Zerotka: I had recently decided to go into practice mode and watch how the AI partied. However, because he stares at the party so long…well, better to use his own words: As the beta progresses, I will be posting lots of stuff from the private beta forums, including strategy guides, data analysis, opinions about tuning and balancing, and all that serious stuff.īeta tester zerotka (otherwise known as Keith here on the blog and facebook) has been called the Jane Goodall of SpyParty, because he studies the NPCs 4 and then writes about their behavior, sometimes uncovering serious bugs in my code in the process. But, like growing a company, it’s important to introduce new people into the culture slowly so as not to overwhelm it. They are doing a fantastic job, exceeding even my very high expectations. Because there’s no in-game support yet for mentoring, or ranking, or cheat protection, or replays, or tutorials, or any of the important stuff that tries to keep player-skill game communities on the interenet from hating each other instantly, I’m counting on the beta testers themselves to be good people, help newbies, and teach each other to play better. However, there’s a secondary reason, and it may be even more important in the long run: growing a healthy community is a difficult and delicate thing to do, and a good community is incredibly important, especially for a game as different as SpyParty. As I’ve said before, the main reason I’m not just inviting all 13047 of you 3 into the beta right now is the game’s lobby server and backend technology is not scalable yet, so everything would just melt. These early-early-access people have managed to create a really wonderful community already. I haven’t processed all the numbers yet, but some super simple database queries indicate I’ve sent something like 762 invitations, 357 people have registered, 2 and 246 people have greater than zero seconds of game time. I know it’s surprising, but the Early-Access Beta has lots of bugs, needs lots of tuning, and the (slowly) growing community needs lots of questions answered and lots of design decisions explained. So, uh, I have been a little busy lately.

Spyparty connecting forever