As expected, SpyParty lost to Minecraft for the IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize, but we had a great time at the show and have lived to tell the tale (or at least blog about it)!

First off—and most importantly—I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the incredibly awesome SpyParty booth volunteers:  Chelsea Hash, Heather M. Decker, Roger Hanna, Tim Fowers, and Dan Alongi!  You can see them helping out in some of the pictures below, and they totally saved me from death-by-overcommitment!

Next up, come play the game at PAX East!

I’m mostly going to throw some pictures up in a gallery, but I figured this one would have some comedic value by itself:

This was the kiosk when we arrived for setup. I think this configuration might be biased towards the Sniper.

We were super lucky to have a line most of the time, so people could read the new manual1, and everybody seemed to have a good time with the game.  There were a few different video interviews that will be going up over the next couple months, and I’ll link to those when they’re available.

Did you spot the ringer, Alex Baard, from the PAX West tournament?  He didn’t tell his opponent he’d played before.  Not nice!

And, finally, here is the excellent Daniel Benmergui, who stayed with me after GDC for a couple days, gazing into the future, thinking artistic thoughts.

1. which I just realized I haven’t posted yet, I’ll do that tomorrow [↩]

The always awesome Ben Gilbert at Joystiq just broke the news:  SpyParty is going to be at PAX East, March 11th through 13th in that city whose streets were designed by cows, Boston, Massachusetts!

As I say in the article, I’m super happy about (at least) two things:

1. The Fire Hose Games guys for being so incredibly awesome to let me crash their booth (#1133) at the last minute.  They’re shipping Slam Bolt Scrappers in March on PSN, and it’s going to be insane crazy fun.

2. That fans are going to be able to play all the cool stuff going in for the GDC build, which is now officially the GDC & PAX East build!  Check out the article for a list of stuff going in.  Here’s a teaser for the Steal the Plans mission:

So, come play SpyParty and Slam Bolt Scrappers in Boston in March!

Update: two more articles in this week’s Joystiq series have been posted! The first is an interview recorded at NYU last November about my thoughts on quality for SpyParty, and the second is a video walkthrough of the new maps!  Here it is embedded, but it sometimes starts with an advertisement, sorry!

A video used to be embedded here but the service that it was hosted on has shut down.

SpyParty needs help!

Are you local to the Bay Area or going to be here next week, responsible, dependable, and hard-working, a game developer or interested in game development, and available to man (or woman) the SpyParty kiosk at the IGF Pavilion at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, March 2nd through March 4th?  Yes, that’s Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, next week…

If so, I want to talk to you.

Before you say, “please, yes, let me slave away on the expo floor!”, you need to understand how much work it is to do booth duty.  You are on your feet for hours, teaching people how to play SpyParty, wrangling crowds1, explaining how to do the non-intuitive bookshelf mission over and over again, answering sometimes inane questions, and taking detailed notes about any problems you see so we can reproduce them later, and the entire time you have to have a good attitude and be genuinely excited to help people out.   With the right attitude, you will have a blast and meet some great people in the game industry, but you need to represent the game well to the people who want to play.

You have a tough act to follow in Tom and Ian:

Specifically, I’m looking for two or three people to help out.  You’ll have to get to play and learn SpyParty, and then work the booth during the three expo floor days when the IGF Pavilion is open.

I need to be able to completely trust you, because my GDC schedule is always insane even when I don’t have my game on the expo floor, so I expect it to be off the charts wacko this year, so you’re going to be on your own a fair bit.  You will be representing my game when I’m not there, and my game is really important to me, both personally and professionally, so I need to trust that you’ll do a good job.

You should apply to do this because you want to help out, be a part of the insanity of making an indie game, and meet cool game industry people, but there is another benefit:  as part of the IGF finalists package, I have some passes to the GDC, so you and your co-booth-helpers will be able to trade off and go see some talks.  The schedule is here. At the very least, even if the talk turns out to be bad, you’ll be able to rest your feet.

If you are interested, send me email with the title “SpyParty IGF booth duty”, and explain why you’re the right person to help out.  You might want to include any references of people we know in common, since a network of trust always helps.  Anybody is welcome to apply, whether a full time professional game developer, an indie, QA folks, bloggers, fans, game developer wannabes, or whatever.  The key thing is you’re responsible, dependable, hard-working, and trustworthy.

Thanks for considering it, I really appreciate it, and sorry I’m so late in getting this together!

1. hopefully [↩]

GDC fast approaches, and I’m trying to make sure all the new stuff I’ve added actually works as designed for people coming to play in the IGF Pavilion, and that means playtest → tune → playtest → tune…

Last night the gang came over, ostensibly to playtest the entirety of the aforementioned stuff, but the damned playtesters wouldn’t stop playing The Balcony map.  Over and over again.  If you recall, The Balcony was almost meant as a throwaway silly experiment.  I was slamming the tuning knobs of map size and complexity from one side to the other with The Balcony and The Veranda just to see what would happen.  However, after the last playtest, I made a bunch of tuning changes to the Seduce Target and Contact Double Agent missions that have sort of inadvertently made The Balcony a somewhat balanced experience.

The Balcony, in Practice Spy mode.

The changes I made look like this:

• Seduce Target – You can now flirt with the target just about anywhere people congregate on the map, including at the windows, bookshelves, and statues, not just in conversations like last playtest.  There is now an analog “flirt bar” that fills up as you flirt1, instead of having a fixed number of required flirtations, with the distance the Spy is from the Target multiplied by the Action Test determining how much credit you get for each flirtation.  It’s tuned right now to require two perfect flirtation attempts while standing right next to the Target, three if they’re just okay flirts, and four and six flirtations, respectively, if you’re far away on the other side of the conversation circle.  Since this change is hot off the press, there is currently absolutely no animation tell if you flirt while not in a conversation…you don’t even make a move, the only tell is the behavioral one of being near the same person multiple times.  Eventually2 there will be conversations that can happen everywhere, and so flirting will at least require being in a conversation, even at the windows.
• Contact Double Agent – I made it so the map could specify the number of Suspected Double Agents visible to the Sniper, and this number could go all the way to zero, and then I set it to zero on The Balcony.  Normally, the Sniper can discount all of the Suspected Double Agents since they (currently) can’t be the Spy.  This is  a nice head start on eliminating suspects, which is a key part of Sniper gameplay.  Plus, since the Sniper knows one of the Suspected Double Agents is in fact the real Double Agent, when the Sniper hears the “banana bread” audio tell, he or she can look around at the various conversation groups and pay more attention to the ones with Suspected Double Agents in them.

These two changes took the map from a quick Spy deathtrap into a relatively more balanced but still quick SpyParty-lite experience.  In fact, since the Sniper can concentrate on everyone simultaneously, it becomes a fairly high level behavioral map.  Instead of looking for tells, the Sniper can really watch for the “burgeoning relationship” of Seduce Target, or somebody who appears to be going out of their way to walk by the Ambassador.  It’s also much less stressful for the Sniper than the big maps, where statue memorization and book tracking are important but taxing skills.

One thing I didn’t mention is I’ve codified the current game types into Call Your Shot, Subset, and Opportunistic Subset, where Call Your Shot means the Sniper knows which missions the Spy is going to attempt, Subset means the Sniper knows only the set of missions from which the Spy will attempt a smaller subset, yet the Spy must pick this subset before play, and Opportunistic Subset is like Subset but the Spy can pick the missions on the fly while playing based on opportunity.  Obviously these are in order of increasing difficulty for the Sniper.

On The Balcony, if you know the Spy is doing two Call Your Shot missions, one of which is a subtle mission like Bug Ambassador or Seduce Target, and you hear the “banana bread” tell of Contact Double Agent, you pretty much have to take a shot within 10 seconds or risk losing because chances are the Spy has already done the other mission, so it becomes an interesting almost-arcade version of SpyParty, but that is still about perception and deception.

In fact, after a couple hours of The Balcony, we switched to The Ballroom, and it felt all serious and stressful, way more than it did in the past.  I hope The Balcony hasn’t ruined the playtesters!  On the plus side, it’s great that I can lighten the intensity of the game on some maps while still retaining the core aesthetic of the game.

Ian and Lauren trade the controller under the table, so Rachel never knows who she's playing!

After playing The Ballroom a bit more, we talked about how it seemed like some missions worked better on some maps, and how general the missions would be.  From a production standpoint, I need to be able to share missions across maps, and that’s proving to be true, but there do seem to be affinities between them.  Time will tell how plug-n-play the missions are.  Some customization per map is great, doing all custom missions for every map is a non-starter, so hope for the best.  :)

I leave you with some SpyParty trash talking courtesy of Ian, Master Sniper:

Lauren, trying to learn from Ian while watching him play:  “Why did you highlight that girl?”

Ian:  “Because she was the Spy.”

1. Comments about how it should be a vertical bar that engorges as you flirt will be sent to /dev/null ;) [↩]
2. Where “eventually” is defined as hopefully by GDC. [↩]