Spyparty idea full#

Is that purely a visual inspiration or will it extend to personality as well? Some of the characters are inspired by real people - Ms L is based on your girlfriend. She's sexy and stylish, but not completely out of proportion body-wise, but her hair is clearly her visually defining feature. We pushed the fabulousness of her hair to 11 (spending double the number of triangles on just her hair than we do on other entire characters, so it has a real cost to the game's rendering budget), but we gave her a pretty normal middle aged female body morphology. We just try to be respectful of the different types of people we're representing, while still making them cool and striking, and try to think 'how would this type of person represent themselves in this (crazy, fictional, stylized) environment?' We decide to purposefully embrace and enhance some characteristics, while flipping others on their head. You've spoken about using spy story archetypes in character creation - how do you tread the line between archetype and stereotype? So, it's really a great game for pushing hard on diversity, because the design really wants the guests to be diverse, so it doesn't feel forced or artificial or anything, it's simply the path to the coolest possible looking and playing game.įrom left to right: Ms O, Mr P, Drs M and N, Mr K and Ms L One big pillar of SpyParty's challenge is what I call 'attention as a resource', which means you are spending your energy parsing the scene, deciding where to focus, and trying to figure out what's going on and filter through a ton of noise to find the Spy (or to frame another guest or be aware of the Sniper's suspects on the flip side), and so the more different the characters are along all sorts of different axes, the better. In terms of the gameplay, SpyParty is a really difficult and hard-core competitive game, and the more uniquely identifiable each person is, the more it helps the players learn their behaviors, animations, and spot them in the crowd.

Spyparty idea full#

Visually, it's just really cool to look at this party full of unique and interesting people hanging out it has that 'spy-fiction' feel because of all these exaggerated archetypal characters. One of the many awesome things about working on SpyParty is that it's a perfect place to put these goals into practice, to put my money (all my money, yikes) where my mouth is, because the game really thrives on the diverse cast, both visually and in the gameplay. The more people playing games and represented in games, the better, in my opinion. I think things like this tend to improve over time, and have been improving over the long haul, and I want to help do my part as a developer.

Well, my goals for diversity for SpyParty specifically and my goals for games in general haven't really changed, which are that I want games to get more diverse, both in terms of people playing them and in terms of the people represented in them. Hi Chris, I know you've spoken before about character diversity and why representing different races, genders, disabilities, ages and so on are important, but has that changed over the years you've worked on SpyParty?

Read on for hair triangles, why you should never wear an ugly sports coat to a party and the limits of geometric nepotism: We nabbed some time with developer Chris Hecker over email to discuss the latest additions. Amongst the group are 40-something rocker Ms L, Sikh gentleman Mr K and a pair of doctorate-holding identical twins. SpyParty - that reverse Turing test of a game where you have to disappear into a party of AI characters, dodging suspicion as a fellow player armed with a single sniper bullet scans for tells - has now unveiled its third group of characters.