From Spies 5 to Spies 6 ~ the adventure

[Judge Sam]

This will be the first of a bunch of long essay-ish topics from me about the game. I really enjoy talking about what goes behind the design of each game, the decisions, theory, setups, and I enjoy hearing what you guys think of it all. There's a few topics I could start off with but I guess I'll begin with the long and twisted road Spies 6 took to get to from Spies 5 to day one of Spies 6 on May 17, 2009 . For awhile I thought the concept was cursed and would never get started!


So after December 3rd, 2007 Spies 4 ended I started thinking about future games. I came up with two main concepts: gangs, and union busters. I went with the gang theme first. Spies 5 and Spies 6 were actually two games developed in tandem... both ideas for themes + the main twist came together at the same time. Actually I ended up grabbing the Council of Nine twist straight out of Spies 6 where it had been planned. I thought of that as a little secret teaser or clue towards where Spies 6 was going. As well as The Trial twist from Spies 4.


Which is kinda weird because Spies 5 and Spies 6 were spread a year apart and you wouldn't think they were connected. So this game has been in the planning for a long time coming haha.


I'm flipping through my paper notebook which starts at the beginning of Spies 4 and here's the first note about it: "Labor Spies: The people are the hard workers of the Corporation, supporting their families. They want to unionize for fair conditions. Enemy is the Corporation, bosses, + union busters (spies) hired to cause dissent." Sounds about right.

So now in the start of 2008 I start off with brainstorming and listing a bunch of different voting changes I can come up with. Remember the inspiration for this theme was that I already had a bunch of ideas previous for different voting rounds haha. So I went through all of my old ideas, I went through the big Wikipedia box which has every way of voting imaginable, (yes I read all that!) and I thought up some new ideas. Here's what I came up with:


-[not used]
-Forum Mafia Round
-Consensus Voting System
-Trusted Weighted Votes (my name for stockholders, the wording just means that votes are weighted at different vote #'s based on trust of others)
-Run off Voting
-Preferential Voting
-Borda count
-IRV, reverse IRV
-Council of Five
-[not used]


The bolded ones have stars next to them which I guess means they were the best candidates at the time but as you can see that didn't turn out haha.

I also found a topic on the Spies 5 board from Jan 25, 2008 where it has a similar early list of ideas with their wikipedia explanations copied. "It is possible that a game could be based around this (such as Spies 6) with rounds occurring every / every other round and/or someone with a role deciding when each takes place." Early on there was an idea of having a player decide when one of the voting systems took place, while that sounds cool, it would be a logistical nightmare trying to adjust each system for each # of players, as well as spoil every system early. There was also an idea of having the group vote on which system they wanted to use, either during the game or at the end which one they wanted to use again.


Okay so at this point 99% of my focus was on creating the ginormous amount of content I shoved into Spies 5 so we don't revisit this until that's over around May 18th, 2008. But after Spies 5 there was still a lot of work to do. There's just so much junk and I wanted to make it that fantastic game accessible to future players (i.e. you guys). I mean if you come to this Spies 6 site right now, knowing nothing about this incredible game, what are you going to get from it from looking at the front page for a few minutes? Probably not much at all, which is sad, there's just so much crap everywhere I wanted to make it more inviting. So that was a lot of summary things I was working on, as well as just enjoying the post-game.


So I gave myself two months of that before beginning work on Spies 6 around July 10th, 2008. Here's what I said in a confessional I'll be showing soon: "So it's July 10th, and today I decided I want a summer game Spies 6. The problem is that it's really late, so basically I'm going to have to go into overdrive to produce content. The bad news is I haven't really done anything for Spies 6 in the 2 months since Spies 5 ended."

So I start whittling down and setting up the voting systems. Which ones to use and when to do them was probably the biggest part of it all. I know it seemed like it went so smoothly and easily (which I was surprised haha) but there's tons of behind the scenes stuff which I will write up in it's own mega-essay. At this point I want a summer game which ends before school starts around the start of September, and it's already the middle of July, and I'm still just starting out with design.


Though I gave it a good shot and worked on it tons for a few weeks, the short amount of time and immense workload made it impossible to set up in time. Plus my exhaustion from the last game. which I previously mentioned, the game was both really long and really negative. Plus I asked about six people if they wanted to help me with a few things, all of them said yes they did, I explained what they could do for like a half hour, none of them produced anything even when given two weeks. So that was a downer.


But during this time I was able to look over Spies 5 and pick out a bunch of awesome changes to make to the game to make it better and I credit that a lot with how smoothly this game ran. I will be asking y'all more questions to make it even better for the next one!

[Judge Sam]

So that's failed attempt #1! Fast forward to...

Well I intended to start earlier...
« Thread Started on Oct 9, 2008, 11:09pm »

But a lot of things came up. And I enjoyed the break.

But now I'm a little behind (what's new?) and I intend to complete a game by December 22nd.

Failed Attempt #2! Looking now at my notebook from the second start-up. I see another 'to-do list' as I quite enjoy creating those. I see checked off "Complete Spies 6 board" (yay!), "Finish up Spies 5" (yay!) but I see unchecked "Develop game." (boo.) I start talking to people and see an upsurge in after party forum posts on the Spies 5 board.


It's hard to convey here but these were like serious, intensive attempts to start the game, I mean I fully intended to have the game start from this point each time haha. We're talking about 2-3 weeks of daily 1-2 hour work, schedule planning with deadlines, huge amounts of developed content. Upcoming dates where I'm planning to have things finished or open applications or start the game.


I'm flipping through the notebook pages and I see almost a lot of this stuff was used pretty much as is in Spies 6 so this is finished content. (I see a few things which got cut out which didn't work.) I mean there's Sam Lies Week (this is when I came up with the fake birthday thing!), Future Week, Guess my Wage activity, Time Capsule, a bunch of roles. I also started developing more fully the specifics of each voting shift.


Right so I was emotionally invested in getting the game started at this point for a long while. Why it didn't happen then I don't know... probably a little bit of me just enjoying my life, a little bit still leftover negativity from last game, other hobbies, a mountain of work ahead of me. That time went by and it didn't start either.


At this point I'm thinking Spies is definitely over, I see no future for it whatsoever. This feeling will be reinforced when two other people help me dig it up from the grave and then rebury it four days later in one last final final attempt haha.

[Judge Sam]

Basically on Jan 10th, 2009 I say Spies is over, or at least on indefinite hiatus. Mike (spies5vince, spies4masaki, spies3jack) sends me a PM that day saying he and Todd (spies5carly, spies4singe) were talking about it:

That being said, I feel it would be a shame to let a game as grand as Spies die and fade away as nothing more than a piece of history, and that is why I am writing you. Todd and I discussed a while back the possibility of giving you a break from hosting by taking up one, or more, of the proceeding games in your name. However, I have always felt there is no need for it so long as you were up for hosting another. Now that you've given the indication you are not, I'm wondering if you would be okay with this.

So we started talking a lot and it re-ignited my interest in the game. I have always really wanted a co-host and I thought Mike might be that one (despite the unending list of previous failed co-hosts which at this point might be noted that it must be all my fault lol). His PM got my ideas rolling and planning. What really intrigued me was that he also mentioned Todd would be up for it. I liked this because two co-hosts are better than one, it would make things work better. Plus if one flaked, it wouldn't be just me again running the whole thing.


Hmm... how to explain Failed Attempt #3 succinctly lol. Well it lasted all of 4 days:

So apparently I now have 2 co-hosts...
« Thread Started on Jan 13, 2009, 7:34pm »
Well, I was going to start in the winter 2008. But everyone who I asked to help with fell through, and I am enjoying my life so I decided not to.

But now Mike and Todd have volunteered to co-host so we'll see how that goes. I really would like to have co-hosts as hosting alone is quite lonely. Plus it will (theoretically) lessen the amount of work I have to do which will allow me to enjoy the game more.

I give it about a 5% chance both of them make it through Spies 6 without quitting. Honestly I would be surprised if both of them even made it through the next week before giving up. You can tell my expectations aren't very high.

It really wouldn't be that bad of a thing either if one flaked, I'm kinda enjoying life as is. That isn't up to me though, we shall see! Having a meeting with them in 24 minutes where I'll give them their first (easy) task.

We had a meeting on ventrilo (w/ microphones) where we talked a lot about the game, what hosting it was like, how much time would be required, etc. I told them all about the twist (and told them that if this didn't work out they couldn't play spies 6). They agreed to everything and it all looked great.


All of us started producing a lot of stuff and they gave me some great ideas. The first task was to write an Imprisonment story. The idea was to write it, as if you were writing it to be presented during the game at a specific time. Meaning it shows up like I do, with pictures, in segments, with introduction and an ending. They agreed completely and the deadline was posted like 4 days in advance. I wrote a whole Imprisonment story as my part of the task before the deadline. (it didn't end up being shown in Spies 6, for the first time ever, I was overwhelmed with Imprisonment stories to show!)


Vince did great with his Imprisonment story which you saw during the game. Todd ended up writing one, but it was not on time and it was not presented properly. Since I was treating this as if it was an actual Imprisonment going up during the game, and presented to the players as the game was going on (as every single Imprisonment story is!) obviously saying "I'll get post it this weekend" to the players on a Friday is unacceptable. Could you imagine if I did that during the game?! The game would completely suck. I was just shocked that he would so carelessly shrug off what he so fervently committed to just four days earlier and delay his own real-time Imprisonment post by "sometime this weekend." And this after I hyped up the CRUCIAL DEADLINE like hardcore!


As I had clearly stated many times beforehand, not completing this first easy task meant I could not rely on you to meet deadlines which is the most important part of hosting. I offered Todd a secondary role in hosting, he declined and quit. Mike quit soon after, I guess he was upset with what happened with Todd. While Mike provided some good ideas, this unreliability in the face of conflict (a very common occurence.... anywhere) proved he could not be relied upon.


So that was over 4 days after it started. I tried not to get emotionally invested in the game until I had an idea that Mike and Todd were committed but unfortunately that didn't happen, for the third time my hopes were dashed. Now Spies 6 was truly dead and buried and reburied!


I'm not sure why I decided to start the game this summer around March 10th, 2009. Maybe I was bored. Who knows. Ironically I had just started reworking on the game when Samson as Subhi declared it dead. Which I felt sad about letting him think that for 2 months but those are the ropes haha.


So this time I had more than two months to finish development on the game. Part of the reason why everything appeared so polished was that I had two full months plus the plethora of development time on this game before that. Future games will definitely not be so filled with perfectly polished stuff! I really appreciated that during this game though, it gave me tons more time to enjoy the game as it happened. With so much done before the game I wasn't rushing as much to say, write an Imprisonment story or write out those super-long explanation posts by a specific time. It was cool.


So then applications opened April 11th and in the first five days I received four applications, two of which had been sent in months and months earlier on the mistaken impression that the message board was open. But it all worked out in the end!


Yeah this is boring and really long lol, and I tried to be succinct. Future essays will be way more juicy. But that's how the game started!

[Almathea]

I love behind the scences stuff! And yeah I remember b eing so sad when I thought it was all over

[DC]

Likewise.

[Mei Yun]

Sam, your dedication and organization (or OCness) in making this whole game requires for you to have high standards for your co-host should you have one. I'm sure perfect one will come around eventually.