On that note, Hecker says he makes all of his tuning and balance decisions with the game's elite players in mind, following a Blizzard-inspired design philosophy of 'depth first, accessibility later.' 'My brain will let me do a paid beta, but it wouldn't let me ship the game early.' 'The nice thing about a paid beta is it doesn't trigger my perfectionism warning signals,' Hecker says. And he says the full release is still a few years off. I can make every bit of it as perfect as I want, given unlimited time.'įor players waiting to get their hands on SpyParty, it can seem as if Hecker has been taking unlimited time to finish. Even though what I was developing was really important, that game was so huge that even the important stuff was just a small bit of what ended up on the disk.

It's kind of a relief from working on Spore, where I was just a tiny cog. 'It sounds like so much stuff,' Hecker says, 'but I'm interested in it all. But aside from Cimino, Hecker does everything: tuning the animations, talking to press, writing algorithms for AI pathfinding, tech support on the forums, balancing the game design. In 2011, Hecker hired longtime collaborator John Cimino to overhaul SpyParty's art style from pixelated proto-Sims to sophisticated cocktail-sippers.

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