It’s my pleasure to introduce the next five SpyParty characters! Wait, did I say five? I meant six.

Meet the new guests!

It’s true, we have added identical twins in this group, making this group six new characters total! A bonus character, no microtransactions required! More on that below, but first, check out how crowded the whole cast picture is getting:

It’s getting crowded up in here…

I think we’re going to need a riser for them to stand on or chairs or something for the next group shot when we add the rest of the characters.

More Saturated Colors!

One of our big goals for this batch was to really push the color saturation of the outfits. We actually thought we were being really colorful with the second batch, but after living with them for a while, it was clear they were drawn towards the blue/grey/brown video game gravity well.

This time, as you can see in these thumbnails of the progression from left to right, I think we’re finally at a good level of color saturation:

I was asked during an interview if I thought we’d go back and modify the colors on the older groups, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary. It’s not that nobody can wear blue/grey/brown, and in fact, those are stylish and sophisticated colors, it’s just that everybody shouldn’t be those colors, so I’m glad we’re mixing in some fully saturated primary and secondary colors now, I think it’ll make a big difference in the look of the game, and also in how quickly the players can identify the characters and manage their attention.

Diversity

As always, having a diverse cast is another goal of mine for SpyParty, and it is really a great game for exploring this. Not only is there the obvious visual interest that comes from having all these unique looking guests, but the gameplay benefits from it as well. The idea of “attention as a resource” is one of the aesthetic goals for SpyParty, and the more distinct and striking the characters are, the easier it is for the Sniper (and the Spy) to keep mental notes about their behaviors and movements during the game, and I can go deeper on the subtle stuff. Plus, did I mention they just look cool?

Meet the Latest Guests to Arrive at the Party

And here they are…as before, these “letter names” are temporary, and we haven’t decided how we’re going to come up with the final names, but I’m hoping we can involve the community somehow. In the meantime, the beta players come up with their own nicknames for all the characters, and then I end up using those too and nobody is going to care about their real names anyway, are they?

Mr. K

He’s a Sikh, and is our best-dressed guest. John Cimino, the amazing SpyParty artist, loves headgear and elaborate hairstyles for making recognizable silhouettes, and a Sikh’s turban is a perfect example of this. We’ll need to be respectful with how we treat the Sikh aspects of the character, so for example his beard is long and untrimmed and he’ll drink water. Hopefully folks will let us know if we make any mistakes here so we can correct them. Update: I was nervous about referencing religion in the game because it’s such a sensitive topic, but looks like it might be okay! Seems like a positive first impression!

Ms. L

She’s a rocker, think Chrissie Hynde or Patti Smith. We went with the leopard sleeved leather jacket and the silk shirt so we could really push the bright yellow; she’s got our most saturated and brightest primary colors in her outfit of all the characters. She also happens to be based on my girlfriend…I figured John put his girlfriend in the last batch of characters, so it was my turn!

Drs. M & N

Identical twins! How will they affect gameplay! I have no idea! What are they doctors of? I have no idea! As you can see if you look closely, they have a few subtle differences between them, and we’ll probably start out with those and see how they play. We can always make them more or less differentiable to tune them, but I’m hoping we can keep it really subtle. Once I add personalities and propensities to the characters (planned for this year, called “dossiers”), then I’m probably also going to look at adding a draft or pick/ban phase to the game loadout so the Spy and Sniper can negotiate who’s invited to the party, and I’ll be very interested to see how the twins are treated in that environment. Will the Sniper allow them both, then highlight or lowlight one to tell them apart? Will the Spy use them as a diversion, or pick to be one of them? So much stuff to play with here! As a technical side note, I’ve always said we’d have unique skeletons and animations for every character, but I’m breaking my promise for the twins; they’ll be instances of the same character model, so instead of having 20 guests in the 1.0 version of SpyParty, we’ll have 21. We reserve the right to give them different animations for some actions as tells.

Ms. O

John’s “sculpted clay” hair style for SpyParty pays off again! We modeled Ms. O as if she’s of a Mediterranean origin, like maybe Greek or Italian. Again, like with Ms. L, we pushed the primary color saturation on Ms. O. Compare her green blouse to Mr. G’s uniform; she should be much more visible at the party. We thought he was really green last time.

Mr. P

Or should I say Señor P? I will admit Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim was one of the inspirations for Mr. P. The cowboy hat has the obvious positive impact on his silhouette, but he’s also got the bright and saturated color scheme, and that sweet belt buckle. We’ll have to name him “Salvador Perez” or something similar to have plausible deniability that we didn’t put the video game’s name on a character’s belt buckle.

Group Shots

Here are all the group conversation shots so far, including the new characters mixed in!

When will they be in the game?

John is animating them now, so we’re aiming to have them in the game by PAX in Seattle at the end of August, or hopefully before that so we can actually test them! These guys gives us 16 total characters, so we’ll be able to do the Courtyard maps, Ballroom, and almost Veranda (which has 17 characters in the old art version).

I can’t wait to have these new folks at the party!

Here’s a teaser with plenty of clues in it for the observant…

How very mysterious…

Our friendly beta tester canadianbacon discovered an anti-tell1 with the way NPCs vs the Spy stopped walking when they reached their destination. This allowed him to lowlight most of the party over time, which turns out to be a pretty good way to find the Spy.

Here is the story of me trying understand and fix it:

Here is a quick (144 seconds) excerpt of a super long (4 hours, 49 minutes, 43 seconds, or 17383 seconds) debugging stream I did for fixing more pathing bugs. Well, it started as a single bug, then kind of multiplied:

1. something only the NPCs do, so you can lowlight for it with confidence [↩]

The latest build is up for your enjoyment, and contained within there’s a beautiful new map called Pub!

The new Pub level, playable now!

Pub was obviously inspired by the cool old pubs in London, with their flowers and patrons drinking a pint on the sidewalk. In fact, if you look at some of the reference images we used, they basically look just like SpyParty levels, complete with conversation circles and everything!

To be true to this look, there are no conversation circles inside the Pub, they’re all out on the sidewalk. Inside, there are two statues, and window pads looking outside. There’s even a window pad looking inward where the window is open to the Sniper’s right, similar to the one you can see in the second reference image, and yes, you can flirt with somebody through the window!

A Pint of Wells Banana Bread Beer, Barkeep!

Of course, once we have a pub, we need a bartender, so Toby got a second job, and a whole new behavior…

Toby works two jobs.

There’s no waiter on Pub, only the bartender, so to get a drink, you need to go to the bar and order it. This also means the Purloin Guestlist mission completely changes on this map. Before, the guestlist would be on Toby’s tray, and you’d steal it (or have somebody else steal it if you got a “green Action Test”) when he served you a drink. Now, it’s on the bar or in his pocket. You can either pick it up yourself, or choose to delegate the pickup to another guest by going into a conversation.

If you delegate, the NPC goes to order a drink and steal the list, so the Sniper has to think back to who was in which conversation and when and with whom, which adds a significant layer of subtlety to the mission.  SpyParty beta testers have even figured out that you can use the delegation to force the Ambassador to go to the bar, so you can get a fingerprint from the drinks later! It’s a good test for the upcoming “recommendations” feature I want to add. More on that later.

The other major gameplay change is some pathing and movement tuning to hopefully eliminate some of the “hard tells” associated with trying to move through congested areas. Time will tell how these pan out and if they help Spies not get shot in doorways.

Irene Adler

Some have asked about the name of the pub, The Irene Adler. My daughter and I are currently reading our way through the Complete Sherlock Holmes, and Irene Adler is an interesting character in one of the stories, A Scandal in Bohemia. It turns out Carole Nelson Douglas wrote some fun books from Irene’s point of view, so we’ve been reading those too. I figured, if Holmes gets a pub named after him in London (you can see it in the reference images above), Irene can have one too!

An Experiment

This build was actually a bit of an experiment with the beta process as well. Unlike previous new art maps, this time I didn’t release the ugly prototype version for public playtest. zerotka and I played it a bunch with internal builds, but I decided to try going straight to the finished art version for the public release. I would say this experiment was a bit of a failure, like I expected it to be. There’s incredible value in getting the prototype level out there for people to pound on, and doing the final version takes a lot longer, so during that time people could have been testing it. Plus, beta testers seem to like getting access to the ugly version and then seeing it hit with the pretty stick. Not that my version of it didn’t have a certain charm…

Beta players couldn’t have handled this much awesomeness.

From here on out, I’ll probably go back to releasing the prototype version first. I think that’s the better and faster way to get to an awesome level with fewer expensive changes needed to the high quality version.

We’re going to update again early next week with some minor changes and tuning, but Pub and these changes is live online, so if you’re in the beta just hit Play on the main menu and you’ll get them, or join the SpyParty beta and check them out yourself. Or if you want to check it out live on Twitch, you can follow the main SpyParty account, or follow @SpyPartyStreams to get notified when anybody streams!

If you’re not yet in the SpyParty beta or if you are but don’t check the (awesome) private beta forums,1 you may not know there was a tournament going on for the past few months. As usual, since I’m too discombobulated to do much of anything, it was a beta-tester organized tourney. This time around, bloom put it together, and decided it’d be the first ever “New Art Tournament”, so it was played entirely on the two maps in the new art style, New High-rise, and Modern.  Two maps is not a lot, but there are two different competition-worthy game modes on these maps, “Any 4 of 7” and “Any 3 of 5” on New High-rise, and “Any 2 of 3” on Modern and “Any 3 of 5” on Double Modern.2 These modes play completely differently, so there’s a fair bit of variety even give the limited number of maps.

We’re putting the final touches on a new new-art map that will be released imminently, but that’s for another post.

There were some awesome matches played during the whole tournament, and I’m sorry I didn’t have spectation implemented yet.  Some of the matches were streamed by the players, but spectation, which I will hopefully do Soon™ will allow casters to stream the matches with play-by-play and color commentary, which is always more fun.  For the final match between kcmmmm and scientist, though, we came up with a cockamamie hack to work around this using the replay system and DropBox’s directory watching, so toboshi and warningtrack could live-cast the whole thing, and it worked pretty well!  It was an amazing match, especially since scientist fought his was back from the losers bracket, and kcmmmmm was the one who put him in the losers bracket earlier in the tournament!

Here’s the video from the cast.  It’s long, at about 2 hours, with a pre-game show and everything. Some amazing elite-level SpyParty games and great analysis here:

Here’s the whole bracket if you want to see scientist‘s long voyage…

1. which I plan to make read-only-public at some point soon since they’re such a great information resource for the game [↩]
2. which is just Modern with another conversation circle, 10 guests, and a known Double Agent [↩]