It is true: I should be working on the game right now. But I couldn’t resist more beta data!  Here are 5,871 geolocated SpyParty Early-Access Beta IP addresses:

Thank you, Guam!

A few things of interest:

• I started to color code the points by the time they registered, and then I thought I’d do a gif animation over the duration of the beta, and then I realized I’d already spent way too much time on this!
• I got a flurry of Japanese sign ups and tweets, mostly referencing this nice article on 4Gamer.net.  I should probably have the sign up page translated into Japanese and Korean…
• Are there really a bunch of sign ups from Arviat, NU, Canada, or is that a bug in the free IP geolocation database I used, or my code?  Also, Sao Tome?  Oh, wait, duh…Sao Tome is right near 0,0 lat/lon, so that’s probably just a bug!  Arviat is a mystery, though.
• I got the map image from here, but be warned, one of their “Mercator” projections isn’t.  I thought I had a math bug for an hour or so in the code I hacked up to render this.

Okay, back to work on the auto-updating and content packing!  Fun fun fun!

Everybody likes data, right?  Well, here’s a random collection of it from the past day and half of the SpyParty Early-Access Beta Sign Up…

• At 17:05:12 PDT on 2011/5/11, somebody named Steven, whose IP address is from Florida, became the 5,000^th person to sign up for SpyParty beta access.  Thanks Steven, and everybody else too!  Oh, and an important note that people have been asking about:  everybody who signs up will get into the beta. I will talk more soon about how it’s going to be structured going forward, and I’ll provide a rough timeline.
• The page went public at 10:30 PDT on 2011/5/10, so that’s 30.5 hours, or about 164 sign ups per hour averaged over the entire time.  Here’s a graph of sign ups per quarter-hour:
  
• The beta announcement got a fair amount of press, which I really appreciate!  Here are some links, most with comments:
  SpyParty Beta Starting Soon, Here’s How to Sign Up – Stephen Totilo, Kotaku
  SpyParty ‘Early-Access Beta’ sign-ups begin, costs $15 when beta opens – Ben Gilbert, Joystiq
  Spy Party To Unwrap “Paid Beta” Access – Jim Rossignol, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
  SpyParty Goes the Minecraft Route, Launching Paid Beta – Patrick Klepek, GiantBomb
  Early-access beta sign-ups open for SpyParty – Jordan Devore, Destructoid
  SpyParty early beta sign-ups begin – Steve Watts, Shacknews
  I’ve Been Invited to a Party…. A Spy Party – David Liao, 4 Player Podcast
• There were a bunch of threads in various places, here are some major ones:
  Spy party beta sign up $15 – Reddit
  SpyParty Early-Access Beta Sign-up – NeoGAF
  SpyParty – You’ve done it Checker. I want to play this game. – Quarter to Three
  Spy Party: Read the Fucking Manual – Something Awful
  The SpyParty Facebook Page
• And, of course, Twitter.  See that bump right there in the middle of the signups?  That’s Markus Persson, a.k.a. Notch, waking up Europe with a very nice tweet to his 174,000 followers.  Markus was very helpful answering my questions while I made the decision to do the Early-Access Beta, and the tweet was an extra helpful icing on the cake.  So, of course, I asked him to tweet again mentioning @spyparty…
  
• One of the reasons I structured the Early-Access Beta this way, with the sign up first, was that I couldn’t really predict how many people would be interested, so I didn’t know how to scale the game server for the unknown load, and I figured it’d be easier to scale a simple sign up form than the entire game lobby and backend.  I spent a fair amount of time loadtesting and optimizing the webserver, and in the end it purred like a kitten the entire time, barely breaking a sweat.  One of the ways I prepared was using Amazon’s CloudFront Content Delivery Network for most of the static assets on www.spyparty.com.  Here’s that data…
  You can see the US and EU daylight hours pretty clearly here.  My total CloudFront cost from the past two days: $6.03
• Once I had the static assets on a CDN, I just had to worry about the dynamic page traffic on my server.  I’ll write a more technical breakdown of this on my personal website some time soon, but the loadavg on the server rarely went above 0.2, even when the Reddit article was on the front page of /r/gaming.  Here’s the bandwidth, with a 5 minute average (blue is outbound, green is inbound, it’s a log plot):
  You can clearly see Notch’s tweet here as well.  The big spike off to the right is the last load test I did before launching.  It’s interesting to see the quicker falloff of the tweet and EU daylight, compared to the fatter area when all the news sites were posting.  The double-hump in the first hit is when the Reddit post made it to the front page of /r/gaming.  Reddit drives an insane amount of traffic, even from subreddits, and even from the bottom of the front page of subreddits.
• Here’s a breakdown of the domains of the emails that registered with 10 or more registrations from that domain.  gmail.com clearly dominates amongst SpyParty beta testers!

  gmail.com	3216
  hotmail.com	522
  yahoo.com	273
  hotmail.co.uk	68
  googlemail.com	56
  comcast.net	36
  aol.com	35
  live.com	33
  msn.com	30
  me.com	24
  live.co.uk	14
  yahoo.co.uk	13
  mac.com	12
  web.de	10
  others	766

Overall, I’m very happy with how things have gone so far.  I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect, but the initial 1/2/7 day estimates I made were 2,000/3,000/5,000, and we basically blew through that in a day.  I’ll be interested to see how it evolves over time.

Now I need to stop checking my stats, and get to work on making this beta more than just an email sign up!

The Line Forms Here

Well, you all asked for it, so I’ve spent the past month trying to figure out exactly how to make it work, and I think I’ve finally got all the pieces figured out.1

So, here we go:  I’m taking sign ups for the SpyParty Early-Access Beta, starting right now!

The sign up page is here.

I’m so excited!  This is going to be a lot of fun!

1. Famous last words… [↩]

Just a quick note in the feed that I added a new FAQ page to the site.  Enjoy!  Oh, and comment there if you have comments on the FAQ.  If you have comments on this post about the FAQ, I suppose you should comment here then!

I love these guys from PAX East 2011. They look like they're straight out of a Judd Apatow film!

GameTrailers.com just posted two new video interviews where I talk about SpyParty.

First, this interview by Ryan Stevens is cut to just be me talking about the game and my goals, and it has some footage of people playing from the IGF booth at GDC:

Next up, Geoff Keighley interviewed me, Jonathan Blow, and Markus Persson about indie games on the Bonus Round this month. This is Part 1, and the parts will come weekly:

Sorry about the ads.

The comments on the Bonus Round one are kind of funny. Almost everybody is a) really interested in indie games and glad that they’re getting coverage like this, and b) kind of blown away by how fast I talk.