I recently realized I've seen Chris Hecker in various Bonus Rounds, indie game panels, and random interviews for years, and he's always introduced as "developer of SpyParty". It finally occurred to me that, Jesus, that game has been in development since 2009. I'm not in the beta, and I'm not particularly following development of the game, and I'm not particularly super dying to play it, I'm just baffled as to how that's possible.

For a game that is basically a twist on The Ship and/or Bloody Good Time and/or Assassin's Creed multiplayer, except it takes place in a single room, I sorta just can't fathom how that game could be in development for 4 years and still not be finished. Has Chris Hecker gone on multiple life journeys, climbed Mount Everest, sailed around the world, in that span of time? Does he still work an exhausting day job or something, and is only a game dev part time?

Feel free to fill me in. I must be missing something.

I'm sure he's focusing on making a variety of super subtle tells for identifying spys who are attempting a large variety of spy objectives. When I saw it years ago it seemed very limited. So he's been working on it for 4 years. So what? Retro City Rampage was in development for 7 years. Fez, Braid and Cave Story all took over 4 years to develop. Monaco took 3 and a half years. These were all one or two person teams for the vast majority of their development.

I think he's been balancing the game for most of that time and trying to create new stages. Character models have been made recently though, they look really good.

Yeah, I know it's slow going when it's just you and like one artist, but I still swear SpyParty seems like it would require far fewer raw man hours than the other games you mentioned. The scope seems more limited compared to the aforementioned games with multiple mechanics, systems, a multitude of levels and/or missions, etc.

Assuming Hecker eventually handed off character texturing/modeling and environment art to the artist he hired, has Hecker himself just been doing nothing but animation work for the past like 2-3 years? At least with those other games you mentioned, I could imagine them going "Hmmm, this section still doesn't seem right, I should put a different puzzle or mechanic in this part" or something (especially Retro City Rampage's crazy everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach). But SpyParty has like, the one mode, in the one place, so I can't envision that many "gotta rework this whole section" time sinks.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm just trying to envision where all the time goes.

I think the thing with Spyparty is that it needs DotA level balancing, this means lots of playtesting (Which he started on a public level quite late in development) and lots of iterations. Plus, the fairly recent new art basically meant rebalancing every aspect of the game to work with the new models. Also, he's making multiple levels, all of which need to be carefully adjusted to provide the fairest competition.

I'm not super fussed, I'm fairly confident he'll finish it, but even if he doesn't, I quite enjoy playing it the way it is at the moment.