Still alive after two days of PAX, one more to go!

Today there was a line from the instant the show floor opened to the public, until closing time!  I feel bad people have to wait to play, but the line has turned out to be a blessing, actually, because it gives people a chance to read the Four Page Instruction Manual and observe the game in progress, so it seems like people are needing less instruction by the irreplaceable and awesome Tom Bui and Ian Hetu.

Highlights of the day include:

• Anthony Burch brought fiance (or did they get married already, I’ve heard conflicting reports?) Ashley Davis over to play.  Of course, because he’s a mean person, he put her against somebody who had already played.  So, to get him back I had him play Ian.  Anthony played a lot of SpyParty and got pretty good at GDC earlier this year, but that was a long time ago:  Ian: 2, Anthony: 0.  Video of the final moments of their match is below.  It was great, kind of like an exhibition match of two pros, and everybody in the crowd was paying close attention!  They’re both cold as ice while playing…Anthony doesn’t move anything except his lip when he shoots.

• Apparently we were nominated by machinima.com for Best of PAX 2010, since somebody came by and gave me a sticker to put on the booth!  I haven’t found anything about it online yet, though, post a comment if you find something.
• Listening to people in line telling their friends about it.  It seemed like the lines today were from word-of-mouth, which is the best kind of attention you can get!  The idea of a spy game about subtle behavior is really sinking in and making people take notice, which feels great.
• We’ve had enough repeat players that we’re going to run an “experts tournament” Sunday at PAX at 3pm.  If you’ve played more than a couple times, you can enter.  Depending on how people do, we might use some of the more advanced rules, like “subsetting” the missions, so the Spy picks 3 out of 4 missions, which means the Sniper can’t camp.  I think we’ll have the winners play Tom and Ian.  Ian can be kind of like Goro in this tournament.
• Justin McElroy from Joystiq played this morning and wrote up a great piece on SpyParty.
• The awesome repro of a bug by a player, so helpful!

Pics!
Continue reading ‘PAX, Day 2’ »

The first day of PAX is over, and we are still alive!!!  We had crowds almost all of the time, and occasionally a giant line.  Best of all, we had a fair number of repeat customers.  One pair of guys game back 5 or so times, which is exactly what I was hoping for, because you can only start to get into the depth of the game on repeated playthroughs.

I cannot thank my friends Tom Bui and Ian Hetu enough, I would not be here writing this if it wasn’t for their help.  The manual helped a lot, but almost every person still needed a lot of help on their first game, and Tom and Ian did almost all the talking.  It was a lifesaver, and it allowed me to keep my voice and stay sane and deal with issues as they came up.

People played 170 games today.  I can’t wait to analyze the journaled data.  That will hopefully make for some really interesting blog posts!

Our only real problem of the day was that one of the machines had a persistent problem when high/lowlighting people when in Sniper mode, and it took forever to figure out.  Luckily, we eventually did.  I turn off the mouse when the gamepad is active, but I was using a cached mouse position for highlighting when the mouse was over the portraits at the bottom, so every time the Sniper would trigger over a person in the party, it would also highlight the person who’s portrait was under the old mouse coordinates.  It was hairy to debug, but once we did, the fix was one line, and better yet, the workaround was just moving the (invisible) mouse on that machine, so I didn’t even need to update the game live.

Here are some pictures and videos from the day:

Continue reading ‘PAX, Day 1’ »

Edit: check out the latest manual here.

Okay, here is the slightly infamous Four Page Instruction Manual for playing SpyParty at PAX.  I felt like I had to print this because of the one downside of the Depth-first, Accessibility-later development methodology I’m following.

My goal with printing up this document is to save my voice for actually new and interesting conversation.  I’m 100% confident I will lose my voice every day, but I’d like it to be from talking to fans about the gameplay, not repeating what the A button does over and over again.  I really have no idea whether anyone will read it at all.  I’ll report back on Friday.

I’m sorry I didn’t get this up yesterday, not only because it deprived you, the wonderful fans, of a day of plumbing its mysteries, but also because I literally finished it and hit send today, 11 minutes after the absolute latest deadline the printer gave me.  I didn’t even have time to read the whole thing.  I hope it’s not completely opaque. If I’d put it up yesterday I could have taken feedback and made it better, but as Donald Rumsfeld always said, “You go to PAX with the Four Page Instruction Manual you printed.”

Here is the print-ready PDF, which assumes you can print two-sided, and then you fold it in half to get the four-page booklet.

This document represents a fairly accurate beginner’s view of the state of SpyParty right now.  After you play a few times, you start to get to even more depth that I couldn’t fit on here (as if it’s not way too dense already!).   Let me know what you think in comments, or if parts are confusing, or if it makes sense.

Here’s a teaser of our booth while under construction this evening:

Monaco & SpyParty PAX Booth #3004, WIP

I’m having the two players face each other, and the big HDTV is duplicating the small HDTV closest to me taking the picture.  I’m counting on good sportsmanship from the other player by assuming he or she will not turn around!  And, hopefully the crowd won’t yell out spoilers.

I’m busy writing the documentation booklet that I’m going to give to people wanting to play SpyParty at PAX1, and I needed an Xbox 360 Controller image to put in there so I can point to the buttons and say what they each do, just like real games do.  Well, it turns out there isn’t any nice picture of a controller that’s usable for this online, so I made one by taking a picture of one of my controllers, and then painting the alpha transparency mask.  Painting masks is a giant pain in the butt, so I figured I’d upload it here in case some other developer needs one.  It’s not exactly professional print quality, but it’s 3.2k by 2k, so it’s high enough resolution for most things.   Here’s a preview 1600 by 1000 png:

It wants a little contrast adjustment and whatnot, but I figure the raw file is most useful.  Here’s the photoshop PSD:  xbox_360_controller.zip (24mb)

1. Yes, it’s basically insane to expect people to read documentation before playing a game demo at a convention, but the game is currently so inaccessible to newbs that I really have no choice.  I’ll upload the draft document here tomorrow so people can give feedback. [↩]

When you get a booth at a convention, you’re supposed to get insurance so that when somebody trips over a taped-down cable, bruises their knee, and sues you, they don’t end up owning your game.

This is a screenshot from one of the insurance policies:

It’s good to know the relative value of these things…

In cable-trippingly related SpyParty news, I’m currently testing whether the warning on my 10′ USB extension cable, which reads, “Caution – do not exceed ten feet of total cable distance on low-speed devices, sixteen feet on high-speed devices”, is really accurate, or whether I can run an Xbox 360 wired controller (9′) over it.  It seems to work so far…famous last words.  Maybe I’ll pick up some USB repeater cables.

While searching, I found this excellent quote from the Xbox FAQ page:

9. Can I connect wireless and wired controllers at the same time?

You can connect up to four controllers in any combination you can think of with a maximum of up to two wired and two wireless controllers.

Any combination you can think of, except most of them.

Obligatory SpyParty screenshot:

"Would you care for a drink, General?"