[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45352788/6762d2fcfd697d51331d75a9aabd9bdf66e26756.png\"][/img]\n\nGreetings from Puzzle Spy International HQ! Weve been busy putting the finishing touches on the last puzzle you get to solve in the game. We had been stuck on exactly how to make it work for a while but a change of perspective and approach made it come together really nicely. Weve had people playtest it on paper but this week will be our first live playtest of the coded up version and were excited to see how that goes. Meanwhile, I (Mike) have been producing a bunch of background art for the big scenes at the end of the game to make sure that the final locale is really interesting and rewarding.

This month Id like to talk about Talias and my collaborative process. How exactly do two people work on a game together? In some places, of course, not at all: I do all the art and RenPy scripting, and as we arent high-level coders, we work with SypherZent who does all of the heavy lifting for puzzle programming. But the puzzle designs and all of the writing are done by us as a team. Every plot point, line of dialogue, puzzle hint or clue are all a collaborative effort.

For us, teamwork is the entire point of making this game. As a couple, we love solving (and making) puzzles, and writing. So while at times it would be more efficient to let one person work on something without the other (generally me as Talia is now in grad school and tight on time,) the whole point of the thing is to do it together. So we end up sneaking co-working time on the game into odd places: Discussing plot points while were brushing our teeth at night, or refining lines of dialogue when were driving together somewhere in the car.

For the writing part, weve found that an incremental approach helps a lot: Well spend some time discussing the rough outline of a scene and what needs to happen in it and jot that down. Later well go back and refine that more. Once its solid, at some other point well start fleshing out lines of dialogue. Well toss ideas for lines back and forth, with one of us sometimes word-smithing what the other person just suggested. We have some scenes that weve worked on for weeks or even months, gradually picking away at them when we have time or are struck by inspiration for what a character should say. This is especially true for the sections with branching narrative, as sometimes we have to write the same conversation multiple different ways. Were working on one of those now where weve got some paths that we think are hysterical (we hope you do too!) but that ups the pressure on making the other paths just as funny. Were currently rewriting one that was finished but then the other paths turned out to be much funnier and that one no longer matches up.

We use the same process for designing puzzles too, except that they require more dedicated time for sitting down and focusing on them, not a brief conversation while in the shower. As we both work day jobs, these most commonly happen on weekends and the occasional holiday. Once the general idea of a puzzle is scoped out, there are lots of small elements that can be iterated on during smaller interactions: How exactly should the clue to this line be worded, or what should hints for this puzzle be? PSI has several puzzles where theres something hidden in a sentence and coming up with those individual sentences is a nice small manageable task to pick away at, possibly while getting ready for bed!

Its a slow, collaborative process, but we wouldnt have it any other way. We love working on it as a team, just like we enjoy solving puzzles as a team. And we hope you like what weve come up with, whether you play it solo or work on it with your own team (which we highly recommend, although not necessarily while you are brushing your teeth!)

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Its been a busy month at PSI-HQ as weve been developing two new puzzles, which includes having folks test them on paper, making all of the art, writing the hints, coding them, testing them digitally, and revising anything that isnt working. One of the puzzles needed a whole second pass with a new approach to get it to work properly, but now that its been recoded, it feels really good! Im excited to show it to new players at a local indie game live testing event later this week.

But the really big news that I have to share about Puzzle Spy International is that were pushing back the release date to Q1 of 2026. Theres a whole development story associated with that so let me share:

When Talia and I first envisioned PS over 5 years ago, it was a MUCH bigger game. The story had you traveling to just about every continent on the planet. There was a laser lab in Rio de Janiero, a stolen goods dealer in Tehran who had found the bad guys a used rocket from Kazakhstan, a kidnapped American NASA scientist, space laser arrays, a liaison with an agent from the Soviet Cypher Corps, and much, much more! The game also involved 40-45 totally unique bespoke puzzles. After a while of working on that, we realized that we would never finish something so large and we back-burnered it.

We spent some time instead developing a space epic incorporating Star Battle puzzles until it too got too large to be feasible. At that point, we looked back at our first love PSI and thought about scope: If we cut it massively, it could be a short 8-puzzle game and wed already designed a good portion of the puzzles needed. And so thats what we did! Weve been progressing with it steadily for two years now, and if wed stuck with that plan, wed be getting close to shipping it now. But when we cut the much-larger story, we just ended it at some arbitrary point.

We didnt include the big finale, that part just got chopped out. And the more we thought about the story wed settled on, the more it felt like the ending was abrupt and unsatisfying.

So over the past couple of months, weve been rewriting the conclusion. Instead of just stopping at some point, it now builds to a climax. Agent Epsilon wind ups somewhere really cool and the threat level is dangerously high. And when you get to the end, it feels monumental. We are SO much more excited about this new ending and know that anyone who plays it will be too. Of course we cant add more story without adding more challenges - read as puzzles - for Agent Epsilon to solve! And were really proud of these puzzles: Theyre super fun, all different from anything already in the game, and they really dovetail nicely with what Agent Epsilon is doing in the story. They just FIT and that fit is truly satisfying.\n

Of course these additions mean more design, coding and play-testing (see above.) And this whole new area has required more illustration than any other location, almost as much as all of the other locations combined! The plus side is that you get a more exciting story with more fun puzzles and a more satisfying ending. The only negative is that youll have to wait a little longer to play it. We think the trade-off will be well worth it.

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Its been a busy month or two at Puzzle Spy International headquarters: We spent July prepping for showing the game at MAGwest, including a fun stand-up of Agent Epsilon, a nicely-decorated table and an extra monitor that never quite interfaced with our laptop correctly. But because MAGwest is a relatively mellow con, folks who sat down to try out the demo were happy to sit there for the ~45 minutes needed to solve the entire demo. We encouraged people to work in groups as thats the most fun way to play and crack the game in our opinion. Some people came with a pile of friends, while other groups formed up as they all gathered around the demo and eventually cracked it as a team. Everyone had a great time trying it out, and we gave out postcards and the last of our stickers.\n\nCurrently were in the process of making Puzzle Spy International a bit longer. The original story ended after eight puzzles, and the ending felt somewhat abrupt and arbitrary. So weve gone back to the drawing board to give the ending a lot more punch. Were really happy with the new additions: Its much more along the lines of how an exciting world-spanning spy adventure should end, and we think people playing the game are going to feel a lot more satisfied with the conclusion. Were certainly a lot more excited about this new direction. With the extended adventure come three additional puzzles. One of them is fully designed and were having folks test it out on paper right now so that we dont commit to the coding process until were sure its solid. Another puzzle is in process, and we made a lot of headway on the third (and final) puzzle of the game this past weekend and are really excited about it. While this extra work will unfortunately push out the release date of the game a bit, were certain that youll enjoy the final results a lot more!\n\nAdding an entire new location at the end also requires a lot more art, but fortunately I love to create it! Ive been doing lots of research on 1960s vehicles, retro-futuristic architecture, costume design, and what a certain \\[classified] countrys landscape looks like to pull the final scenes together. Theyre going to look really cool! We also are getting to add some really funny conversations with some new characters designed for the end of the game as well, and looking forward to your getting to see them too. \n\nAnyhow, thats all the big news. If you want to catch more, dont forget to follow us on Bluesky at @agentepsilon.bsky.social... Be seeing you!

This month weve been finishing up the coding of one of the later puzzles in the game: Fans of the daily word-connection puzzle game Circuits will enjoy this one. We play Circuits every day as a couple, and you can play it yourself at https://circuitsgame.com .

One of the other important things that Ive done recently is edited the Steam game descriptions to include the phrase rules discovery. There are different approaches to puzzles games: A good many of them offer a more guided approach, especially puzzles that are more systematic in nature where the basic rules stay the same but the difficulty expands over time. That kind of game can introduce the player to basic concepts and carefully introduce and explain each new variation or added rules as they are introduced. Ive been playing Afterburns Inbento lately and its a great example of this gradual approach. Other games just throw the player into the deep end, giving them freedom to explore and figure out the rules and even what theyre supposed to do. One of our favorite puzzle game series, The Room, has multiple different kinds of puzzles, few of them overlapping, and they dont provide step-by-step explanations on how to solve each one. Its a less guided approach but instead provides more immersion and offers a great deal of player satisfaction when you manage to figure out how a puzzle works without the game telling you at all.

Theres nothing wrong with either approach, but I feel like the most important thing is for any potential player to not be surprised at what the game offers: If youre expecting one kind of game and it turns out to be another, that can be a bit of a bummer. Recently, as Puzzle Spy International was part of the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase and we launched our demo, a whole bunch of people got the chance to play our demo. One of the things that some people told us was that they were expecting the game to have (or BE) much more of a tutorial that slowly taught you how to play and our demo clearly wasnt that. Fortunately, other people offered feedback about how they had no idea what to do at first, but slowly figured out what the puzzle was looking for and then solved the entire puzzle. They reported experiencing a great deal of satisfaction from having figured everything out sometimes with no hints at all and managing to solve the entire puzzle. Its THAT exact feeling that were shooting for in PSI: Not giving the players as much direction or tutorialization, and allowing for that rewarding feeling of puzzling your way out of a given problem. If we told you all the rules of a given puzzle, that would deprive the player of that awesome feeling of having pieced it together and solved it.

So anyhow, just something to keep in mind for when PSI eventually releases: We dont give you a very guided walk-through on how to play each of the puzzles, and every one of them is totally different. Some of them are going to be recognizable and pretty simple to wrap your head around while other puzzles are going to take a bit more mulling over to decipher. We, as the designers, made a conscious choice to not give an overt tutorial for every single puzzle and hope that puzzle fans who appreciate that kind of challenge will enjoy the approach weve taken.

The most exciting news for this month is that the demo for Puzzle Spy International is out now! We released it yesterday, just in time for participation in the Spy Video Game Rendezvous (which started yesterday on Steam) and the coming week's Cerebral Puzzle Showcase which we'll also be in. It's exciting to finally give you the chance to play a puzzle or two in our game world!

The demo takes place in London - which is where Agent Epsilon herself is from - and is an entirely separate story and puzzle from the main game, so playing it won't spoil your enjoyment of the game at all. We decided to do it this way because PSI itself is not a terribly long experience, with only eight puzzles in the main game. Granted, they're not small, but with such a short game, we didn't want to spoil a big chunk of it by releasing part of it as a demo. We decided early on that making the demo a whole separate puzzle would let us adapt another one of our co-puzzle-designer Jay's excellent puzzles, and could give folks a flavor of the game without spoiling any of it. We think of it like the action segment at the start of a James Bond movie, a fun little adventure that Bond deals with quickly and competently and then we cut to the opening song and title sequence. This is like that, a small appetizer to the main course.

In January of 2024, we set aside all work on the main game and just spent a few months focusing on this demo. The look of the game had already been established so I developed a new setting and we iterated on Epsilon's contact, who would become Inspector Ewan Danger. It was fun to also incorporate Obfuskoperatives from the Soviet Cypher Force, which was at one time a part of the main story prior to editing.

Testing the first pass on the puzzle made us realize how much more time we needed to spend on adding hints to the puzzles, a learning that we've carried through to the entire game. One solver pointed out that while she got the answer, there were many lines that she hadn't completed and that it would be nice to have a way to get clues on a per-line basis. Those are in the demo now, little illustration clues for every single line. Many people won't see them at all: We've noticed a lot of players taking a lot of pride in solving our puzzles with no hints ('though there is NO penalty for using the hints in this game.) But for those who need them - or who want to go back through and see the hints after solving the entire demo - the little illustrations for each set are fun and a novel approach we haven't seen on many puzzles... but given my skill set, they were a fun and effective way to hint at solutions.

One of my local indie game dev Discord servers hosted a live game testing night at a local brewery. We brought the demo to it and expected people to take turns playing it. Instead what happened was that one person sat down to play, her friends joined her, and eventually there was a huge crowd around my laptop all working together to solve the puzzles. We love this method of puzzle solving! In fact, each of us - Talia and Mike - rarely solve puzzles on our own, instead enjoying working on them together as a team. This goes for crosswords, Puzzled Pints, and even other puzzle video games. (Some semi-recent puzzle games we've solved together include Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, Frog Detective, and Tangle Tower.) There's not really a name for games you solve as a group - "couch co-op" has lots of other connotations - so we decided to add a note in the start of the game encouraging folks to solve it as a group (if they enjoy that) and to use the hints (if they want.)

Anyhow, we're excited to give you the chance to try out this short spy adventure in London - with or without a team - when you get the chance!

It's been a slow month of progress for PSI, mostly focused on getting the game to save properly. There's more testing needed, but we really wanted to make sure that a player could save the game mid-puzzle, as it can take 30 - 60 minutes to complete a single puzzle! But things are looking hopeful...

So this month seems like a good time to talk a bit about the puzzle design in Puzzle Spy International. We (Talia and I) were first introduced to these brain-teasery puzzles by our good friend Jay. (He also introduced us to RL escape rooms and the monthly in-person puzzle challenges ofPuzzled Pint.) Jay has not only been a long-time fan of complicated paper puzzles and Puzzle Hunts but has also writtenquite a number of puzzles himself, for Puzzled Pint, Microsoft Puzzle Hunt and more.

The original impetus for PSI came from our asking Jay for permission to repurpose his puzzles.Something along the lines of "Hey, we have this idea for a spy story, could we incorporate some of your old puzzles into it?" Jay granted permission and we've reused several of his puzzles in the game. In other places, we've had to write our own puzzles to dovetail nicely with our story and situations. We've leaned more towards puzzles that have longer solutions: The PSI puzzles needed answers that formed full directions like "Meet your contact next to Big Ben in London." (NOT an actual puzzle answer in the game!)

Like puzzles from Puzzled Pint and similar events, the puzzles don't display their instructions up front. Part of the challenge - and, we argue, the FUN - comes from analyzing what little is given and figuring out what you're supposed to do. Here are a bunch of boxes that you can type in, but what goes in those boxes? Here are a bunch of letters or words, what's their connection? If we told you everything that you're supposed to do, that would be hand-holding your way halfway through the puzzle, and we want players to experience the thrill of figuring out those connections themselves. That's what leads to the fun A-HA moments that make puzzle-solving a joy.

Of course not every puzzler can get into the mind of the puzzle creator so we've provided an EXTENSIVE hint system (and there is NO penalty for using hints!) The hint system ensures that no one will ever be in a position to not be able to finish a puzzle and move forward if the solution isn'tclicking.

We're still planning on releasing the Puzzle Spy International: Prelude and Demo next month so stay tuned for the chance to try it and experience these a-ha moments yourselves!

Now that Im back from GDC the Game Developers Conference, where I had a lot of fun showing Puzzle Spy International at an indie showcase event at Syzygy in San Francisco its back to work on the game! This past month, weve been playtesting, adding coding to one of the newer puzzles, creating layout art for another new puzzle, working out how to save games mid-puzzle, and lots of drawing, including two new backgrounds (location: Classified!) and three new characters. As Im adding all of this art, this seems like a fitting time to talk about the art inspirations for PSI.

As Im fond of telling folks, the story is set in the mid-sixties and so is the art and UI design. Ive been drawing heavily on the illustration style from the middle of the last century for this project, often referred to as mid-century modern. United Productions of America was an animation studio that was big in the 50s, and their work was heavily influenced by graphic design. Walt Disney films of the period had a great graphic sense as well, with 101 Dalmatians (1961) being a particular influence on my backgrounds for PSI. Many look at the art from the game and remark that it reminds them of 90s and early 2000s animation, like work by Craig McCracken (Powerpuff Girls, Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends, Wander Over Yonder) and Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexters Laboratory, Samurai Jack.) McCracken and Tartakovsky attended CalArts together, where some of the instructors were animators from UPA and both ended up drawing influences from UPAs animation So its not a coincidence, were just all inspired by the same earlier work!

Im also drawing a lot of inspiration from other graphic design of the 50s and 60s, including fonts and logos from that period, maps, magazine illustrations, movie posters, and package design. Saul Bass, well known for creating movie titles and posters at that time, is also a great reference for 60s imagery. Ive also tried to absorb some ideas from contemporary artists whose work pays homage to the mid-century look, including Shane Glines, Derek Yaniger, Kevin Dart, and especially Satoshi Hashimoto.

So thats where the art style of Puzzle Spy International comes from, as well as a not-insignificant helping of my OWN art style, having been a professional illustrator and creating art, animation and UI for games for several decades. I hope you like what youve seen so far!

Weve made some great progress refining several puzzles this past month. Ive done art for new locations and characters, and we attended two live playtest events. We got a lot of great feedback on several puzzles, and have been busy adjusting the puzzles (and some of the UI around them) to make them work better.

Being part of the local game developers communities has been a huge help in making Puzzle Spy international happen. Were lucky to be in an area where theres a lot of indie game dev happening and Im fairly active in the local indie Discords as well as several other game-related Discord servers (for example, the two big ones where people are using and giving feedback on games made with the Renpy engine, which is what PSI uses.) My local indie Discord just hosted a live playtest at a bar/arcade in San Francisco last week, so Talia and I attended and got to watch a bunch of people play PSI. When something isnt working well, we get to see it with out own eyes and talk to the players about what isnt working. (And we also hear a fair amount about what IS working too!)

That same local Discord hosts a weekly coworking/problem-solving night so last week I came with a problem that people noticed with one puzzle not accepting input when the shift or capsLock keys were on. Our own programmer couldnt find the problem, but a few folks offered to check through the code and found exactly what the problem was. Sometimes all it takes is a fresh pair of eyes! And with just a few lines of code changed, now the puzzle works exactly the way anyone would expect it to, and no one playing has to worry about whether they have capsLock on or not.

Another great place to meet up with community are conferences: I dont attend a lot but never miss the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the big game industry gathering every spring in San Francisco. Ive been attending for years. Last year I especially loved the Thinky Games MeetUp in Yerba Buena Park in downtown SF. I met the makers of so many other fun puzzle games, including Mini-Metro, ViewFinder, A Tiny Sticker Tale, Surradia, and more. This year the Thinky Games folks told me that they wouldnt be at GDC so I offered to plan and host the Thinky Puzzle Devs Meetup so that it would still happen. They gave me their blessing so therell be another meet-up this year. If you happen to be around SF or the GDC, come by Yerba Buena Park (specifically the Stone Stage) on Thursday March 20 from 10-12. Ill be there talking about Puzzle Spy with lots of other game-makers!

A big thanks to everyone who wishlisted Puzzle Spy in the first month! We're going to use these regular new updates to let you know about what we're working on.

First off, who's "we"? We're Mike and Talia, a husband-and-wife team from Oakland, California, USA. We're collaborating on all of the writing and puzzle design and Mike does all of the visuals. (He's been an industry game artist for several decades.) We get outside help for coding, music, and some puzzle design.

The game is currently ~60% complete, both in terms of story and puzzles. We have 5 of the planned 8 big puzzles coded and are in the process of playtesting them now, Play-testing has included folks playing them over the internet and in live local game showcases. It's exciting to have people give us feedback on what is and isn't working, and for us to be able to look at the latter and come up with new ideas to make the puzzles easier to understand and play.

(For instance, in one puzzle about punny names, two names were falling flat as they riffed on somewhat uncommon expressions. We replaced those with some much more "gettable" puns and have received appreciation for the new updates.)

We got a ton of writing done over the New Year's break and have since added all the art and implemented the entire branching conversation for one entire new location. (Sorry, but which country this conversation takes place in is classified information.) We've got full sketches for another major character and plan to work on finished art for them soon.

We'll also be doing some more live playtests of puzzles early next month... Look for a new update in February!