Super Sketchy Party
AI Recognition Update
It’s been a few month since our 1.0 update and we're excited to bring you a fresh, experimental feature: The AI Update!
We’ve developed something really cool we’d like to share with you, which will add some additional variance to your parties: This update adds an image recognition AI to the our steam client players. If you enable the AI in your game and join a party as a watch mode, the AI will then start to recognize the images that have been drawn in that party. So rather than generating new images, the AI is taking your hand-drawn images as an input and tries to figure out what you drew. We then apply additional logic to contextualize them within the game and then feed it back into the guesses for the drawing, making it harder to guess what the right answer is. The AI guess shows up as a normal guess, but qualifies as a fake guess, so whoever pick the wrong AI guess loses a few points.
We think this a really fun and ethical appliciance of AI in our game. It not only rewards clear drawing skills but also encourages players to think outside the box with their guesses, as the AI handles the more predictable responses. It’s also just really fun to see what the AI thinks you drew.
To clarify: The AI features are entirely optional and do require a robust CPU for optimal performance. If you prefer not to use the AI, you can opt out during game startup or disable it in the settings menu. Note that these new mechanics are active only when at least one player in watch mode has the AI feature enabled. The number of active AIs in your party lobby will be displayed alongside the count of regular players. The feature currently only works if you use English as your language for the party.
We're eager to hear your thoughts and look forward to your feedback!
The 1.0 Update
We're excited to announce the release of the 1.0 update! This update includes a number of smaller fixes and improvements, but our main feature with this update is the addition of 27 new languages:
***Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian*** (English & German were already present)
That’s right, we’ve translated the content and the game itself (including subtitles) for all these new languages, so more people can enjoy Super Sketchy Party in their native language.
We also have a system in place, that helps to expand the content for all languages: So let’s say a player adds a new German phrase to the database via our content submission system. This phrase is then auto-translated into all the other languages we support. But here comes the catch: We won’t add this phrase to that language database right away, but add it to a second separate database, where you can vote on the quality of that phrase. Only if the phrase gets a significant number of upvotes, it gets added to the general database with all phrases for the game. This way we ensure the quality of the phrase database, while also giving you, the community, a way to add more content to the game.
This update also marks the end of our early access journey. We’ve been in early access for about 1,5 years now and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It gave us the opportunity to get the community involved early in the lifecycle, while still improving on the overall experience. In the early access period we’ve added matchmaking, custom player sound effects, awards, cards, narration and so much more. As of now, we are proud of the scope the game and are satisfied with its features, which is why we’ve decided to finally fully release the game.
Thank you for your continued support and we hope you enjoy the new update!
Card & Narration Update
it’s us again. As promised in the last update, we’ve added and enhanced quite a few things to make the game even better. So let’s have a look.
Cards
As teased in the last update, we’ve added cards into the mix. The game awards you with cards at the end of each turn based on a secret formula. When you get these cards, they show up in your hand, which you can access at the start of the next round.
With cards we wanted to add a way to influence the others players during the round, since we felt that this would make the game more interactive and fun.
So here are the cards we implemented:
All of these have a negative effect on at least one player when they are played. From our testing we’ve found that these six cards feel like a good mix of effects: some more detrimental, some less. So we’ll await your feedback before adding any more.
Narration
An important part that was missing from the game was a proper narration, which is something we added now.
Every screen of the game is fully narrated with about 150 voice lines. In accordance with our goal to make this game as international as possible, the narration has full subtitles in English and German.
We’re really satisfied with how it turned out, but feel free to let us know whether you like it.
Graphics
The graphics of the game have always been something we had to make sacrifices for and we want to explain why.
Our goal was always to support as many devices as possible and with that goal in mind, the whole game is made in web technologies. This is why you can always go to [supersketchy.party](http://supersketchy.party) and play the whole game without any limitations.
While this is great, it’s also something we had to account for in the graphics department. As you probably know the web is very capable today and offers some really great ways to visualise your content. The flipside are the old browsers that are still around that we also want to support, which often don’t offer the same kind of capabilities as your desktop browser. Why do we want to support these old browser? Well, mainly because these are the kind of browsers which are on your Smart TV and we wanted our game to run on there as well.
Long story short, that’s why we were struggling to deliver a more compelling visualisation for some elements of the game. But since the last update we’ve invested more time in enhancing the elements we didn’t like with the tools that even the old browsers have and we think we have something good to show for now.
Our new Endresult with a better visualisation who made how many points in which round.
Our new Turn Result with fully animated picks and confetti 🎉
Game Client
We’ve changed the underlying technical base of our game client, which should give you a smaller installation and better game support on linux. This was quite the effort to pull off, but we think it should pay out in the long run.
What’s next
To be honest, we don’t know. The game is in a pretty good state right now and really fun to play. We’ve achieved most of our Early Access goals and are overall very confident that you’ll have fun playing the game. We are planning on adding the rest this year and release version 1.0. What comes after depends fully on the player feedback we receive. Before adding any additional features beyond the scope for 1.0, we want to assess the feedback first to see what would bring the most value to you. So, as always, leave us your feedback here or in the Steam Reviews, so we can see what you think we should improve.
Content, Controller & Stability Update
Happy new year to all of you and welcome back!
There are a few things we have improved since the last time, so let’s get right to it.
The Content Update
We’re pretty confident with our content by now, but we always wanted to let the community expand on our base content. That’s why until now you were able to send in new words, that could then be reviewed by us and added to the main game content.
We are now expanding on that concept of player agency by letting you vote on content.
With this feedback we can get a better picture of the submitted content, especially when we don’t speak the language.
But that’s not all: When a word is submitted, we translate that word into a few other languages, but don’t add it to games content immediately. Instead we put these words in a queue, where they can be judged.
We’re doing that, so all players can benefit from the submitted content, but we know that many phrases that sound good and make sense in one language, are completely unusable in others. But since our russian pun skills are not exactly up to par, we’ll try this approach together with you.
You can find the new feature in the Content Submission submenu in the mainmenu.
Controller support
Our vision with Super Sketchy Party is to support as many devices as possible and controller support is a step into that direction. With the release of the Steam Deck around the corner more so than ever.
But when you play Super Sketchy Party, you quickly realise that you don’t really need any kind of controller for the main game and that has been our approach with the implementation as well. So as of now you can control the main menu, host a game or change the settings. That should be just enough to get a first impression if this is something worth spending more time on.
Stability & Bugs
Since the last update we’ve adressed a few minor bugs to improve the overall experience. We also found a more major bug, where sometimes players would get disconnected from a running party. If you encountered this problem, we apologize for the inconvenience, since we want to keep the game as stable as possible and hope you give us another shot in the future.
What’s next
We’ll keep a close eye on performance and stability, but our next feature will be exiciting for all of us. We’ve noticed that during the rounds, the players barely need to interact with each other. That’s something we want to change with the addition of cards. Here is a sneak peak:
Drawing & Playersound Update
We've been a hard at work on our next big update. After several weeks of work, here is what we've been up to:
(old: left, new: right)
We've improved the drawing experience. The old drawing canvas was a good start, but the new one allows you to express your ideas more freely and gives the drawing a smoother look overall. Additionally we've increased the canvas size, so you have more space for your drawing and it looks cleaner in the end. With this change we've adjusted the pencil size, which we feel is better now, but any feedback over in the Steam Forums is appreciated.
Our second big feature with this update is the playersound. When joining a game, players can now record a sound as a playersound. The game uses whichever microphone is available, so this works on pretty much every device you can think of. The playersound is then played whenever the player avatar is shown, resulting in an entertaining soundscape during the game. In addition to that we've provided several stock sounds for players, who don't want to record their own sound.
Other changes:
- The lobby QR-Code is now visible on the player devices as well, so players can easily help other players joining the game
- The party lobby layout has been redesigned to better accommodate smaller screens
- Normalized music and soundeffects, so they're all the same volume
- Added more explanations to the content submission page
- Game is not allowed to start when there is no presentation device in the lobby
- Fixed several smaller bugs
What's next:
In the next update we want to improve the player content submission even more. (Thanks for all the submissions this far)