As I mentioned before, I playtested the hell out of SpyParty at GDC this year.  I tried to take pictures of everybody playing, while simultaneously taking copious notes, as one should while people are playing your game.  Since I’m doing the depth first design methodology, the game required a fair bit of explaining to get people up and running, but after that, everybody got into the rhythm.

First up, my old friends Mike Mika and Chris Charla. I had added a bunch of features in on the runup to GDC, including adding console controller support to the Sniper so it could be played without needing room for a mouse, and I needed to make sure I didn’t break anything before setting it up at a big party on Tuesday night, so I had Mike and Chris over to the hotel room to pretest.

Mike and Chris have known each other forever, and so they know each other’s game play styles pretty well.  Mike used this knowledge to his advantage when he decided to just stand around talking, while loudly flicking the camera joystick (which doesn’t move the Spy) in time with another AI moving.  Chris took the bait and shot the civilian.  Hard core metagaming!  I really need to figure out how to get this level of in-the-same-room metagaming going across the net.

Mike Mika (otherocean.com)

Chris Charla (f9e.com)

After this, Mike tweeted:

Just played ten rounds of Spy Party at GDC! This is te best game I’ve played in a LONG time. Hecker is pulling it off.   5:55 PM Mar 9th

While Chris tweeted:

Just play tested Chris Hecker’s SpyParty! Even better the second time. Finally wasted @mikejmika. 5:53 PM Mar 9th

Yay!  Okay, so I didn’t bust anything, now it’s off to the party…

Continue reading ‘GDC 2010: Developers Playtest SpyParty’ »

So, the wp-recaptcha plugin I use for spam protection in wordpress freaked out when I upgraded the blog to wordpress 2.9.2 the other day, and started marking all the incoming comments as spam automatically, which was very helpful, especially right before all the press coverage for SpyParty this week.1  I could not figure out why there was enough traffic to melt my server, but nobody was leaving comments.  Well, here’s the explanation:

http://www.blaenkdenum.com/2010/03/recaptcha-marking-all-comments-as-spam/

Sigh.

Anyway, it should be fixed now, and I rescued 28 comments from the spam folder, and I’ll go through them and reply to the questions over the next few days.

ObSpyParty:2  To rescue this post from utter mundanity, I offer you this little story about playtesting at the Stupid Fun Club a few weeks ago…

Continue reading ‘28 Comments Rescued, Bonus Anecdote’ »

1. More about that soon! [↩]
2. Does anyone else even know what Ob______ means anymore on the internet? I am old, like, Usenet old. [↩]

I am still barely functional after a long GDC, but I playtested the heck out of  SpyParty at the show, and I took a bunch of pictures of everybody playing, so I’ll be posting those soon.   In the meantime, here’s a teaser:

Jonathan Mak plays while Daniel Benmergui and Petri Purho observe.

PS.  WordPress is totally fired for not allowing links in image captions without horrible hacks.  Here are their websites:  Jon, Daniel, Petri

Jonathan Blow has finally started up the development blog for The Witness, his new game post-Braid, and he’s currently talking about the rendering technology and aesthetic he’s working towards.  Jonathan and I often do “Indie Game Work Days” together (which we steadfastly refuse to call “coworking days”), where I’ll work on SpyParty and he’ll work on The Witness, and once my daughter Clementine was along for the ride and ended up “playtesting” The Witness for a bit.  She has playtested in-development software before—mostly the Spore Creature Creator—but this was her first time using a full 3D mouse-look interface.  She picked it up pretty quickly and had a great time moving around the island.  Now that he’s revealed some prototype screenshots, I can post these pictures I’ve been sitting on.

Continue reading ‘The Littlest Playtester’ »

Technically, even though this post is getting published in February, I started writing it in January, 2010, so I think saying “Happy New Year!” still counts for something…

2010 is going to be the first full year of development on SpyParty, and I’m pretty excited about the progress so far.  The official Goal for the Year™ is to figure out if the core gameplay is as cool and compelling as I hope it will be based on the thinking and brainstorming I’ve done over the years.  Will I be able to achieve my design goals of making a truly deep and replayable game about subtle human behavior?  I have no idea, but this year I plan to find out.  The problem with making a game that is truly different is you can’t say with any confidence whether it will work at all.  Scary!  I think the old Albert Einstein quote is in order:

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

There are a lot of philosophical themes I’m hoping SpyParty will touch on (using interactivity, not narrative or cut scenes, of course!) that I’ll go into in more detail the future, but from a pure design process standpoint, I’m following two basic tenets:

1. Make the deep and hardcore game first, and make it accessible later in development, a.k.a. Depth First, Accessibility Later. I’m ripping this off directly from a 2006 speech by Rob Pardo, the Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard, about how they design games for the long term.  Here’s a great quote from the Gamasutra writeup:  “First we try to come up with what are really cool things, things that will get people to play for two to three years. Then we actually start talking about accessibility, how to make the content approachable and easy to learn. But it starts with depth first.” As I said in a recent interview, I wish we had taken this approach on Spore, and developed a super consequential core game to go with the awesomely deep editors, and then worried about making it accessible. There are probably a lot of different ways to make good games, so I don’t know if this one is the best, but it feels right for SpyParty because I want to have a core game that’s highly focused on player skill (mind you, not the same player skills as most games, but skills like perception, deduction, distraction, performance, and subterfuge).
2. Playtest early and often. The game is years away from shipping, but I’m already playtesting the super-duper-incredibly-ugly-and-crufty-early-prototype multiple times a week with friends and colleagues.  These started out as truly painful sessions, where I basically couldn’t get people to play with me without bribing them with free lunch or chocolate chip cookies, but I recently had a playtest with a bunch of friends from EA, Maxis, and Zynga, and they played the game for 4 hours straight, until 1am, which blew me away.  They were having a good time, giving tons of great feedback, really competing with each other in the game, and developing strategies and counter-strategies.  The playtesters ranged from people who never played “core games” to hardcore gamer min-maxers, and the results were promising.  The newbie players would always get owned by the experienced players (where “experienced” means “played a few more games that evening”), which is right where the game wants to be at this point in development.   It’s relatively simple to make the game easier and accessible for new players by tuning and matchmaking, but making a game that doesn’t have that skill component into a player skill game doesn’t work.  I was surprised how well the playtest went, and was slightly giddy, to be honest.  I’ll post more thoughts about this later.

I will leave you with two images that are pretty inspirational for SpyParty (no, not the highly questionable image of Peter Sellers in blackface playing an Indian gentleman, that’s cringe-worthy at best, yikes!):

I’ll write more about these images soon.