2014/09/17, 14:07 by checker

We survived PAX 2014! Yay us!

There were two big goals for SpyParty at PAX this year:

Get the game to the point where when a new player sits down at the booth, all they see is the new art. This means we have all 10 new art characters playable, and a new art level set up for beginner play. The original Beginner vs. Beginner Ballroom map that everybody who has every played at PAX was really balanced for newbie play, but it was time to try a replacement. Enter High-rise, first done in the old art style by me, and then updated by John into the new art style. Sell SpyParty at the booth! I was coming in a bit hot on this one, but it worked out way better than I thought it would, and is going to be the topic of another post where I can go into the details.

Turns out the Beginner High-rise worked pretty well for new players, and was well-balanced. Here are the stats for the pair of machines that newbies were trained on:

Total Players: 2 Total Games: 314, SpyWins: 153 (48.7%), SniperWins: 161 (51.3%) SpyMissionWins: 58 (18.5%) SpyTimeouts: 19 (6.1%) SpyShots: 142 (45.2%) CivilianShots: 95 (30.3%)

We had amazing booth helpers this year from the SpyParty community. A bit chunk of the top of the leaderboard was there, including krazycaley, drawnonward, wodar, canadianbacon, cleetose, lthummus, slappydavis, theoselk, and kate! Caley computed the total number of played games represented by the booth helpers at 48111.

zerotka and I did another chat video discussing all the stuff that happened at PAX, including the plan going forward, so here’s that:

If you want to skip to specific topics, here’s a rough table of contents:

0:00 – So PAX, How’d that go?

1:22 – The Omegathon & Lt. Hummus

2:43 – Booth Helpers

4:07 – Selling SpyParty at PAX, the cool Codecards, etc.

14:45 – Beginner High-rise

17:00 – What’s next for SpyParty?

And, as usual, I took a lot of pictures, this time with my fancy new camera, and they came out great. See if you can spot yourself in there!