Chris Hecker focuses on solving hard problems at the intersection of gameplay, aesthetics, and technology. He is an outspoken advocate for pushing the current boundaries of design and interactivity, in the hope that games will eventually reach their full potential as a medium. To this end he helped organize the Indie Game Jam, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and The Depth Jam, and his work on Spore centered on using proceduralism and artificial intelligence to enhance player creativity and agency. Chris has been on the advisory board for the Game Developers Conference for many years and is a regular speaker at the GDC, Siggraph, and other conferences. A frequent contributor to Game Developer magazine, Chris was the technical columnist for the magazine for two years and the Editor-at-Large for three, and was on the editorial board of the computer graphics research publication, The Journal of Graphics Tools. He has worked at both ends of the development spectrum, as a one-man indie game developer with his company definition six, inc. and on a hundred-person team at Maxis/Electronic Arts. His professional goal is to help games become the preeminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century. His current project is SpyParty, an indie game about subtle human behavior and deception.
He’s one of the most fun people we know.
http://chrishecker.com/Home...
SpyParty is a tense competitive spy game set at a high society party. It's about subtle behavior, perception, and deception, instead of guns, car chases, and explosions. One player is the Spy, trying to accomplish missions while blending into the crowd. The other player is the Sniper, who has one bullet with which to find and terminate the Spy!
SpyParty is in Early-Access Beta right now, which means you can buy and play the game immediately, you'll get all the updates during development, and then you'll get the final version when it ships. The beta community is friendly and welcomes new players, and there's a private beta forum where players share strategies.
http://www.spyparty.com/
Play on: Windows and MacOS
https://www.youtube.com/wat...
Why do you make games?
Well, sometimes big decisions like this are hard to put into words, and are a mix of subconscious and conscious motivations. The conscious decision part revolves around the idea that completely new art forms only come along very infrequently, maybe every few hundred years, and so the opportunity to be a part of shaping how games evolve is incredibly exciting...it's like playing around with film in 1905: nobody knows where it will take us. But more important is the less verbalizable subconscious aspect, which has something to do with interactivity--the thing that's fundamentally different about games compared to other art and entertainment forms--really appealing to me at a personal and aesthetic level. The idea of making systems that respond to players interacting with them is magic in a way that the passive art forms can't touch. I went to art school for college and thought I was going to be a painter, actually, but fell in love with games and interactivity.
Why should people play SpyParty?
Well, the thing I'm proudest about in the design of SpyParty is how it's an intense and deep competitive game, but it's core gameplay is about human behavior instead of shooting and moving and blowing stuff up. So, SpyParty explores subtle aspects of performance and deception, and at the same time it's a great and exciting skill-based game that people stream on Twitch. The second thing I'm proud of is the community, and how supportive and non-toxic and involved in helping people learn it is, even though the game is a deep player-skill multiplayer competitive online game, which is usually a recipe for toxicity. The players at the top of my leaderboard have played over 400 hours of actual gameplay time, 3 minutes at a time (not just time with the executable launched, which is how Steam calculates hours played). The game is very deep. If you're looking for value for your dollar, it's hard to beat that for $15! That said, the game is still very beta and changes a lot, so if you like to see how games are developed and be a part of the community influencing the game's direction, by all means join, but if you like a more polished and finished experience, you might want to wait a bit.
What element of game design do you hold above all others?
For me, competitive depth is the most important goal for SpyParty's design. I will talk about this more in the full interview, but I regularly sacrifice accessibility for newbies to make the game deeper and more competitive. I want SpyParty to be considered among the top competitive games of our time, at least in its design, so I hope it can eventually stand along side Counter-Strike, Starcraft, Street Fighter, and games like those in terms of its depth and re-playability. If I'm really going out on a limb, I'd even say I'm shooting for Poker, Chess, and Go levels of depth, but man, those are some of humanity's most beautiful game designs. I'll be happy if I get even close to the depth of any of the games listed in this paragraph.
Today’s Stories:
Giveaway: SpyParty Early-Access Beta: http://n4g.com/user/blogpos...
Interview with Chris Hecker, Part One: http://n4g.com/user/blogpos...
Interview with Chris Hecker, Part Two: http://n4g.com/user/blogpos...
SpyParty: A Game in Which I Kill My Husband: http://n4g.com/user/blogpos...
Day 9 | Chris Hecker
We were expecting problems with mod support, but there are a lot of other issues.
This is why you get the GOG version on gog you can select the version of the game to download.
On pc fallout 4 fallout new vegas and skyrim are all broken on steam because they all got the same "next gen" update.
Skyrim dec 2023
https://www.pcgamer.com/sky...
Can not find new vegas but anyone that modded it knows the script extender there was also broken
Not accidental, they want modders to stop modding their older games to force them to mod Shitfield.
There doing the same on starfield with a mods store and blocking mods
There goal is like blizzard and what they did with fallout 76 you make mods they can sell and you become a slave.
On skyrim they have "trusted" mod devs now basically a badge that lets your mod on the store you get a crumb of the sale when someone buys it.
lol to the disagrees, the last Skyrim update broke mods too. They've been trying to kill mods to monetize them in creation club for years, it's not a stretch that they purposely put out patches just to break free mods.
The disagrees are from people who have common sense. They aren't trying to kill mods. Most mods for any game will break with a new update because they rely on files/code that have been changed. This isn't new. Even with Bethesda this would happen way before the creation club. Mod support is literally one of the things that got Bethesda to where they are, and they're one of the only devs that releases comprehensive mod tools for each of their games.
Over 14 GBs and doesn't change much at all? What? Taking up that much drive space for a pathetic 'remastering' is shameful.
Par for Bethesda.
LOL people are actually expecting massive improvements or something? From Bethesda?? the same people who released Skyrim multiple times and the all look like shit? THAT Bethesda? are people for real?
The ps5 version doesn't change a ton but from my small playtime it's enough to make me want to replay it just to have it running at 60.
A side note to this my PS4 version no longer boots after it's "update" so I guess that's what it feels like to own a Bethesda game on PC
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
A voice actor from The Coalition's third-person shooter series, Gears of War, has hinted at a new game announcement coming in June.
Hopefully Microsoft will go back to the original story line and get away from that woke nonsense from the last Gears game Gears of Woke! But were talking about Microsoft so all the betting money is on more of the same woke nonsense.
The Locust trilogy concluded with Gears of War 3. I don’t get how Gears 4 and 5 are “woke” .
I'm tellin you, Indies are really where the creativity is these days. It's hilarious and awesome!
Yeah and they have so much freedom, i love indies :)
this looks great , it's like the ship , but this is awesome !
interesting... migt give it a try
Looks good, I'll probably try it when the finished version comes out.