Puzzle Spy International news & patch notes

The day has finally come, and we’re excited to be able to share Puzzle Spy International with the world! When I look back, we’ve actually been working on this for 7 years or so: The initial idea came back around 2019 or so when we decided that we wanted to make a game that combined Puzzled Pint-style puzzles with a more coherent adventure story and a lot more art! The spy theme and the idea of Agent Epsilon was born back then (and we’ve actually been using “Agent Epsilon” as our team name at Puzzled Pints since that time!) We wrote a VERY involved story spanning most of the continents and including many interesting elements that we ultimately recognized were too much for a small two-person development team to implement. We put the entire game concept on the back burner for several years before returning to it during a period when I (Mike) was in-between full-time game development jobs. A while after that last layoff, I needed to be working on a game again and so we dusted off PSI, edited it down to a much more manageable length, and got to work. I think I’ve mentioned it in this space before but we eventually realized that we’d edited it down TOO much and went back to thoroughly rewrite the entire ending. That of course meant designing more puzzles as well, but we really think the story is much more satisfying with the longer ending and we really like the new puzzles we’ve added. We hope you will as well!

Game development doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it’s too dark and dusty in there – and I’m especially glad to have had the support of several online communities of fellow game developers as we’ve worked on this game. Most of all, the group of (mostly) local San Francisco Bay Area indie devs The BAD (Bay Area Developers) Collective has been so supportive in this project, from standing co-working sessions, playtesting, and just generally talking through the process of small-team game development. But I’ve also been supported greatly on the coding and implementation side by the DevTalk and Ren’Py Discord servers, enjoyed the discussions and found testers on the ThinkyGames.com Discord, made lots of friends on the Wholesome Games Discord, and various other local game-development-centric servers. And we’ve greatly enjoyed the support of our local video game museum The MADE for regularly hosting fun events and indie play-testing nights which have been instrumental in honing this game’s puzzles. The important thing to remember is that, no matter what kind of thing you’re making or into, you never have to go it alone. There’s always a lot of support for whatever ideas you have brewing! Lastly, we want to give a huge shout-out to two contributors who have helped make Puzzle Spy international what it is, our puzzle coder SypherZent and our composer Alex Doty. It wouldn’t be this game without them and they’ve put in a ton of amazing effort and we wanted to publicly appreciate all of the work they’ve contributed. Thanks, guys!

Anyhow, on those notes, we’ll leave you to (hopefully) purchase and play Puzzle Spy International… And we hope that, whatever level of puzzling you have coming into the experience, we hope you find it challenging and fun! Be seeing you, Mike and Talia Travel-Friendly Cake

Hi folks, especially those recently joining us for the Steam Next Fest! Hope everyone is finding new titles and fun demos to try out!

I haven’t had time for game demos this week because we’ve been busy putting the finishing touches on Puzzle Spy International. A lot of work last week went into a bug that was preventing Mac users only from saving a game in mid-puzzle. That seems to be fixed but of course broke a handful of other things in the build. I think we’ve got everything under control now. I also recently got a lot of feedback on “Museo Photographs,” the first puzzle in the game (not a spoiler!) from both remote and in-person testers. We’ve been gently tweaking that one to make it a bit easier, as it’s the first puzzle that players will encounter. We also added some more detail to the hints for that puzzle to help out any players who are stuck. This puzzle involves identifying and labeling picture cards, and now there are some additional text clues per card available for whomever needs them.

The other big thing this past month has been finishing both the new Date Announcement Trailer and the as-yet-to-be-revealed Launch Trailer. I had never worked on any video editing before (aside from the PSI Gameplay Trailer) and while I’m reasonably happy with how that first trailer came out, it’s admittedly pretty slow. I wanted the new non-gameplay trailers to be more punchy and exciting, so I chose some faster-paced music that Alex Doty wrote for the game. The Date Announce trailer highlights Alex’s theme for the enemy base, and it’s got a real groove to it. It was so much fun synching up in-game animations to its driving guitar! And while I don’t have editing chops, I’ve been a game animator for years and a lot of those same skills and instincts came into play assembling this. I shared an earlier version with a friend who is a professional gameplay trailer editor and expected a ton of crits, but in the end he only pointed out a small handful of areas for improvement. I will confess to being unreasonably pleased with that result, so I hope you’ll check it out if you haven’t already.

Lastly, Puzzle Spy International (specifically, me, Mike) will be at the Game Developer Conference this year. So on the off chance that you’re there, please come find me! I’ll be giving out PSI postcards and stickers while I hang out in Yerba Buena Gardens for the week. The best place to reliably find me will be at the Thinky Game Devs Meet-Up in the park on Wednesday from 1-3. This is my second year co-organizing it, and as this year it’s officially co-sponsored by ThinkyGames.com and Playmath.org, there should be snacks and maybe even signage! The last few years’ events have attracted developers behind some of your favorite thinky games (YMMV) so it’s always a blast to hang out, talk shop, and gush over some awesome puzzle games. Hope to see you there… Cheers!

We’re working away at completing Puzzle Spy International and it’s feeling like we’re in the last downhill stretch heading towards the finish line. And it’s not a wild, uncontrolled mad dash to get there but instead a nice measured pace. We have a number of people playing through the full game now and giving us notes, and we’re going through them one by one. Some are simple to fix like typos and awkward phrasing. Others involve changes with code or how we’ve designed puzzles and hinted at their solutions. After some brainstorming, we came up with a fun and efficient way to show more granular hints for the first puzzle in the game. And sadly, some suggestions are out of scope, or just things that RenPy cannot do as an engine. 

Another important necessity for launching is a trailer! I (Mike) have taken to learning DaVinci Resolve - a popular video editing application - and have been busy getting a trailer together: Recording footage of my playing, exporting custom pieces of art from the game, cutting and editing it together, and synching it all to one of Alex Doty’s more intense pieces of spy music from the game. I’m really excited about the result, which is a lot more punchy than the slow gameplay trailer that I produced earlier. Alex not only provided the music but he’s also quite adept at sound mixing in general, and it working on a final sound edit of the trailer this week. It came together really smoothly, so I may end up with enough time to produce a second trailer. If so, we’ll have one to announce the release and another to announce the launch. One of the things we want the trailer in time for is the upcoming Steam Next Fest, which Puzzle Spy International will be participating in. As I’m writing this, tomorrow is the broadcast of the Thinky Awards sponsored by ThinkyGames.com. PSI is nominated for the most Anticipated Game of the year. But I’m super-excited to see who wins all of the awards! The week after the NextFest will be the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, USA. I’ll be there and hopefully giving out PSI stickers. I can’t say for sure where you’ll find me most of the time, but I am once again helping organize the Thinky Game Developers gathering in Yerba Buena Gardens so if you attend that - and you should, it’s a blast! - you should be able to find me there. And soon after all that is when we’re planning on launching the game! We’re looking forward to everyone getting to try it out… Cheers!

Greetings from Puzzle Spy International HQ! We’ve 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. We’ve had people playtest it on paper but this week will be our first live playtest of the coded up version and we’re 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 I’d like to talk about Talia’s 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 aren’t 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 we’re brushing our teeth at night, or refining lines of dialogue when we’re driving together somewhere in the car.

For the writing part, we’ve found that an incremental approach helps a lot: We’ll spend some time discussing the rough outline of a scene and what needs to happen in it and jot that down. Later we’ll go back and refine that more. Once it’s solid, at some other point we’ll start fleshing out lines of dialogue. We’ll 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 we’ve 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. We’re working on one of those now where we’ve 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. We’re 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 there’s 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!

It’s a slow, collaborative process, but we wouldn’t 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 we’ve 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!)

It’s been a busy month at PSI-HQ as we’ve 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 isn’t working. One of the puzzles needed a whole second pass with a new approach to get it to work properly, but now that it’s been recoded, it feels really good! I’m 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 we’re pushing back the release date to Q1 of 2026. There’s 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 we’d already designed a good portion of the puzzles needed. And so that’s what we did! We’ve been progressing with it steadily for two years now, and if we’d stuck with that plan, we’d be getting close to shipping it now. But when we cut the much-larger story, we just ended it at some arbitrary point.

We didn’t include the big finale, that part just got chopped out. And the more we thought about the story we’d settled on, the more it felt like the ending was abrupt and unsatisfying.

So over the past couple of months, we’ve 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 can’t add more story without adding more challenges - read as ‘puzzles’ - for Agent Epsilon to solve! And we’re really proud of these puzzles: They’re 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. 

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 you’ll have to wait a little longer to play it. We think the trade-off will be well worth it.

It’s 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 that’s 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. Currently we’re 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 we’ve gone back to the drawing board to give the ending a lot more punch. We’re really happy with the new additions: It’s 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. We’re certainly a lot more excited about this new direction. With the extended adventure come three additional puzzles. One of them is fully designed and we’re having folks test it out on paper right now so that we don’t commit to the coding process until we’re sure it’s 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, we’re certain that you’ll enjoy the final results a lot more! Adding an entire new location at the end also requires a lot more art, but fortunately I love to create it! I’ve been doing lots of research on 1960s vehicles, retro-futuristic architecture, costume design, and what a certain \ country’s landscape looks like to pull the final scenes together. They’re 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. Anyhow, that’s all the big news. If you want to catch more, don’t forget to follow us on Bluesky at @agentepsilon.bsky.social... Be seeing you!

This month we’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve been playing Afterburn’s Inbento lately and it’s 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 they’re supposed to do. One of our favorite puzzle game series, The Room, has multiple different kinds of puzzles, few of them overlapping, and they don’t provide step-by-step explanations on how to solve each one. It’s 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. There’s 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 you’re 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 wasn’t 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. It’s THAT exact feeling that we’re 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 don’t 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 we’ve taken.