According to this, the new PC Gamer UK has a SpyParty preview?

Anybody have a scan of it?

Update: As you can see in the comments, Simples was awesome and scanned it for us!

Continue reading ‘SpyParty in PC Gamer UK Issue 214’ »

I just read this interview with the Lost executive producers, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, and it’s got some pretty interesting comments in it that relate to some of my current thoughts about game design.

This first quote speaks to a concept Jonathan Blow and I talk about all the time when discussing game design and development, namely, bottom-up versus top-down game design, and listening to your game as you develop it and being able to react to what it’s telling you:

Lindelof: I think one of the most profound lessons I’ve learned over time as a show runner is that the more you listen to the show, the better your show.

I was struck that Lindelof used the exact same phrase when talking about developing Lost.  I’m being a bit hyperbolic here, but I think there’s a general belief in the game industry that you can top-down design games, that if your design document is good enough, you can just type it in, that making a game becomes predictable, but I really don’t think this is true if you’re going for greatness.  This is not to say you just start typing without any idea of what you’re going for, you definitely have to have aesthetic goals, but you need to have the freedom to listen to the game.

I also think this is why hybrid developers, like programmer-designers, and artist-designers, and artist-programmers are more effective, because the game speaks to you at many levels of detail and in many languages, and you’ll miss some of them if there’s a tin-can-and-string telephone between you and the game…sometimes late at night the game whispers something to the programmer about design or to the artist about programming, and he or she needs to be able to react to it.

This is also related to the rant I gave at GDC this year; you need more than a few days of development for your game to start saying important things to you.

The Lost guys also talk about how much they knew when they were creating the early episodes, and this relates to the ability to react to how the show itself is coming together:

Lindelof: We have to have the answers to the mysteries so that there is something to work towards, but what we don’t have are the stories. J.K. Rowling can sit down and say, here’s how Harry Potter’s parents were killed, and here’s who killed them, but how am I going to reveal that information to the audience in the most emotionally impactful way? So we know what we want to do, but we have very little idea of how and when we’re going to do it.

There’s a really great Bill Moyers interview with David Simon about The Wire that touches on this topic in a very similar way:

Simon: And, you know, I’m not suggesting we have everything planned to the nth degree. But we knew, for example when we wrote that scene in the beginning of the first season, that by the end of the run those three characters would have been treated as pawns in a chess game.

And we knew that character that cited what was ailing post-industrial America, he happened to be a union captain and one of the longshoreman. That he would be speaking to, at the time, what we were reacting to with Enron and things like– and WorldCom and the first sort of– first shots across our bow, economically. That people were trading crap and calling it gold. And that’s what THE WIRE was about. It was about that which is– has no value, being emphasized as being meaningful. And that which is– has genuine meaning, being given low regard.

The part at the end of this also speaks to me, because I’m constantly thinking about how games can have deeper meaning.  The talk I gave last year at the IGDA Leadership Forum asked,” Why are we making games?”  It’s really clear, listening to these guys talk, that they have meaningful things they’re trying to say with their art.

Carroll: Do you still see that as the central issue, man of faith versus man of science?

Lindelof: The paradigm has shifted from that to, were we brought here for a very specific reason, and what is that reason?

They’re even thinking about how their audience is thinking about their work:

Lindelof: Locke is now the voice of a very large subset of the audience who believes that when Lost is all said and done, we will have wasted six years of our lives, that we were making it up as we went along, and that there’s really no purpose.

I think games occasionally try to do some self-referential things like this, like the protagonist in Uncharted 2 saying things like “I’m so sick of climbing stuff”, but it’s happening at a much more surface level, and it’s not directly speaking through the interactivity, the way we need to be doing to come into our own as an art and entertainment form.

On the topic of actually answering questions, and making the meaning plain, they understand the perils:

Carroll: Is there a worry that there exists questions for which any possible answer is not as interesting as the question would be before you knew the answer?

Lindelof: Absolutely.

This is something Brian Moriarty has lectured on in the past.  He’s a gifted presenter, and his lectures The Secret of Psalm 46 and Who Buried Paul? are master classes on the topic.  J.J. Abrams gave a TED talk about his “mystery box”, which is a fine talk, but not as good as Moriarty’s.

Finally, I think this is something Jonathan did really well in Braid.  Iroqouis Pliskin gave an excellent talk at GDC about his interpretation of the meaning behind Braid.

I’ll relate all of this back to SpyParty in a future post.  Or maybe I won’t.  :)

Let’s be clear:  I love making games, and I hope to do it for a few more decades, fate willing.

That said—like in other creative endeavors—the pursuit of awesomeness in game development is often mind-numbingly tedious and mundane.  Case in point:  my last week and a half.

It all started when I decided the next cool thing to work on would be to get the partygoers to be able to pick up stuff, like books, sculptures, drinks, cigarettes, and any other MacGuffins I come up with for the Spy missions.  Let’s ignore the fact that it’s 2010 and game developers still need to think about and do work to get characters to pick up objects in game worlds.  Sigh.

Okay, this seems like a reasonable short term programming goal that will allow me to further explore the design space.  For example, it will allow the characters to carry books away from the bookshelves, making it harder for the Sniper to keep track of what’s going on, etc.

Easy!  What could possibly go wrong?

I broke this high level task down into bite-sized components:

1. Add an event track to the animation system so the animations can tell the AI when the object should be attached.
2. Make an animation for picking up the object and have it fire an attachment event.
3. Add non-character dynamic items as a concept to the code.
4. Add a simple attachment system to the character AI and rendering code.
5. Write a quick full body IK system so the character doesn’t have to align with the item exactly1.
6. Hook it all up.

I start on Step 1, and get it done relatively quickly.  There was a bit of an issue of figuring out how to represent the event track in the modeling tool, but once I figured that out (with help from the awesome Ryan Ellis), it went pretty smoothly.

Okay, so next up, Step 2, the rough animation to pick up an item.  Of course, when doing an animation referencing an item in the world, you want that item in the view while you’re doing the animation.  I load up the pedestal with the statue on it into the file with the character rig, and get this:

That’s a very tiny pedestal you have there.

Hmm, that’s odd…

Continue reading ‘Game development is tedious, let’s go shopping!’ »

1. This is a step that might give some people pause, but I’ve written so many IK solvers over the years that I figure I can whip this out in a day or so.  Famous last words. [↩]

Wow, so the week after the Game Developers Conference was kind of  simultaneously crazy and great for SpyParty!  As I posted previously, I did a ton of playtests at the conference with developers, and I got a lot of great feedback on the game.

I also playtested it with a few folks from the game press, and they were nice enough to write up their experiences on their various news sites.  And then those articles got picked up by other sites, and things went a little nuts.  I was on airplanes for half of one of the days, ssh’ing in from my phone on the tarmac to try to keep my server running!

Let’s see, in the order the stories were posted:

• AVC at GDC ’10: Spy party! by John Teti on The Onion AV Club
  “I don’t want to beat around the bush here; this game is awesome in too many ways to describe here.”
• GDC 2010: Enjoyed and Annoyed by Evan Narcisse on Time Magazine’s Techland Blog
  “Even in its pre-natal form, Spy Party does a great job of creating a new kind of multiplayer psychological tension. It’s something that wasn’t even on my GDC agenda, yet it wound up rocking my world.”
• Why you need to be excited about SpyParty by Anthony Burch on Destructoid
  “There has never been a videogame like SpyParty. … SpyParty is as cerebral and personal experience as I’ve ever had with a multiplayer game. … Despite being two years away from completion, the early version I saw still remains one of the most subtle, enjoyable, and surprisingly playful multiplayer games I’ve yet played.”
• Innovative SpyParty Is Ultimate Mind Game by Gus Mastrapa on Wired’s Game|Life
  “SpyParty is like nothing else I’ve ever played. … When the laser focuses on you, the tension is intense. And the relief, when the beam swings away, is powerful.”
• I Know That You Know That I Know What You  Know by Chris Dahlen on Edge Online
  “Both players are tense with the joy of knowing or not knowing or thinking they know what’s about to happen.”
• The Next Smart Video Game Only Lets You Kill Once by Stephen Totilo on Kotaku and Gizmodo
  “Part of what is so exciting about Spy Party is the stuff that happens around the game. Hecker has seen the game trigger strong emotional responses. I even felt it… guilt of all things. I’ve killed thousands — millions? — of enemy characters and even some friendly characters in video games with none of the pangs of consequence. I shot one innocent partygoer in Spy Party after tracking them for a few minutes, after being sure they were Chris Hecker’s avatar and up to no good, and then, as they lay dead on the floor I realized I was wrong. I felt bad.”
• You Only Shoot Once: SpyParty by Kieron Gillen on Rock, Paper, Shotgun
  Kieron couldn’t make it to GDC this year, but he wrote up his thoughts on the game from reading the other articles!
  “Pure battle of wits stuff here, and seems totally fascinating. It’s a couple of years away, at least in part due to a major general aesthetic upgrade, but we’ll be watching it. Closely. Trying to work out if it’s a spy.”

In the middle of all this, Gus’ Wired piece hit the front page of reddit, and Anthony’s Destructoid story hit the front page of the games section of stumbleupon, both of which generated a ton more traffic to the articles and the SpyParty blog.  Stephen’s piece generated 300 comments on Kotaku and Gizmodo, a Fark comment thread, and as of this writing it’s on the top of the stubleupon games section with Anthony’s piece on the same page!

Then a bunch of other people started writing articles about the game, with titles like Finally, a TRUE Spy Game!, and commenting about the game on forums and on Twitter.  It broke out of the video game industry in a few places, like this article on a poker blog:  Innovative Video Game Concept Should Appeal to Poker Players.  It even snuck its way into articles about other games, like Brandon Boyer’s article about Jason Rohrer’s Sleep Is Death; the “banana bread” comment in that story happened because Jason thought Brandon had already played SpyParty, and the current tell for the Contact Double Agent mission uses the codeword “banana bread”!

To state the obvious, I am over the moon with all of this coverage.  The comments by fans on the big gaming blogs are really encouraging, and people seem to love the game concept and want me to get it done as fast as possible.

I took some screenshots to send to the various journalists, and I’ve assembled a page of images, which is also accessible at the top of the blog.  I’ll add any media to that page in the future.

I also took a bunch of pictures of the press guys playing each other…

Continue reading ‘GDC 2010: SpyParty Press Extravaganza’ »

I’ve decided the best way to go really mass market with SpyParty is to support a mashup of Big Head Mode and the hip retro vector graphics style of Tron and Geometry Wars…

Continue reading ‘New SpyParty Gameplay Mode’ »