Since we have a few folks in Magic LAN playing SpyParty now I figured a thread dedicated to it would be appropriate.

Main Website: http://spyparty.com/

At it's core, this is (currently) a 1v1 game where one person plays a Spy and one person plays the Sniper attempting to identify and shoot the Spy. The Spy has a list of missions that need to be completed before time runs out, and before the Sniper identifies and kills the Spy. This list can be anywhere from 3-6 missions long. Due to the way the game is structured there are 4 conditions that can occur by the end of the game:

1) The Spy completes all missions and isn't killed. In this case the Spy is credited with the win.
2) The Spy is correctly identified by the Sniper and is killed. In this case the Sniper is credited with the win.
3) The Spy does not complete all missions prior to time expiring. In this case the Sniper is credited with the win.
4) The Spy is not correctly identified by the Sniper and a civilian is killed. In this case the Spy is credited with the win.

After reading the website for about 30 seconds you'll note the several hundred spots where the game very clearly says that it is still in beta. To join the beta it is similar to Minecraft, in that you pay for access to the beta and get a guarantee that you will be licensed to play the final product, should it ever be released. If you are up for paying $15 for the beta and want to join let anyone who is in the beta know! Prior to doing this make sure you sign up for the beta at this link:

The developer asks that people who are playing provide assistance on the forums in the event that a bug is identified, otherwise he asks people to play and be honest about feedback. So far I've enjoyed the game thoroughly--there's a ton of meta-game strategy for both sides, and as Ghost can attest even if you have played significantly more often than someone else you can still lose!

If someone doesn't feel like paying $15 just to try it once, I do have a few accounts available on a very limited basis that people can try out for one day at a time. The passwords on these accounts are changed daily, but you can at least download the client, install it and give it a whirl with some of the fine folks who are posting in this thread about how much they're enjoying the game!

the game goes by fast, so it's easy to get like 10 games in 5 mins lol.

yea how many games have you got on me firestar and I still have gotten really good those last few games as a spy.

still need more work as a sniper tho.

So you do or don't have to pay to play the beta?

Sent from my ADR6300 using Tapatalk 2

Yes n no.

Firestar has some accounts to hand out for ppl to try but if like 5 ppl want to try it you guys will need to share them. Or you can get ur own account after u try it which would cost u 15 clams.

I think we can share the exe so u can install it and you can play the practice mode all you want just not online. The install is only 7meg lol.

I bought 3 beta accounts so people I know could give it a try, and so they could be used at LAN parties.

I have gotten a bunch more games under my belt--been doing quite well, still slightly over a 50% winning percentage. Skill-wise I seem to be doing slightly better as a Spy, but I still have a LOT more to learn before I can beat some of the people with 1000+ games in!

As always, if anyone's interested in trying it one evening let me know. It's a 7MB download so it doesn't take long to load!

He did an update just before he went out to EVO in Vegas. On the website he's got a summary of the event--I guess top-tier fighting game enthusiasts enjoyed it a lot!

As always, if anyone's interested in trying it out let me know, either to get your own account or to temporarily try it out.

I saw Frohawk finally got an account through random chance, and he admitted it to me in Steam after I noticed him. Woot, more people playing SpyParty!

In the secure beta area you can look up everyone's record and see the stats. Yesterday I was in the Top 20 overall in games played, Spy wins and Sniper wins (literally #20 in all 3 categories). Woohoo!

Just keeping the thread alive; the open beta may be coming up here in the next week or two. Mr. Hecker is writing up bots to stress test his scaleable server configuration and he's getting things deployed to the Amazon Cloud, so hopefully 16,000+ people will be joining very soon! For reference, right now there's about 2,000 people in the beta (I don't have an exact figure.)

Game is still great to play! I recently played my 500th game (I won) and I'm now in the Top 15 for total games played, total Spy wins and total Sniper wins, so that's always a good thing to have! Sadly the link to the stats is part of the secure beta site, so even if I did link it you couldn't see it without a beta account.

Anyone interested in installing/trying SpyParty before the LAN let me know; otherwise I might cruise around the LAN (assuming I am still going) and ask if folks want to play against each other. Preferably people who can't see each other's monitors!

Chris just posted an update regarding the future of the art in SpyParty... apparently he hasn't actually been working alone! He convinced one of the artists he had a good rapport with when designing Spore to do some work for him, and now he's got this:

http://www.spyparty.com/2012/08/27/the- ... art-style/

It won't be added to the game quite yet, but he wanted to get it out there in front of PAX this weekend. He'll have a booth there (along with a few other indie games) and I REALLY wish I was going!

Oh, and last night I played my 900th game of SpyParty... woot!

looks fun
is this 360 or pc?
signed up regardless :p

It's PC only right now. He has grand plans of moving it to other platforms, but there's a ton of gameplay and features he wants to add long before he works about interoperability with consoles. The game is playable with either a keyboard/mouse combo, or an XBOX controller (which is what he has set up at demos.)

If you are interested in getting in the beta I can move you to the front of the line, but as noted above the beta is a paid beta so it's $15 to join. The benefit is that you get to play now and comment in the forums to help with bugs, and once the game is released you have full access to the completed product. He may or may not, at his discretion, elect to provide some kind of benefit for being a beta tester as well.

If you want to move to the front of the line and have your Paypal account ready to go just send me a PM with the E-Mail address you signed up for the beta with and I'll forward the info over to Chris to get you bumped in immediately.

I've started posting my matches on twitch.tv in 1080p for others to see and learn from.

http://www.twitch.tv/tytaluswarden

Ditched the twitch.tv idea since I don't have enough bandwidth to kick out 1080p streams for others to watch. Recording locally now and posting on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/firestartytalus

The quality is massively better, but it takes me a while to encode things properly. I either need to write my own encoding software or drop the dollars to get FRAPS or another encoding solution... haven't decided which I will do yet, but my current solution only allows a maximum of 10 minutes of recording. I thought about recording each match individually, which might be interesting, but also tedious.

If encoding is all you need, then I'd recommend handbrake. If recording and coding then I'd say FRAPS would be an excellent solution.