As soon as I came up with the spy and the sniper, the game basically designed itself,” Hecker says. He recorded a video and sent it to Wright as a kind of digital Where’s Wally? test. “They would pause, play a talk animation to each other and then walk away.
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“I got a room full of characters walking around,” Hecker says.
But if that character was physically anonymous, dressed like any other guest, a searcher would have to rely on subtler tells. Among the selection of NPCs that The Sims could muster, one differently modelled character would be immediately distinguishable. “What’s the intimate version of that?” he wondered. But Hecker recalled a previous Indie Jam entry, Thatcher Ulrich’s Dueling Machine, in which a Doom avatar with a single bullet hunted a target player hidden by thousands of sprite pedestrians. If that’s true today, it was considerably more so at the time. “People in the world – not space marines.” “Some of us organisers thought, well, there aren’t a lot of games about normal people,” Hecker says. Then in its fourth year – and still a few more away from the indie boom that would be triggered by regular participant Jonathan Blow – the event challenged participating designer-programmers to explore human interaction. Hecker negotiated the use of assets from The Sims, Wright’s breakout paean to domesticity, in the 2005 Indie Game Jam. Ironically, it was Wright and EA who had enabled Hecker’s experiment in the first place. For the sniper, the game is about reading social cues, spotting a strange gesture or conversation cut short and mentally building the case against a suspect. But they need to be sure of their target because they have just a single bullet.
Meanwhile, a second player with a sniper rifle occupies a roof across the street, with a single task: they must pick out the spy in the crowd and take the shot. An asymmetrical multiplayer game called SniperParty, its premise is as binary as its title: one player attends a party as a spy, blending into the throng of mannered guests while surreptitiously swapping statues and planting bugs on ambassadors. Will Wright is certain: “That’s not gonna work.” Maxis is mid-development on Spore, and an engineer named Chris Hecker is describing an ambitious side project.