down to get the backend code ready for accepting Early-Access Beta signups.  A few of those are my test accounts, but most were just people who came to the site and entered their email address.

The good news (for them) is they are first in line for the Early-Access Beta.  If you tried to sign up after the announcement but were told you were already subscribed, then you must have signed up during the spring and are one of the 707.

The bad news (for them) is since I didn’t have any of the beta stuff figured out back then, I’m going to ask them to reconfirm their sign-up to keep their place in line.  As I’ve said before, I want to make sure a high percentage of people I invite will actually pay and register for the beta so I don’t have to churn through tons of invites to get a given number of registrations.  I’d like to be able to send 20 emails and know I’m going to get about 18 registrations, or something close to that.  I don’t want to have to send 500 emails to get 20 signups, because then I might randomly get 150 signups, and that would screw up my work on slowly scaling the backend.  I don’t want to invite 500 and then have 480 people see an “oops, sorry, already full” message, because that’s annoying too.

So,  I want to make sure people who have signed up are going to register.  Since the 707 had no idea what they were signing up for, or that it would actually cost money, I’m going to send them all an email with a link to reconfirm their subscriptions.  The email will explain the situation, link to the details of how the beta will work,1 and ask them to click a link to reconfirm.  There’s no time limit on this, and I’ll always invite in order of earliest sign up date,2 so if you are in the Antarctic and don’t get the mail immediately, you’ll still be able to reserve your place in line, you just won’t get invited until you confirm.

I’ll have more details about the registration process in a few days.  Sadly, I still have a bunch of work to do, but I’m getting closer.  Thanks for being patient!

Oh, and since I was asked on twitter, there are currently 8006 people signed up and confirmed, or 7299 if you don’t count the 707.  647 people have not confirmed the initial opt-in email, which is about 8%, which I’m told is very good for this sort of thing.3   I might send out a single “hey, did you forget to confirm” reminder to those people, but I’m not going to worry too much about them.  The long tail sign-up rate appears to be about 20 per day.

1. I really need to go through the comments on the sign up page and put together the Beta FAQ! [↩]
2. …maybe with a few random choices for each invite batch from anywhere in the line just to keep people on their toes! [↩]
3. So, I guess that means the tens of thousands of emails I sent while load-testing didn’t get me marked as a spammer, which is nice. [↩]

Here is my talk from last night’s SF IGDA meeting, all marked up and flashified.  Apparently MyPlick finally died, so you can download the raw ppt and mp3. I talked about my goals for the network infrastructure for the SpyParty Early-Access Beta, both at a high level in terms of polish, security, scalability, and flexibility, and then also a bit at the low level, in terms of specific technologies and approaches I’m using for solving some of the problems.

Here’s a quick text summary:

• On the polish front, I want to either support or be able to support things like Single-Sign-On, Auto-discovery of Lobby Servers, NAT Punchthrough, Relay Fallback,  Personalized Beta Homepages, Ajax Forms, Private Forums, Bug Reporting & Feature Requests, etc.
• For security, the first rule is “No DIY Security!”, so I’m using MIT’s Kerberos with an OpenLDAP backend, and then hooking it up to the University of Michigan’s CoSign Single-Sign-On platform for the website. Then I talk a bit about AuthN & AuthZ, AuthN Client↔Server & Client↔Client, using https, TLS, revokable certs, timed downloads, etc. I also talk about how none of this means the game will be “unhackable” or “unwarezable” by any stretch.  There’s not going to be any DRM, and it’s a PC game, so there’s basically nothing I could do about it even if I wanted to.  But, Kerberos will allow me to always associate and authenticate a real account with a play session, and an honest client will be able to authenticate other clients and servers and know they are “official” and in good standing.  Of course, being the PC, nothing is going to stop people from hacking the client and even making their own servers, except that’s a bunch of effort for not much gain except “see, I did it”, and hopefully people will be more into playing the game as I update it, and supporting the development of new and interesting indie games.  We shall see!
• I’m trying to make it scalable, so if a lot of people want to play, I can let them!  Scalable means Very Few Centralized Services, the very few Centralized Services are Replicatable, and need Few Writes, the rest Runs in the Cloud, and is Load Balanced.  I talk about the importance of Load Testing Everything, and Assuming Nothing before testing.  And, I talk about how I did the email signup to support an Incremental Roll-out.
• Finally, I talk a bit about flexibility, and how there are going to be lots of ways the code sucks, at least at the beginning, so knowing where it will suck and knowing how I’m going to fix it when the time comes is important.

I also try to pre-emptively answer the most common questions at the end, namely, Why do all this yourself?, Why not use Steam/XBLA/PSN/etc?, and Why not start with the “MVP” and iterate?

Hope you enjoy it.  It’s pretty short, about 20 minutes with 8 minutes of Q&A at the end.  Feel free to ask more questions in the comments!

I had hoped to do a more lengthy update by now, but I’ve been so deep in server code I haven’t had a chance to breathe, let alone blog.  Still, I wanted to say I’m giving a short talk tonight, 7pm, Wednesday, July 13th, at the San Francisco IGDA meeting, at the Autodesk Gallery, 1 Market Street.  There are some directions here.

The talk is going to be about the SpyParty network backend, and my goals, hopes, and dreams for it, and why I’m so late getting the Early-Access Beta up and running (sorry!).  When I say “short”, I mean it’s only 15 minutes, and then a Q&A session.  Then it’s back to work on the beta for me.

The good news is last night1 I finally got the beta registration flow working.  I sent myself a beta invite email, and then clicked the link, filled out the form, got forwarded to PayPal, paid myself pretend money from the PayPal Sandbox test environment, got forwarded to the page that waits for the payment to be completed, clicked through to the beta homepage, which automatically redirected me to the login page, logged in with the new account, got to the beta homepage, clicked the link to the beta forums, and I posted an unintelligible message to myself.  Progress!

Of course, an unspeakable amount of stuff happened behind the scenes in about 5 different languages to make all that work smoothly.

Not waving.

1. This morning?  It all blurs together… [↩]