I think we’ll probably end up involving the community in naming the characters, but it’s not time for that yet. Okay, enough generalities, here they are! Remember, these names are all placeholders until we pick real names for them. Hats and interesting hair styles are a big part of creating the character’s silhouette, as you can see in the group shots. The less confusion between characters, the better the Sniper can keep track of suspects. In SpyParty, the silhouette is incredibly important for instant visual recognition, even when lowlit. This is a very inspirational sketch showing the diversity of silhouettes in the Corpse Bride movie: On a more superficial note, we also look at aesthetic diversity, especially when it comes to the silhouettes of the characters. Is it okay to have a character in a traditional aristocratic outfit from a country as long as there are others of the same race in more modern business or party attire? I think so, but we need to be careful to not slip into racial stereotypes and harmful cliches. We definitely acknowledge and embrace some spy and mystery cliches, but we want to tread carefully and push further. We’re also looking to keep the cast diverse in the sense of the archetypes we include. There are many other axes worth exploring one important one we are skipping for now is class/income-level, because I couldn’t figure out a way to address that meaningfully in a game about a high society cocktail party while still keeping the game focused on the core perception and deception skills. It’s not a terribly deep exploration of sexual preferences, but it’s there and it’s real gameplay. We’re also addressing sexual orientation, but in the game mechanics themselves, rather than in character design: there’s a mission called Seduce Target, where you can choose who you’re going to seduce, and it allows any combination of characters to seduce one another.
The axes of diversity we’re actively exploring with the SpyParty characters are: age, gender, ability, race, and body shape.
If I was working on a game with serious space marines in it, it’d be a lot harder to include a playable elderly woman… However, the design of SpyParty is such that this walk-speed-disadvantage will contribute to the meta of the game, and so players will be less likely to choose her, so she’ll be less suspicious, so they’ll be more likely to choose her, and down the yomi rabbit hole we go! I’m lucky that I’m working with a game design that allows me to explore diversity with no compromises. By this I mean the elderly woman will walk like an elderly woman-so mostly likely slower than a fit young person-and because of this, a player choosing her as the Spy will have to compensate with better time management for accomplishing missions. Furthermore, I’d like all of these diverse characters to be playable, and have them all be competition-level tuned and balanced, even though they retain their diverse characteristics. This list includes women, minorities, old people, and people with disabilities. Less hyperbolically, I would like the characters in SpyParty to represent a wide variety of people who don’t normally appear in video games. I want SpyParty to be “the most diverse game ever”, which is a kind of silly hyperbolic statement, but it is a good guiding principle for us to follow when we’re concepting characters. I did a long interview with Evan Narcisse over at Kotaku a while back where I talked about the different kinds of diversity I want to explore in the game, including how important a diverse and inclusive community is to me, but for the purposes of this character reveal I want to talk about diversity in the character designs. John Cimino, our amazing artist, has outdone himself again, and the work just keeps getting better! Diversityīefore I introduce each character individually, I want to talk for a second about diversity in SpyParty.
The characters are varied and diverse, but all feel like they fit into the SpyParty universe. As I’m sure you remember, we’ve chosen what we call a natrualistic and illustrative style for the new SpyParty artwork, and I’m so incredibly happy with how it’s coming out.