GamesBeat: Is there a leaderboard?
Hecker: Yeah, yeah. Here’s our forums, which are insanely active and awesome. It’s outside the game. There are no leader boards in the game. The lobby shows wins and stuff. There’s all this subtle psychological — I didn’t want to do stuff without being really thoughtful about it. Showing numbers like MMR, an ELO or TrueSkill — those numbers go down, and so people don’t really like those numbers, until they’re at a certain skill level.
Here, this person has spent 1,000 hours in matches. They’ve played 19,000 games total. I’m down here. Pretty far down. It’s great to get your ass handed to you at your own video game. That’s such a good feeling. Anyway, there are detailed stats, but you can just see the total number of games here. There’s a lot of playtime in this game, which is great.
In the game, though — I want it to be competitive, but I don’t want to pound people over the head with that. The elite players know to go here. There’s a ladder, and tournaments and stuff, but that’s all outside the game and in the forums right now. Eventually I want to start working some of that in, but I’m just so busy getting the game working.
This game time here is measured differently to the way Steam measures it. This is 783 hours literally in the game, three minutes a pop. Steam measures game time as when the executable’s running. If you launch DOTA and go to lunch, that’s part of your game time. This is only turned on when a round starts playing and off when someone gets shot or the game times out. It’s three minutes a pop. I don’t know what that corresponds to in executable running time. This guy, in matches alone, is 1,000 hours. I don’t know what his total time is. The point is, it’s way deeper than I ever thought it was going to be, and I’m going to make it deeper.
GamesBeat: How do you look back on the eight years? Do you wish you maybe didn’t start indie, that you got some publisher money and a team to build this?
Hecker: No, for a few reasons. Number one, I’m a control freak. It’s nice to make the game I’m trying to make. But more important, in that same — there’s an old programming scheduling saw. Nine women can’t make a baby in one month. Some things just take time.
John and I talk about this a lot when we’re talking about The Witness, which was another long-in-development game. There are some wall clock aspects of game design. Sometimes things have to simmer for a few months of real time. You can’t just say, “Now I’m going to solve this design problem,” and a couple of days later you have the solution. There’s a lot of stuff in SpyParty that’s way better because six months later I’m in the shower and I realize, “Oh, right, duh.” Or somebody posts on the forums, “Hey, what about this?”
Having the time and the spaciousness for that to happen is awesome. Now, I’ve spent all my money, so that’s one downside. But as I say, I can program a computer in the bay area. I’m going to be fine even if this flops. Hopefully it won’t flop.
You can see all the stuff I’ve done. There’s eight years worth of stuff in this game. It’s beautiful. But for whatever reason, I don’t have that thing where I get bored by something just because it’s the thing I’m working on. I have infinite endurance as long as a thing is interesting, and because this is a competitive multiplayer game — we haven’t even talked about everything I want to do. Eventually I want to have multiple spies, multiple snipers, spy-sniper teams, the whole nine yards. All that tournament stuff can be built in. There’s so much to do on this game. I could keep going for a long time.
I was on Spore for six years. Everyone else was ready to kill themselves. I was like, “No, the game’s not as fun as it could be. We need to keep working on it.” They said, “No, we need to finish this game!” For whatever reason, I don’t get bored in that same way, as long as there’s interesting stuff to work on. Cool design and technical and art problems. I’m happy to keep going on this game for a long time.
SpyParty is really big, in terms of the depth. It’s a sponge for game design. Outfits, more maps, more missions, all the normal stuff you associate with a game like this, plus all the traits. There are all these crazy ideas. I want the sniper to be able to tell the security guard at the party — he doesn’t do anything right now — to go interrogate someone. There’s a little conversation tree where they ask you about things you’ve done in the party. That pulls you out of the party, which allows the sniper to lock you down and see if missions get done while the interrogation is going on. That has to add time to the clock to be fair to the spy. And if the sniper’s not paying attention you can lie to the guard. There are pages and pages of notes on stuff that I might add. I want to explore all that.
When I started out, it was basically me and The Sims. There were no other games about normal people. Nowadays the game industry is a lot more diverse, which is great. There are games like Life is Strange. But what I’ve found is, because there are so few games about normal people, there’s game design just lying all over the ground. That drink thing I told you about, where just having drinks in the game, let alone having a mission associated with them, made for game design. That’s awesome.
GamesBeat: What else drove the idea that you didn’t want a shooting game? Making a game about human behavior, why do that in the first place?
Hecker: You and I have known each other for I don’t even know how many years. Let’s just call it 20 years, even though it’s probably longer than that. Even back then, I’ve always been interested in games as an art form, meaning, what does it take for games to be on the same level as movies or books or music? Art and entertainment for our culture and for humanity. Counter-Strike is one of my favorite games. I like shooting dudes in the face. But we have almost no games that aren’t about that. To use the dumb business term, there’s just a blue ocean of stuff out there.
When you’re making a game about normal people, you’re just walking around picking design up off the ground, because it’s so unexplored. That’s great, as a creator, to be able to do that. I want diversity in my game, but also diversity as a creative person. I want to do stuff that’s not the same as what everyone else is doing.
My mouth wrote a bunch of checks back in the ‘90s when I was giving design theory lectures about how we need to make more games about people. Luckily my game is cashing those checks right now. It’s not because I had this grand plan. I just happened on a game that really allows me to do the stuff I was talking about: games about people interacting, about human behavior, about tension not through whether I’m blowing stuff up or not, but tension through, in this case, subtlety.
On the spy side it’s a game of deception. On the sniper side it’s a game of perception. Just as a pure designer thing, it’s about asymmetry. Doing a game where the asymmetry is turned to 11 is awesome. It’s a hard design problem and it’s fascinating.