GamesBeat: Do things go by on the outside?
Hecker: They don’t yet. They will. I don’t have animation in the world yet, only the characters. Eventually I will, because there’s a ton of these maps and mission ideas. One of the great things about having a healthy community is I get a ton of ideas from the community. One of the maps the community has suggested is an apartment in Chicago with the elevated train going by every once in a while. You can hear it coming. The spy obviously wants to wait for that, but the sniper needs to look through the windows. Once I have that animation, there will be steam coming out of things, cabs going by, stuff like that. But not quite yet.
It’s kind of timeless. You’re not sure when it is. It’s an old-fashioned cab, but a modern mailbox. We wanted you to be not really sure. Some people have pocket watches. Some have cell phones. When is this happening? Kind of noir. You’ll have the manhole cover with the steam rising. There’s the whole New York skyline back there. You can look down the street.
Here’s an opposite map to Courtyard. This is Library, which used to be called Panopticon, because the player suggested the idea of a panopticon, this layout where the guards are in the center and the prisoners are in the outside. It’s a prison reform idea. If you look at this map, the sniper’s in the center looking out and rotating. It’s a very different space. Where the Turing statue was in the sniper now, and the party happens around him.
The sniper’s view can move a lot faster than they can look around in Courtyard. You might think the sniper is looking here — the sniper can basically see one of these sections at a time, with their cone of view. You could want to bug the ambassador over here, but if the sniper knows that, they swing the laser here and then swing back fast. They can’t do that in Courtyard because it takes a while to move around the outside. It’s exploring the opposite end of the design spectrum for the sniper’s movement.
Panopticon was a prison reform idea from Jeremy Bentham, this guy in the 19th century. That’s Jeremy Bentham there. All these busts are of prison reformers. We found two women and two men in that field and made it a prison reform library. Nobody’s gonna know what it means, but it’s just cool, when you’re doing an indie game. We have these people who’ve been playing five years, 20,000 games. Giving them something to talk about is great.
When we converted it to a library—we didn’t do a full in-the-round thing, because we didn’t have enough characters. We could only fill about three fifths of it. Making it a library made more sense given the size. These are all based on the game design of the previous white box maps. They’re competitive-level maps. They’ve been played in tournaments. We know they’re tuned.
This is Moderne, which is based on a mansion in South Africa. This map used to look like this. It was the first new art map we did, as a concept. We were doing this thing where it’s warm where the spy is and cool where the sniper is. But back when we did this, we only had five new art characters. It looks weird to have old art characters in new art maps. We cordoned off the map just to make it available, but then when we developed the environment art style more, it ended up looking like this, so we had enough characters and we opened the whole thing up. This map has never been played before.
GamesBeat: It reminds me of one of the Hitman mobile maps.
Hecker: Totally. That game’s pretty shallow. You’re just trying to spot the guys. But the sniper rotating around the outside is the same. You have a similar thing going on. There’s a whole genre of sniper-oriented games like that.
Here’s the latest map John did. These maps are done by a combination of John Cimino and Reika Yoshino. Reika was an artist we had for a year. She’s now at thatgamecompany. She wanted to move to Los Angeles. She did three of them and John did the rest. This is based on Santorini or Mykonos, a Greek island, tumbling hillsides and all that. In this you can see these stairs and stuff. Right now our path system doesn’t support multiple levels, but eventually we can open up more of this level for variants once the pathing is improved. A lot of these maps, like the inside of Balcony, and here, have places you could go that are ready to open up once we can support it. There’s plenty to do after Steam Early Access as well.
GamesBeat: It looks you’re not animating blood?
Hecker: No. In fact, when my daughter was playing, years ago, we talked about the sniper shot sound, even. The game has no violence in the actual interactivity, which is interesting. It’s more like a Hitchcockian use of violence. In Hitchcock movies you never see the murder. They’re talking about the murder that happened, or it’s gonna happen, but back then you couldn’t show a murder.
SpyParty is kind of Hitchcockian in that sense. The sniper has one bullet. As soon as you pull the trigger, the game’s over. You can’t miss, because it’s whoever you highlight and shoot. You can’t shoot the wall. It’s more of an identification thing. The character dies in a kind of silly overdramatic way. But the violence happens completely outside the game. It’s the threat of violence while you’re playing that creates the tension.
Clementine, my daughter, didn’t like sniper shot. It’s scary for a six-year-old. That’s when she started playing this game. She’s 14 now. Let’s not even think about that. I thought, “You know what, I should put an arrest mode in.” The sniper tags somebody, game’s over, and then big burly guys come and haul the spy away. Then all the Guantanamo stuff came to mind, though, and I thought, “Well, is it better or worse to catch a bullet in the head or be dragged away to some hidden prison for the rest of your life and be tortured.” I’m still not sure.
I’ll probably still put the arrest mode in, because if you think about it from a game mechanic standpoint, literally nothing changes. If I tag somebody and say, they’re it, game’s over, they get dragged off, nothing changes. You still identified the spy or got a civilian or whatever. You’re right or wrong. The same win conditions apply. But I think it changes the way the game feels when there’s no shot. From an aesthetics standpoint I’m interested to see what that feels like. Does it make the game less tense? Does it change anything about actually playing? I don’t know.
Games are still pretty early on as an art form. Questions like that—how does the completely external aesthetic affect the actual play? It’s really interesting. You get an example of that here, where any of these maps that have the old art versions—all the active areas on the ground where the spy can do missions, those were all exactly the same when we did the new art versions. That way we knew the game was tuned. We didn’t have to rebalance anything. Moderne is the only one that’s new, because we opened it all up. The rest of these are all based on tournament maps that were just ugly.
But the fact that it’s new art changes the feel of it. The characters blend in with the background a little more. We make them pop, but it’s not as obvious as when it’s this cartoony. Even aesthetic stuff—it’s a game about perception. Things like pixel details matter. All those things are interesting to me as a game designer, how aesthetics and behavior and the AI system all interact with the game.
This is a game about AI. It’s flipped on its head. The player has to pretend to be an AI, as opposed to AI trying to mimic a human, which never works very well, as we see in most video games.
GamesBeat: Does it distract you in some way from what you’re supposed to be watching for? You’re supposed to be watching for a glitchy person, right?
Hecker: For newbies, yeah. They’re kind of like, “What am I doing?” They don’t know how to walk. There’s a lot of micro in this game, like how StarCraft and games like that separate out micro and macro. There’s strategy and then there’s how fast you can click. There’s only a little micro in this game compared to a Counter-Strike or a StarCraft, but there is micro. Being able to walk is a skill, a physical skill. Being able to walk like an AI. There are certain mouse-clicky things when you’re doing missions — you can do missions better or worse. It’s light compared to a Counter-Strike, but it’s in there intentionally.
I could have done click to move, on the spy side. But having to puppeteer the spy embeds you in the world more, makes you feel more immersed. It also provides more player skill of a micro variety, not just macro strategy. It’s like salt in a meal. It’s seasoning. You need a bit of that. It makes the game deeper to have a bit of that.
At beginner levels you might see — if we watched a replay of a beginner game, you can see it pretty easily. They’re stopping in the middle of nowhere. But as a beginner sniper you’re so snowed under looking at this whole thing that you don’t even notice it. That scales really well. By the time you start looking for it, the spy is learning not to do that stuff. At elite levels they walk exactly like the AI. That was a core coding thing. I have to make it possible to exactly emulate an AI. Then you have to do missions on top of that. That’s where you get suspicion. Or you get suspicion from intentionality.
There are basically three kinds of tells in the game. There are hard tells, like bugging the ambassador. There’s an animation that shows you planting a bug on the ambassador. There are soft tells, which are more deductive. One of the missions is contacting a double agent. That sends an audio sample, which is me saying “banana bread” for historical reasons. When you hear that, you know someone in a conversation circle is it. This guy couldn’t have been it. But it could be any of these people. It allows you to pare down the party. I wanted some deduction in it. Not as much as Clue, where you grind down to an exact answer, but I wanted some deduction, so you can highlight and lowlight on the sniper side to manage your suspects, which makes people more and less visible.
Then there are just pure behavioral tells, which are simply, “That guy’s acting funny.” At the more elite levels it’s like, “That guy is acting more intentionally than an AI would.” They’re making a lot of stops at mission sites. They’re not doing anything, but they’re moving around the party as if they were going to do something. Those behavioral tells, people shoot for that at elite levels. “This is my best suspect and I’m pretty sure they’re getting close to finished.” At the level of 20,000 games, they’re playing a very subtle, very behavioral game. Sometimes they’ll catch a bug animation, but they’re good about hiding that stuff.
GamesBeat: How much time do you have in the match?
Hecker: It varies per level. It’s a handicapping thing. There are games that are two minutes and games that are four minutes. There’s also a way for the spy to add time, which the sniper can notice if they’re careful. There are extra mission spy actions. But on average it’s about three minutes. It’s great for matchmaking, because unlike a 30-minute DOTA game, I can have a way smaller matchmaking pool. On average, every 90 seconds someone comes up free.
These four maps are in there already. That’s Pub. That’s Highrise. That’s Ballroom. There’s Veranda. This is a horseshoe-shaped map, so the sniper goes all the way around the outside. Again, in each one of these we’re exploring more game design space. These are all the maps.