Sign up for the Spy Party Early-Access Beta

Chris Hecker, the man behind the genius that is Spy Party, has just tweeted a link to sign up for the early-access beta of the game.

I’m really excited to finally open up SpyParty playtesting to people outside of my local friends and the few hundred folks who get to play the game at public showings!  For me, this will mean I can balance and tune the game to the intense player-skill depth I’m striving for, using real data and feedback from a large number of players over a long period of time.  For you, it means you finally get to play SpyParty without standing in line at a show, and you can have a real and meaningful impact on the game’s development; you will get to see and feel new features and changes to the game as they happen, instead of just reading about them on the blog or on a news site.  I’m pretty sure we are both going to have a blast!

A lot of the details of how the Early-Access Beta will operate are still in flux, but I’m now accepting sign ups so you can reserve your place in line.  I’ll start inviting batches of players into the program over the next few months as I scale the game’s backend servers to deal with the load.

This is going to be a paid beta program. It doesn’t cost anything to enter your email address below and confirm your sign up, but I need to figure out scalability and balance issues, so please only sign up if you’re planning on paying for the Early-Access Beta when your email invite arrives.  I want to be able accurately predict how many people will enter the beta program from the number of sign ups I get and invites I send.

The current plan is it will cost $15 for beta access.  This will let you play the beta as much as you want as I update it over SpyParty’s development, and also get you a copy of the finished game when it’s released on PC.  I still have a lot of work to do in figuring the details out, so this stuff could change, but $15 is what you should expect when you get your invitation.  The game requires a Windows PC right now (but not forever).  The hardware requirements are fairly low at this point in development, so any 3D graphics card from the past few years should be okay.

If you want to follow SpyParty’s development but don’t think you’d pay for the Early-Access Beta, that’s cool! Instead of signing up below, please follow the game on the blog feedTwitter, and Facebook.  This list will not be used for SpyParty news updates, it will only be used for beta invitations.

SpyParty is a long way from the finish line, so there are going to be lots of bugs, and balance issues, and your favorite feature will get nerfed, and there will be downtime, and resets, and the general misery that accompanies any game in development.  That said, peopleseemtoreallylikeplayingthegame even in its current state, so I hope you will too!

You can sign up for the beta here.

http://www.spyparty.com/beta-sign-up/ http://twitter.com/spyparty http://www.facebook.com/SpyParty