Yes, it’s a case of finding your victim while avoiding your attacker, trying to look innocent, baiting others into foolishing attacking you, while attempting to ensure you have the best point scoring weapons to hand.
When I played it back at release I loved it because not only was it insanely fun trying to balance all these different aspects, but it was the kind of game where you could have fun losing too, sharing stories of your ineptitude with other players on the server.
Jut be warned, you will need to learn the maps, you need to know where the weapons are to win.
This sniper game sounds awesome, but I’m definately hoping for more than two player involvement.
It sounds like it could be a tough game to make interesting for the sniper. He has to watch a room full of NPCs, or pretend NPCs, with whom he can’t interact (at least from what I’ve read so far). This could get old quickly if the party looks and behaves about the same from game to game.
I wonder if we’ll eventually see the sniper being able to interact more with the party - perhaps he can cut the electricity, or have distressing telegrams delivered - so it’s more like watching a Sims household, which the spy has to live inside.
The ability to mark people reminds me of minesweeper.
There’s 2 different versions of the mod. The original was made on the original half life 1 engine. The source version is the more recent, new version that costs money, and runs on the source (half life 2) engine.
I’ve actually been (pleasantly) surprised how long-lasting the current prototype is on both sides during playtests (people have been playing for hours), because the meta-gaming heats up when the players start learning the skills. But, yeah, I want it to have Counter-Strike levels of replayability (a guy can dream), so there are plans to add a bunch of ways the sniper can impact the party like you mention, from stuff in the small like placing a phone call to one of the partygoers, to wholesale changes to the arc of the party, like having the opera singer do an aria at the piano, having a character + entourage arrive, and if I can figure out how to make it fun and interesting, having a sit down dinner served!
The Party, the Peter Sellers movie, has a bunch of really awesome scenes like this in it; it’s very inspirational for the game…well, until the house fills with bubbles and the elephant shows up. Hey, it’s a Peter Sellers movie.
Hah, yeah, the problem is the sniper just hearing the spy controller inputs is often enough to get the spy shot if the sniper is any good. It’s definitely something I’m simmering on, though, because it would be really good to figure out something, obviously. Another thought is to have the spy just play through the sniper’s view somehow.
Ha, too bad controllers don’t have little displays on them like during the dreamcast days, then the spy could play through the sniper’s view, but have a bit of extra info.
The sniper side scales well, both with one screen and people talking, and split screen where each has a controller. And multiple spies works too.
For all the people interested in playing THE SHIP, how does Saturday afternoon sound? Or evening? I could throw up a event on the Qt3 group and we could meet in chat. Either that or find “copet” on steam. Make sure you have it installed, and have steam up and we’ll see if we can get together.
I can’t play until next week, since I’m traveling, so if people play before then, you still have to play with me later! :) I’m really interested to see how it feels, and what similarities and differences there are.
Does the boxed version you can get on amazon connect to steam as well?
I try to look for info on The Ship guys every couple of months, and it’s weird, the developer sites aren’t even up anymore, I wonder who gets the 70% * $19.99 now for steam purchases…
The wikipedia article says they were working on a sequel code named Hollywood Murder Party, but it’s hard to find anything about it. I wonder what happened to them and the game. Last time I looked during the summer, their sites were at least loading but not updated. Maybe now that SpyParty is getting a bunch of press and people are talking about The Ship again, something will turn up about them.
By the way, here’re a couple videos of The Ship…from these, at least, it looks completely different from SpyParty, but this is mostly the actual killings, there are more related videos:
If people are interested in trying The Ship, I strongly recommend that you try to play the free Half-Life 1 mod version rather than the commercial version. Sadly, it was a lot better.
I played a few games of The Ship last year with POE. It was insanely fun, made more so by using Steam voice chat.
I loved the tense standoffs in the bathrooms (gotta pee, but who can you trust?), getting put in the brig just to retrieve the shank, and lighting people up with the flare gun.
Though a few people had a disturbing habit of locking themselves in the stall with me…
I can remember quite enjoying some moments of playing the original, slowly hunting down my target, being careful to never get left alone, always watching others nearby for suspicious behaviour towards me. Also looking for the least used weapons so that when I did make my move, I’d get the most points for it.
But when I played the commercial version, the rules had changed. The game would end soon after the first kill had been made. And all of the weapons were now hidden in random suitcases, apart from the fire axe, which was mounted everywhere on the walls.
The result was that everyone just grabbed the fire axe and went flailing towards their target as soon as possible. There was no slow observation or tactical manoeuvring - if you didn’t grab a fire axe and kill first, you’d lose.
It’s possible that was just a server setting, but it seemed to be the default. I didn’t enjoy a single game that I played.
I might be remembering this wrong, too, but didn’t they get rid of the AI passengers in the commercial version?
I can’t say as that was my experience with the commercial version. Most of the weapons were in the same location each time, knife was in the kitchen, pool cue in the games room, etc.
The axe was a great weapon to grab for self defence, but it was rarely a big point scorer.
It depends what game mode you are playing. Sometimes it is last man standing, sometimes it can end after the first kill or something. Also, it isn’t always about killing the person first, as you will find out if we play ;) Killing someone with the fire axe may get you $500, but killing with a knitting needle might be the “weapon of choice” at the moment and score you $5000. The winner is the one with the most money.
You’re actually remembering rather accurately. The default settings for the game were really poorly decided. Thankfully, the game also let you customize a ton of the server options before you started the server. So, you really had to just find those good settings that made it a good experience. Problem was that the dedicated server hosts weren’t really doing that, they were just running the servers with the default settings which frankly sucked. The fireaxe problem is really an issue with the map design, however, you would routinely find specific types of items in certain areas. A tool weapon in the utility closet, for example. There’s pros and cons the first and the second have over each other, hard to say which is better.
Okay, so the SpyParty press storm from GDC has wound down, so I rounded up all of the significant coverage and put it in one place, along with some pictures of the press guys who playtested:
I also put up a ton of pictures from the other playtests I did with developers:
(There is one remaining unidentified developer in that post, the mysterious #10, maybe somebody here knows who he is.)
And, some of Will and other Stupid Fun Club folks playing, plus an anecdote about Will’s luck:
Okay, I think I’m done talking about people talking about the game for a while, and the next few posts will actually be about design and development. :)
