When pressed, Hecker breathlessly chronicles his financial books in a way you rarely hear in the game-publishing world. That amount of time-to iron out, fine-tune, and perhaps even hoist the game with his own petard-has come at a significant cost.
Hecker has otherwise run the entire show by himself-as director, lead programmer, game designer, network coder, animation designer, sound designer, UI lead, and even PR lackey. Other than a one-year contract hire for additional art, that's it. In the case of SpyParty, that tally has climbed to nearly eight years, through which time Hecker has paid an artist, his former Maxis colleague John Cimino, for 5.5 years of work as its art director. "Good, hard game-design problems sometimes take what I call wall-clock time to solve," Hecker says while hunched over his ThinkPad. The number of party attendees will vary based on the map chosen. First, we had to shovel through more than eight years of SpyParty development rubble, which has cost Hecker hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. (Discount hunters have ten days to buy the game at its beta-test price of $15, which will include a Steam key.) As I laughingly assumed, it took us a while to get to that trio of facts. Sure enough, Hecker had specific news to share: an April 12 launch date for the game on Steam Early Access, a new slew of game features, and a $25 price. Every three-minute match pits one "spy," who acts like an AI character at a video game party, against a sniper, who watches the entire party play out before guessing who the human is among the computer-controlled crowd. Hecker invited me under the pretenses of unveiling news about his long-in-development one-on-one video game SpyParty- one I have followed for years, owing to its tense and truly unique face-offs. "We are going to talk about three things," he said as he began booting a six-year-old ThinkPad. SAN FRANCISCO-During last month's Game Developer Conference, longtime coder and designer Chris Hecker invited me to a game demo event with a tidy premise.
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