The most exciting news for this month is that the demo for Puzzle Spy International is out now! We released it yesterday, just in time for participation in the Spy Video Game Rendezvous (which started yesterday on Steam) and the coming week's Cerebral Puzzle Showcase which we'll also be in. It's exciting to finally give you the chance to play a puzzle or two in our game world!
The demo takes place in London - which is where Agent Epsilon herself is from - and is an entirely separate story and puzzle from the main game, so playing it won't spoil your enjoyment of the game at all. We decided to do it this way because PSI itself is not a terribly long experience, with only eight puzzles in the main game. Granted, they're not small, but with such a short game, we didn't want to spoil a big chunk of it by releasing part of it as a demo. We decided early on that making the demo a whole separate puzzle would let us adapt another one of our co-puzzle-designer Jay's excellent puzzles, and could give folks a flavor of the game without spoiling any of it. We think of it like the action segment at the start of a James Bond movie, a fun little adventure that Bond deals with quickly and competently and then we cut to the opening song and title sequence. This is like that, a small appetizer to the main course.
In January of 2024, we set aside all work on the main game and just spent a few months focusing on this demo. The look of the game had already been established so I developed a new setting and we iterated on Epsilon's contact, who would become Inspector Ewan Danger. It was fun to also incorporate Obfuskoperatives from the Soviet Cypher Force, which was at one time a part of the main story prior to editing.
Testing the first pass on the puzzle made us realize how much more time we needed to spend on adding hints to the puzzles, a learning that we've carried through to the entire game. One solver pointed out that while she got the answer, there were many lines that she hadn't completed and that it would be nice to have a way to get clues on a per-line basis. Those are in the demo now, little illustration clues for every single line. Many people won't see them at all: We've noticed a lot of players taking a lot of pride in solving our puzzles with no hints ('though there is NO penalty for using the hints in this game.) But for those who need them - or who want to go back through and see the hints after solving the entire demo - the little illustrations for each set are fun and a novel approach we haven't seen on many puzzles... but given my skill set, they were a fun and effective way to hint at solutions.
One of my local indie game dev Discord servers hosted a live game testing night at a local brewery. We brought the demo to it and expected people to take turns playing it. Instead what happened was that one person sat down to play, her friends joined her, and eventually there was a huge crowd around my laptop all working together to solve the puzzles. We love this method of puzzle solving! In fact, each of us - Talia and Mike - rarely solve puzzles on our own, instead enjoying working on them together as a team. This goes for crosswords, Puzzled Pints, and even other puzzle video games. (Some semi-recent puzzle games we've solved together include Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, Frog Detective, and Tangle Tower.) There's not really a name for games you solve as a group - "couch co-op" has lots of other connotations - so we decided to add a note in the start of the game encouraging folks to solve it as a group (if they enjoy that) and to use the hints (if they want.)
Anyhow, we're excited to give you the chance to try out this short spy adventure in London - with or without a team - when you get the chance!