The day has finally come, and we’re excited to be able to share Puzzle Spy International with the world!
When I look back, we’ve actually been working on this for 7 years or so: The initial idea came back around 2019 or so when we decided that we wanted to make a game that combined Puzzled Pint-style puzzles with a more coherent adventure story and a lot more art! The spy theme and the idea of Agent Epsilon was born back then (and we’ve actually been using “Agent Epsilon” as our team name at Puzzled Pints since that time!) We wrote a VERY involved story spanning most of the continents and including many interesting elements that we ultimately recognized were too much for a small two-person development team to implement. We put the entire game concept on the back burner for several years before returning to it during a period when I (Mike) was in-between full-time game development jobs. A while after that last layoff, I needed to be working on a game again and so we dusted off PSI, edited it down to a much more manageable length, and got to work.
I think I’ve mentioned it in this space before but we eventually realized that we’d edited it down TOO much and went back to thoroughly rewrite the entire ending. That of course meant designing more puzzles as well, but we really think the story is much more satisfying with the longer ending and we really like the new puzzles we’ve added. We hope you will as well!
Game development doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it’s too dark and dusty in there – and I’m especially glad to have had the support of several online communities of fellow game developers as we’ve worked on this game. Most of all, the group of (mostly) local San Francisco Bay Area indie devs The BAD (Bay Area Developers) Collective has been so supportive in this project, from standing co-working sessions, playtesting, and just generally talking through the process of small-team game development. But I’ve also been supported greatly on the coding and implementation side by the DevTalk and Ren’Py Discord servers, enjoyed the discussions and found testers on the ThinkyGames.com Discord, made lots of friends on the Wholesome Games Discord, and various other local game-development-centric servers. And we’ve greatly enjoyed the support of our local video game museum The MADE for regularly hosting fun events and indie play-testing nights which have been instrumental in honing this game’s puzzles. The important thing to remember is that, no matter what kind of thing you’re making or into, you never have to go it alone. There’s always a lot of support for whatever ideas you have brewing! Lastly, we want to give a huge shout-out to two contributors who have helped make Puzzle Spy international what it is, our puzzle coder SypherZent and our composer Alex Doty. It wouldn’t be this game without them and they’ve put in a ton of amazing effort and we wanted to publicly appreciate all of the work they’ve contributed. Thanks, guys!
Anyhow, on those notes, we’ll leave you to (hopefully) purchase and play Puzzle Spy International… And we hope that, whatever level of puzzling you have coming into the experience, we hope you find it challenging and fun!
Be seeing you,
Mike and Talia
Travel-Friendly Cake