Here is a quick teaser for the metrics I’m analyzing from the playtest data from both PAX and NYU.  The counts below are the number of times the Spy player picks a given character, out of 601 games across both playtests.

I find it interesting that the guy in the obvious plaid jacket gets picked almost twice as often as the James Bond-esque dude at the bottom.  What kind of Spy would wear that jacket?  A lot of them, it turns out.

More soon! Metrics I’m going to mine include types of wins, characters most likely to be shot correctly versus incorrectly, last mission attempted before getting shot, etc. Also, some charts over time to see if standing in line really did help the Snipers.

	74 (12%)
	72 (11%)
	68 (11%)
	62 (10%)
	55 (9%)
	52 (8%)
	47 (7%)
	45 (7%)
	43 (7%)
	42 (6%)
	41 (6%)

I need to find a better graph dispay system than these horrible HTML tables. Any suggestions are welcome.

Edit: I figured out a slightly better HTML table approach, and it seems like the most portable at this time, so we’ll see how it goes.

My crazily hectic summer & fall continues…  I’m back from a great time at GameCity in Nottingham, UK (here are some pics, and I’ll post the lecture audio shortly), and now I’m preparing to go to NYU’s GameCenter in a couple weeks.

On November 18th, on the lower level of NYU’s 721 Broadway building, we will do a SpyParty playtest at 1pm (note extended hours!), followed by a lecture and interview with Frank Lantz, the most excellent Director of the GameCenter, at 7pm.  Both are open to the public, which is very gracious of the University! Here is their announcement.  Plus, check out the awesome poster by Rachel E. Morris:

This is going to be the last public playtest of SpyParty for a while, maybe even until GDC next February.  I love doing these playtests and lectures, but the travel and preparation really distracts from progress on the game itself, so I need to buckle down and crank for a bit.

Frank Lantz, pondering his SpyParty playtest at GDC10

I also have a huge backlog of stuff to post here on the blog, so hopefully I’ll begin whittling that down once things normalize again.

I submitted SpyParty to the Independent Games Festival Monday night, 11 minutes before the midnight deadline!  I was originally planning on also submitting to the Indie Game Challenge, the deadline for which was October 1st, but I couldn’t get the game working over the internet in time.  However, even though I blew through that deadline, I’m really glad I tried for it, because it clued me in to how much work I still had to do to make the game “contest ready”, just from a logistics standpoint.  It set me up for entering IGF with something that actually worked.  Too bad about the $100,000 though!

The biggest part of becoming “contest ready” was getting the game working over the real live wild internet.  All the playtests so far have been on a local LAN, but the judges for these festivals and contests aren’t always in the same room.  I had to write a rudimentary lobby server and switch networking libraries to something that could do NAT traversal.  After talking to a bunch of people, friends at Valve pointed me at libjingle1, which is used by Google Talk and  Steamworks, and seems pretty robust.

Network code is a giant pain in the butt, and multithreaded network code is even worse, but I eventually got everything ported over, and a lobby server and client up and running.  I did a fair amount of testing with the new internet code, including over my crappy 2G/EDGE cell modem, and with a friend in Tokyo, and it worked pretty well.  I still have some problems behind really restrictive firewalls (the Oakland Airport free wifi and the Westin St. Francis lobby wifi are my current challenges), but it should work for most judges, I think.

Here’s the IGF page for SpyParty, and we even made it into the IGF press release, which is nice.  There are a lot of great games in the IGF this year, so who knows what’s going to happen.

Here’s the README.txt in the SpyParty IGF submission for your reading pleasure.  It builds on the Four Page Instruction Manual and assumes the judges will read that first.
Continue reading ‘IGF Submission Submitted’ »

1. Hmm, it looks like they finally released the new 0.5 version, I wonder if they fixed all the same threading bugs I had to fix… [↩]

I’m sorry I went dark all of a sudden after PAX, I just got completely swamped with stuff, including festival deadlines, lectures, GDC stuff, etc.

It’s going to be a couple more weeks of crunching for various things (like the IGF deadline on 10/18), and then I will post the rest of the cool stuff from PAX I’m sitting on, and more.

In the meantime, I posted on Facebook about the various upcoming playtests, so check that out, and become a SpyParty “fan” there while you’re at it.  I tend to post small stuff there and on Twitter when I don’t have time to make a real post here on the blog.  I prefer the real long-form blog posts to the smaller notes, but when I’m snowed under sometimes I can only manage 140 characters!

Here’s a teaser video from one of the PAX Experts Tournament games, I think this one was in the quarterfinals:

Oh, and one of the things I’m doing for these festivals is getting SpyParty working over the internet, so that will pave the way for more testing where you don’t have to be in my dining room.  More on that in a month or two.

I’m so exhausted I’m not going to do much more than post pictures tonight, and I’ll write up more about PAX Day 3 tomorrow, but in addition to having a line of people Reading The Fine Manual, let me say that the SpyParty “PAX Experts” Tournament was so mind blowingly amazing I can’t even describe it. Well, I can probably describe it, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.  Watching some people come back multiple times, getting better and better each time, and then having them all play each other at the end was incredible.  Some of the games were so close and so tense that the players were grasping their chests after the round was over. Continue reading ‘PAX, Day 3, ZOMG’ »