
The hard part for the spy is you have to fulfill missions, like getting a message at a statue, in a way that can visibly give you away.

Learning to walk the way an AI walks is a skill in this game, Hecker said. “If the spy is too easy to find, you can adjust it and make it harder,” Hecker said. “Each of the maps are aesthetically very different. We have a lot of diversity among the characters. There are three different kinds of “tells,” or ways to discover the spy.Įach map explores a different part of the game design space.” It’s architecturally diverse, and diverse in game designs. A hard tell could be where you as the sniper see the spy plant a bug on the ambassador. There are “soft tells” that require more detective work. If something happens in a conversation and only a few characters are talking, then you can deduce that one of those people in the conversation circle is a spy.

The sniper can then mark, or “highlight,” the suspects and “lowlight” the ones who are not suspects, making the visual task easier. And the third way to tell is through behavior, like someone acting more intentionally than an AI would. “People shoot for that latter reason in elite levels,” Hecker said.
