This is Chris Heckers work in progress indie thingo that was at EVO recently. Finally got my beta invite after signing up 12+ months ago.
www.spyparty.comHow is SpyParty different from ______?
SpyParty is not the first game to explore psychological themes, nor pretending to be an NPC, nor hiding in plain sight, nor any of these concepts. I think it is a particularly interesting take on them, but there have been many games before with similarities. These include:
The Ship and Bloody Good Time, by Outerlight, and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood by Ubisoft. These are basically games of Assassin, which is a popular live-action game played on college campuses. They’re mostly symmetric, meaning each player is playing the same role, they use large maps where occlusion and environment traversal is a big part of the gameplay so they have features like radars for telling where your target is, and they don’t focus on the same level of behavioral performance and perception that SpyParty tries for. I have a long post I’m writing that will do a detailed analysis of these games, that I’ll link to here when it’s finished. People ask if I’m worried about these games, and the opposite is true, actually. I wish they explored the psychological gameplay more, because we need more games pushing in these directions, not fewer!
Here's the beta tutorial from the Spy POV featuring 15 mins of Chris Hecker talking. You can't really see the red sniper trail unless you use the 720p version. Graphics are all placeholders while the gameplay is nailed down.
Since you can't really see the sniper gameplay in the previous video, here's the sniper point of view.
Matches are short (~3mins). Trying to mimic the AI is incredibly hard at first and you have to unlearn using short sharp movements and adjustments to get around, it's a dead giveaway to the sniper. It's pretty intense when you're trying to complete a mission like changing a statue while there's a sniper laser trained on your head for 30 seconds.
