Archive for the ‘design’ Category.

Know Your Enemy, Especially if He or She Has a Sniper Rifle

The fellow on the right looks like a pretty nice guy, no?  Well, take my advice: don’t go to a party where he is lurking outside. Meet Paul and Ian, my elite SpyParty playtesters. Both have played around 10 hours of SpyParty across multiple sessions.  They’ve played the game more than anybody else, including me […]

A Deathtrap and a Walk in the Park

One of the new things I’m doing for the GDC build is adding two additional maps.  Up until now, everybody who’s played SpyParty has played in the Ballroom, a box with 12 or so characters in it and windows on two sides.  The Ballroom is carefully tuned to be fair for both Sniper and Spy […]

How I Celebrated the IGF Nomination

You may have heard SpyParty was nominated for the Seumas McNally 1 Grand Prize at the 2011 Independent Games Festival.  This is really exciting, even though I probably have no chance of winning!  Still, I celebrated in the best way possible:  I worked on the game. The feature I’m working on right now I call […]

Thanksgiving Metrics Teaser

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 […]

More Cocktail Teasers

A few more teaser shots for the new cocktail stuff.  Soon, drinks will be served by this nice gentleman, rather than teleporting directly into the hands of the partygoers. Of course, eventually you could choose to be the waiter or waitress, and that would certainly make poisoning the Generalissimo’s drink pretty easy, however you might […]