After more than a year in invite-only closed beta, SpyParty, the long-in-development game of perception, deception, and subtle behavior from veteran indie developer Chris Hecker, has opened its doors to the public.
Would-be spies and secret agents can sign up for the game's open beta for $15, which grants immediate access to the game as well as a full copy upon its eventual release.
Hecker says there was "a big fear component" to taking the open beta live.
"With a private beta, you're like one of those guys in New York who run the clubs with the velvet ropes," he said via phone, "whereas an open beta is like a restaurant, and you're wondering if anyone will show up."
SpyParty is a game for two players. One takes the role of a spy infiltrating a cocktail party, tasked with missions such as "bug the ambassador," "steal the statue," and "signal the double agent." The other is a sniper looking in through the windows, attempting to discern which of the characters is the human-controlled enemy agent. The spy wins if they complete all of their missions without being shot. But since the sniper only has one bullet, he must choose carefully.
Hecker first came up with the idea for SpyParty at an indie game jam in 2005, drawing inspiration from an entry entitled Dueling Machine as well as the idea of a reverse Turing test: Could humans convincingly attempt to pretend to be a robot?
He began developing the game in his spare time while working at Maxis on Will Wright's Spore, first showing it to the public at the Game Developers Conference in 2009. When he was laid off later that year, Hecker turned himself into a one-man development studio, working on SpyParty full-time.
In 2011, Hecker hired longtime collaborator John Cimino to overhaul SpyParty's art style from pixelated proto-Sims to sophisticated cocktail-sippers. But aside from Cimino, Hecker does everything: tuning the animations, talking to press, writing algorithms for AI pathfinding, tech support on the forums, balancing the game design.
"It sounds like so much stuff," Hecker says, "but I'm interested in it all. It's kind of a relief from working on Spore, where I was just a tiny cog. Even though what I was developing was really important, that game was so huge that even the important stuff was just a small bit of what ended up on the disk. But here, it's a perfectionist's dream. I can make every bit of it as perfect as I want, given unlimited time."
For players waiting to get their hands on SpyParty, it can seem as if Hecker has been taking unlimited time to finish. And he says the full release is still a few years off.
"The nice thing about a paid beta is it doesn't trigger my perfectionism warning signals," Hecker says. "My brain will let me do a paid beta, but it wouldn't let me ship the game early."
Hecker sees the paid beta model as far healthier than options such as Kickstarter or investment funding. Players get in the game early, the developer gets feedback, and so long as there are enough sign-ups to sustain development, there's no clock ticking on when the full product needs to be released.
"That's the magic of triple-A indie right now, and this paid-beta thing," Hecker says. "If you can make it work, you can just keep going and make the game completely perfect within your skill. You want your abilities to be your limit, not some douchebag with a checkbook who doesn't really care."
By the end of the closed beta, approximately 6,800 people were playing SpyParty. Now that the doors are open, roughly 400 people are joining each day. But while traffic spikes are nice, Hecker knows that the numbers will taper off. He says that as long as he gets about 30 new sign-ups a day, development can continue unimpeded: "As long as it pays for me to eat and my daughter to go to school and John's salary, we're good to go, and we can just make the game awesome."
As of this writing, more than 127,000 total games of SpyParty have been played. In the last six months, the 35 players with more than 40 hours of playtime each have played nearly 15,000 games against each other. For these elite matchups, the win ratio stands at 45.1 percent Spy victories to 54.9 percent Sniper.
Hecker uses these numbers, combined with feedback from the community, to ensure SpyParty is as balanced as possible.
"It's hard to make a game like this," Hecker says. "But the rewards are so amazing, because watching someone play at an elite level in something you made — watching this virtuosic performance — it's unbelievable."
On that note, Hecker says he makes all of his tuning and balance decisions with the game's elite players in mind, following a Blizzard-inspired design philosophy of "depth first, accessibility later."
"During Spore we ended up doing 'accessibility first, depth never,'" Hecker says, "which was one of the flaws of with the game. There was a lot of really cool stuff in Spore, but it never got to this critical mass of cool game. With SpyParty I vowed not to make that mistake and turned it to 11 in the other direction."
That means there's still a lot more to do. Hecker lists new maps, new missions and eSports-style options like spectator mode and replays as features yet to be added. But most importantly, there's John Cimino's new artwork. The current playable version of SpyParty still features Hecker's programmer art, not Cimino's polished designs.
Hecker says he can't just drop in the new characters yet, because the artwork is how SpyParty is balanced. The whole game is about staring at the characters and picking out the human. It's an exercise in subtlety and attention to detail. Changing the art means changing everything.
Still, Hecker hopes to have a version of the game with the new art style "limping along" by Penny Arcade Expo in August. This will be more of a "tech demo," he says, but having versions with both the old and new art running side-by-side will finally put Hecker and Cimino on the same page, working together and progressing forward.
"At some point I'll have to decide what it means to ship," he says. "When you're doing these paid-beta games – take Minecraft for example – shipping was like 'Alright, I guess we'll call this next build done.'"
"Eventually, one of them you call 1.0, and maybe you throw a party."
