Last time I was indie in the 90s, there really was no good dependable way to make a living at it. What do you think of the current state of the indie scene? I still haven't played the vast majority of them, though, so I'm looking forward to hanging out at the IGF booth at GDC and playing them soon. I love the voice over stuff in Bastion, and think it adds a real personal touch to the game. I'm a big fan of Marc ten Bosch's Miegakure I think it's a really interesting and deep game. I haven't played nearly as many as I'd like.
Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you particularly enjoyed?
I worked on it occasionally over the years since IGJ3 in 2004, though. How long have you been working on the game?įull time since September of 2009. I have also pushed some risky stuff off to v2, and there is still a lot of experimentation to go, like how important should facial animation be to the gameplay, and things like that. Obviously there have been smaller things that haven't worked, like the first version of the bookshelf mission was a complete disaster, and the current one still kind of sucks, but in the grand scheme of things those are not significant negatives. There have been lots of things that didn't work out like I thought they would, but the game design fates have been smiling on me, because those things have usually ended up cooler than I thought, not worse. I've been pretty lucky so far that there haven't been any big dead-ends.
#SPYPARTY CONNECTING FOREVER MOVIE#
I plan to turn just about every spy movie trope into a mission, from poisoning a drink, to seducing the secretary, to breaking into the safe behind the painting.Īre there any elements that you've experimented with that just flat-out haven't worked with your vision? The next steps are making the game an even deeper player skill competitive experience, and then figuring out single player. What are the next steps in the development of SpyParty? What types of missions can we expect to see? Similarly, I want to reference retro 60s spy-fi, but not look dated. You're never sure what time period they're taking place in. Not sure yet, but I really like the timelessness of The Incredibles and Team Fortress 2. What kind of graphical style will the final game take on? The current visuals seen in screenshots of the game are placeholder.
I came up with the inverse Turing test idea, and the spy fiction, and the game kinda designed itself from there! It was super cool, and when IGJ3 rolled around (theme: "people interacting"), I was thinking about what a more intimate version of that game would be. Thatcher Ulrich and Marc Leblanc did a cool game called Dueling Machine at Indie Game Jam 0 (the "100,000 guys" one) where one person was hunting another person in a city with 30,000 inhabitants. It's C++, a custom OpenGL graphics engine, a modified version of Cal3D, which is an old open source animation library I'm eventually going to replace, and a bunch of spit and bailing wire. What development tools are you using to develop SpyParty? EA laid me off last year, which indified me again. I was indie a long time ago, 1996-2003, and then worked on Spore from 2003-2009. I've been in the industry forever, but only managed to ship one game so far ( Spore).
Here, Hecker explains his inspirations for SpyParty, the visual style he hopes to achieve and what the next step in development is. Having already worked for EA on Spore, a huge AAA game release, Chris Hecker has now returned to his indie roots, and consequently earned himself an IGF finalist place, with his game SpyParty in the running for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
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