However, for me, the most inspirational challenge of this sort in modern day games is Active Reload from Epic‘s Gears of War, so to start out I’ve basically made a modified clone of it and we’ll see how that goes in playtesting. There are many examples in games of the kind of small scale player-skill challenges I’m talking about, with driving and putting in Golf games being a historically important example.

So, I’ve decided to try adding a tiny optional player-skill challenge to accomplishing missions. The Spy will still win most of the time, because the merely good Sniper won’t be able to tell which partygoer to watch if the Spy is good enough, but I still consider this a flaw because an elite Spy should be able to perform missions right in front of the less skilled Sniper due to the skill differential. The flaw in the current game is if a merely good Sniper is playing an elite Spy, the Spy player can’t accomplish any missions if the Sniper is looking directly at the Spy, even though he or she is much more skilled. Once I’ve got the player-skill design “turned to 11”, I can ease new players into the game with matchmaking and an advanced handicapping system 2. As I’ve said many times, I’m trying to take the core SpyParty game design as deep as I can on the player-skill axis, to the point where a more experienced player will basically always beat a less experienced player. The idea behind Action Testing is to fix what I consider a flaw in the current game. The feature I’m working on right now I call “Action Testing”, which is a pretty lame name, but you have to name things when you’re writing code, so there you go…I’ll figure out a sexier name later. 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. 02:50.2 Action test white: Inspect Statues 02:48.9 Sniper shot Spy.You may have heard SpyParty was nominated for the Seumas McNally 1 Grand Prize at the 2011 Independent Games Festival. 02:51.2 Action triggered: Inspect Statues 02:50.4 Took shot. 03:09.1 Action triggered: Inspect Statues 03:08.3 Action test white: Inspect Statues 03:04.1 Held statue inspected. 03:10.4 Action triggered: Swap Statue 03:09.6 Action test green: Swap Statue 03:09.6 Statue swap pending.

03:20.7 Action triggered: Bug Ambassador 03:20.7 Begin planting bug while walking. 03:29.8 Spy player takes control from AI.

Spyparty microfilm