- May 2026 Update - 28 May 2026
Hi, all! This is our first update post-launch. First off, we want to thank everyone who has purchased the game, and played it. Thanks also to those who have left reviews, which have been almost entirely positive and often incredibly gratifying to read. You’re all who we made this game for, so it’s really made many of our days to read about the reception the game has received and hear what you think about it! The big news today is that we just released a surprise DLC update, the game soundtrack! It took a little longer than the game to get all of the files together, but for those of you who enjoyed the 1960s spy music in the game, you can get it to play outside of the game in MP3 and lossless WAV format. Alex Doty, the game’s composer, did an amazing job of channeling the vibe of mid-century spy movies, really absorbing all he could from greats like John Barry (James Bond) and Henry Manc…
- Update note for PSI 1.0.1 - 10 April 2026
Fixed a problem where music would be turned down but the map transition music would be played too loudly.
- Launch Update - 30 March 2026
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.…
- February Next Fest Update - 25 February 2026
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…
- February 2026 Update - 3 February 2026
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 g…
- November Update - 7 November 2025
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…
- October Update - 4 October 2025
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 g…
- September Update - 3 September 2025
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 ei…
- June Update - 24 June 2025
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…
- May Update - 24 May 2025
The most exciting news for this month is that the demo for Puzzle Spy International is out now! We released it yesterday, just in time for participation in the Spy Video Game Rendezvous (which started yesterday on Steam) and the coming week's Cerebral Puzzle Showcase which we'll also be in. It's exciting to finally give you the chance to play a puzzle or two in our game world! The demo takes place in London - which is where Agent Epsilon herself is from - and is an entirely separate story and puzzle from the main game, so playing it won't spoil your enjoyment of the game at all. We decided to do it this way because PSI itself is not a terribly long experience, with only eight puzzles in the main game. Granted, they're not small, but with such a short game, we didn't want to spoil a big chunk of it by releasing part of it as a demo. We decided early on that making the demo a whole separa…
- April Update - 23 April 2025
It's been a slow month of progress for PSI, mostly focused on getting the game to save properly. There's more testing needed, but we really wanted to make sure that a player could save the game mid-puzzle, as it can take 30 - 60 minutes to complete a single puzzle! But things are looking hopeful... So this month seems like a good time to talk a bit about the puzzle design in Puzzle Spy International. We (Talia and I) were first introduced to these brain-teasery puzzles by our good friend Jay. (He also introduced us to RL escape rooms and the monthly in-person puzzle challenges of Puzzled Pint.) Jay has not only been a long-time fan of complicated paper puzzles and Puzzle Hunts but has also written quite a number of puzzles himself, for Puzzled Pint, Microsoft Puzzle Hunt and more. The original impetus for PSI came from our asking Jay for permission to repurpose his puzzles.Something alo…
- March Update - 26 March 2025
Now that I’m back from GDC – the Game Developers Conference, where I had a lot of fun showing Puzzle Spy International at an indie showcase event at Syzygy in San Francisco – it’s back to work on the game! This past month, we’ve been playtesting, adding coding to one of the newer puzzles, creating layout art for another new puzzle, working out how to save games mid-puzzle, and lots of drawing, including two new backgrounds (location: Classified!) and three new characters. As I’m adding all of this art, this seems like a fitting time to talk about the art inspirations for PSI. As I’m fond of telling folks, the story is set in the mid-sixties and so is the art and UI design. I’ve been drawing heavily on the illustration style from the middle of the last century for this project, often referred to as “mid-century modern.” United Productions of America was an animation studio that was big i…
- February Update - 24 February 2025
We’ve made some great progress refining several puzzles this past month. I’ve done art for new locations and characters, and we attended two live playtest events. We got a lot of great feedback on several puzzles, and have been busy adjusting the puzzles (and some of the UI around them) to make them work better. Being part of the local game developers communities has been a huge help in making Puzzle Spy international happen. We’re lucky to be in an area where there’s a lot of indie game dev happening and I’m fairly active in the local indie Discords as well as several other game-related Discord servers (for example, the two big ones where people are using – and giving feedback on – games made with the Ren’py engine, which is what PSI uses.) My local indie Discord just hosted a live playtest at a bar/arcade in San Francisco last week, so Talia and I attended and got to watch a bunch of…
- January Update - 27 January 2025
A big thanks to everyone who wishlisted Puzzle Spy in the first month! We're going to use these regular new updates to let you know about what we're working on. First off, who's "we"? We're Mike and Talia, a husband-and-wife team from Oakland, California, USA. We're collaborating on all of the writing and puzzle design and Mike does all of the visuals. (He's been an industry game artist for several decades.) We get outside help for coding, music, and some puzzle design. The game is currently ~60% complete, both in terms of story and puzzles. We have 5 of the planned 8 big puzzles coded and are in the process of playtesting them now, Play-testing has included folks playing them over the internet and in live local game showcases. It's exciting to have people give us feedback on what is and isn't working, and for us to be able to look at the latter and come up with new ideas to make the pu…
