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.

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