Ace of Spies - WIP

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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The most minimal of updates to the build. After many months of not getting much done that can go in an updated build I’ve finally added more matches to finish out the three first tournaments in Austin, Dubrovnik, and Malta. I’m still finalizing the new matches and making sure things work, but I should have it in good shape in a few days.

You can now make it all the way to lose in the semifinals, your handler will get annoyed if you actually make the finals in singles. I do sort of enjoy writing a sports story that includes people telling you to play worse.

Here’s the section that would play for your first extraction mission, it’s just a brief description of the type of mission, with a bit of editorializing about why your poor character is involved. And as ever I enjoy poking holes in my own premise when I can.

About Extraction missions...

If you were tasked with doing an extraction as a rule it meant a national intel agency had screwed up badly. Extracting assets is something agencies hate subcontracting out even to agencies they’re nominally allied with much less getting involved with an independent agency.

The reason the Co-op existed at all was that there are situations where a harmless athlete can get into places easier than an agency trained operative. There were times you were deeply skeptical of that simple fact underlying the agency’s purpose, tennis players sign up for tournaments sometimes months in advance, there just isn’t a lot of flexibility to adjust to these things.

In extractions you did at least know where to start. The agency that needed the extraction done almost always knew where to look, either a workplace, a residence, or if they were in custody some form of detention center.

As ever thanks for reading. Be back in November or earlier with hopefully more actual spy content.

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No significant new content. Well… I have excuses for not having more actual spy content. (Dispiriting elections, distracted by new Dragon Age game) The important thing is that progress is happening, but it is slow as I just keep struggling with writing things generically.

The Operations Engine is a real handful, not in terms of being complicated from a programming perspective, but more in finding the right way to integrate content to make it seem more bespoke is proving a challenge. Keeping the generic stuff from feeling generic is a bit of a timeless challenge when it comes to this sort of thing.

Aside from the operations engine my current priorities are the doubles engine and the player’s introduction to the intelligence world and first operations with the Co-op.

Here is the small section that would play when your character draws a first recruitment assignment.

About Recruitment missions...

The Co-op did not generally cultivate a network of their own intelligence sources and mostly relied on partner/client agencies for actual intelligence, but a good intel operative collects potential sources of intelligence, not always consciously but you make interesting friends with interesting jobs, and interesting friends with interesting jobs have interesting information.

So when you did recruiting it was usually a solo exercise. Early in your career agencies would send out one of their people to assist with the vetting, not that they didn’t trust you, they just didn’t… respect your skills, that’s probably the best description.

Often when you were recruiting you had the option of the carrot or the stick, befriend or find some damaging information and politely dangle it over the poor target as a form of… encouraged compliance? Nobody likes the words blackmail and extortion.

As ever thanks for reading. Hopefully things will speed up in 2025, despite my slacking on updates Ace of Spies really is in a good place.

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Happy new year, unfortunately no new build, but progress continues.

I’m optimistic that I can have five sample missions for the demo of the operations engine in a workable place for the next update. It’s possible I’ll even have that significant update ready sooner than I expect to. I wouldn’t bet on my progress speeding up, but I’m annoyed with how slow it’s gone and I’m in a good place with understanding the format of the operations engine so actual progress is a real possibility.

Today’s silly thing that I’ve thought too much about… Objective descriptions. They have to be generic and passive for their position on the skill chart, but that makes them annoying for using in narrative and… I never worried as much about the tenses of words and subject verb agreement as I do working with variables.

Here is the small section that would play when your character draws a first surveillance assignment.

About Surveillance operations...

Trained operatives sometimes look down their noses at surveillance missions. They’re trained to do a lot of things and then just told to take pictures or plant bugs. That general feeling might be why it seemed every mission James Bond was ever given seemed to devolve into fisticuffs, gunplay, and inevitably being captured. James might’ve just been an operative that bored easily.

Of all the general types of missions you got stuck doing surveillance missions were the most likely to send you out on your own with just you and whatever you packed for the trip.

They tended to be relatively simple. On paper anyway. You’d find where you had to surveil, then if necessary when you had to be ready to surveil by, actually it would usually be the other way round. Know when you had to be ready by, before knowing where you had to be, then the planting of bugs on useful figures, the retrieval of said bugs, and then onward to your next tournament.

There’s the old saying that the best laid plans seldom survive contact with the enemy, that’s why a good surveillance operation just avoids contact with the enemy. Everything’s simpler that way. Or at least it’s supposed to be.

As ever thanks for reading and for those of you fond of tennis enjoy the 2025 Australian Open.

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Just to make you aware, Dashingdon hosting will be closing soon so I would recommend moving this to cogdemos or uploading a compiled html file:

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Hello, first of all, no still don’t have the five sample missions yet for the operations demo.

Kicking myself about it. Making progress, and I’m confident on the programming side, just not so much in terms of getting it to a place I’m happy with just yet. I’ve been getting to some of the writing outside of the operations engine, but the operations engine is the complicated part of writing especially because of the versatility I’m trying for. My brief explanation became less brief than I wanted it to be, so enjoy the glimpse into my programming thoughts.

The Complications of Versatility

Each kind of operation has five phases coded to a letter. (A-E)(F-J)(K-O)(P-T)(U-Y). So the string “AFKPU” denotes one operation, “BGLQV” another - It works really nicely with the ability to pull a single character out of a string. Between each phase is a small section with a choice or two to add flavor to a specific operation.

So far it’s stupidly complicated, but the point is that I have the ability to reuse a section. Infiltrating a local hospital and infiltrating a university might be similar enough to reuse section A, but the hospital might have a similar twist to infiltrating a dissident group, so those two might share section P. The university might have a similar resolution to infiltrating a tech conference, they might share section V.

The point is to add complexity without doubling the writing required. In practice the elegant solution I’m looking for is proving to be well… complicated in the writing that it takes. I still find it elegant and I’m enjoying the challenge.

As ever thanks for reading. Here’s hoping for real progress for next time.

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Greetings, progress continues and continues to be slower than I’d like.

I’m in a good place to finally have the doubles engine improved, but it’s one of those things where I think things will always be simpler than they turn out to be. Possibly because of my lack of programming expertise there’s a lot of brute force coding to do and then testing.

Even now there are still times after testing the singles match engine extensively that I discover that a typo slipped through over a year ago and I’ve just missed it.

If I keep at it I should have an updated doubles engine by the end of the month and then I can get back to the annoying writing stuff. (So, yeah it’s a pretty big if.)

Meanwhile here’s a brief section from the start of an infiltration mission:

Somewhere in Eastern Europe...

Your way in was as a typical recent graduate, of college in what some would broadly define as the first world, sometimes a high school, actually secondary school graduate, worked in the developing world(though it was pushing it a little to have a teenage cover at your age), but anyway a graduate looking for work.

One of many nice things about being an operative was the simple fact that you came into every job interview with impeccable references and the qualifications they wanted for the job.

It made things significantly easier.

You once read a story, not sure it was in a paper or a summary of a research paper that got a little traction outside of academia, the upshot was that most of the time the people in charge of doing the hiring reach down for someone that doesn’t quite meet the job requirements. This in turn got you wondering if it was inherently suspicious that your aliases always had the right experience and good references.

It was enough to get in the door. Once you were in the door, you could do the rest.

Trying to actually get a job in a foreign country made it very useful to know the language and know it well. Mostly… mostly, you’d never be asked to infiltrate an organization that wasn’t multilingual and accepting of English.

Which is to say you could always handle your interview the traditional way, with good old fashioned charm.

As always thanks for reading, maybe I’ll even be back for a proper update by the end of the month.

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Hello! No new build, just new insights into my thinking
So, I’ve been thinking a lot about doubles this week as I was messing around with updating the doubles engine to add more interactivity for deuces and tiebreaks. After I code a new feature I put in a little explanatory section to explain what I’ve done and why, but this time as I was trying to explain it… (Using offensive, defensive, or neutral approaches in a sort of rock, paper, scissors style to slightly affect winning percentages)

I just felt that I couldn’t explain it from either a narrative point of view, a tennis point of view, or a gameplay point of view… so it demanded a rethink. I suspect that I’ll land on something more narratively based, maybe remembering little details about your partner to indicate that you’re playing well together and offering a bonus based on that. I’m not sure yet, it’s still very much in the brainstorming stage.

To provide a brief indication of what traveling the world looks like in Ace of Spies here’s a brief description for a visit to Panama:(my apologies to Panamanians if I offend anyone)

At the Chagres Consortium Championship

Naming tournaments based on little things I can glean from wikipedia is one of my favorite little things to do about this project. The Chagres river is the largest river in Panama, so I take one geographic name that reflects the locality and add some corporate language to make it sound like a group that could sponsor a tournament and tweak the information slightly to fit what I imagine the area will look like in the 2050s. In any case, here’s my intro description for Panama:

Panama is a nation famous for exactly one thing. The Canal. The Panama Canal has been the best way to get stuff from the Atlantic to the Pacific for ages and that isn’t expected to change anytime soon.

Most of the population of Panama lives in Panama City, partly because it’s well situated to run the country from and partly because most of Panama is full of miserable jungles and mountains making is a simply terrible place to try to build just about anything except for a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific. The canal took forever too, because Panama is even a terrible place to build the Panama Canal, it just happens to also be the only place to build it.

Due to that strategic position Panama was also a country whose strategic and political importance far outweighed its position the 116th largest nation in the world by area. Czechia and Sierra Leone are 115 and 117 respectively and no offense to the good folk of Prague, but neither of them has caused as much loss of sleep in geopolitical circles as the Panamanians.

As always thanks for reading.

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I love this very much, tennis stories will always catch me since tennis was one of my sports back in my school days and I want you to know how much I enjoy how you’ve done it here! And of course spy stories are always fun!

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Hi, once again I don’t have much of an update.

I don’t really have much of an explanation beyond that I’ve had other things on my mind. Family issues. Not always pleasant.

I’m still trying to make progress, still trying to finish up enough espionage engine missions to make a demo. Hopefully I’ll have that espionage demo soon, I still love this project… I just seem to have an annoying habit of making things more complicated than they have to be.

Here’s a quick section from your character’s training in Newark just after joining the Co-op.

Newark?

It felt faintly like college. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays were mostly intel instruction. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays on tennis. Sundays, Sundays you actually got to have a little control over your life.

You even got your first ‘assignment.’ Before your had to leave the area in September for a couple of tournaments in the Southwest the Co-op would appreciate it if you could obtain information about the Newark city government that the general public couldn’t obtain just by putting in an effort.

How exactly you could manage that was entirely your problem. Like the vast majority of Americans you were almost entirely ignorant of local politics before you signed up for the Co-op. Now, a few years older and a little bit wiser, you could pretty much name the mayor of any city you had a tournament in and generally made sure to know who was the mayor of the biggest city in any country you were about to visit. America is atypical in just how little the nation at large cares about the mayoral politics of its capital.

Of course one of the reasons you wanted to know who that mayor was in any random country you were visiting is that the mayor of Windhoek, Pristina, Vientiane, Muscat, or Asuncion is a very useful figure to involve in any covert scheme to destabilize a nation. The mayor of Washington, D.C. just doesn’t have that kind of power.

As ever thanks for reading, hopefully I’ll have a real update soon.

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Greetings, yeah… still no real update.

The family issues have become a more pressing concern diverting my attention from my writing, which is a shame. But I’m still writing, it’s just a headache getting things into a presentable condition. My goal is still to have a real update by the end of the year.

Until then… here’s a preview of something I haven’t shared before. You see, I really like my tennis engine, I think that I could tweak it to be more enjoyable and a better representation of the sport and have been thinking about doing a version that’s just focused on the athletic side of things instead of the hybrid version in Ace of Spies. It would involve an introduction/tutorial set at a tennis academy, making friends, being introduced to potential romantic options(like a ton of romantic options it would be complicated with characters being defined by traits and interests rather than having individual bespoke romantic interests) Then a primary gameplay loop of matches, narrative elements, and a mixture of tournament long plotlines and extended plots that last throughout a season of tennis, keeping track of rankings has been the biggest programming headache so far.

It is a ton of work to contemplate. But it also has a great name “The Racketeer”. Here’s a brief preview:

Racketeer - Kauai

Kauai, Hawaii

One thing was very clear after your arrival in Kauai, it would be a pain coming and going from the academy. It was a good thing then that the academy was so very beautiful.

You were handed your uniform and sent into the locker room to change, possibly so you’d look like a more cohesive group than the very eclectic bunch that showed up for day one at the Oceanic Sports Institute and Academy. When you got out you were directed to a sizable outdoor amphitheater where presumably the staff would provide a proper welcome.

The academy’s welcome was a litany of resumes from the athletes staffing the academy. They emphasized that it was an academy designed by athletes for athletes. You were only half paying attention to most of them, after all you were there for tennis… and the surfing.

The fact that because of the mandatory surfing classes you would also get to see basically everyone either in bathing suits or skintight wetsuits on a regular basis. Why that was a bonus that certainly hadn’t even occurred to you.

You were thirteen OF COURSE it had occurred to you.

The tennis squad met, unsurprisingly on the courts, with the coaches and a pair of older players that judging from the uniforms were still attending the academy. There were eight, four boys, four girls, in your group. Checking flags you confirmed that three of them were American including yourself. The remaining five featured players from Japan, Korea, Panama, and Colombia unless you were significantly worse at identifying national flags then you thought.

The coaches introduced themselves. It was a four person staff. The lead coach, the one you were most familiar with was Emma Mendoza, she had been a top 50 player, but was better known for her coaching exploits in recent years. She still worked with a few tour level players which kept her away from the academy more than your parents would like, but on the bright side you could be expected to meet a tour level pro or two because why wouldn’t they be up for training in Hawaii.

The remaining coaches introduced themselves as: Edgar Davidson, a serve volleying lefty that topped out at a ranking of 126 with an 0-3 record in majors; Stephanie Bell, an erratic, but hard hitting Canadian, 3-7 in majors, peaked at 83; and lastly Hideki Michiba, a Japanese trickster, peaked at 92, with a rousing 1-5 record in majors. Mendoza then commenced with a speech.

As ever thanks for reading, hoping for a better month going forward and real updates soon.

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Hi, so it was a rocky 2025.

In a bunch of ways, but mostly family health issues. They’ve abated somewhat, much to my absolute delight, but of late I’ve been back to brainstorming more than proper writing.

Allow me to share some of the objectives I’ve been considering for the espionage operations.

Recruitment

A recruitment mission unsurprisingly involves recruiting an asset, the targets for those missions will largely be low to midlevel figures on the basis that anyone more important should require the involvement of actual spies:

Bureaucrats (Ministry of Transportation or Energy)

Medical Doctor/Hospital administrator

Scientist (Researcher/Engineer)

Politician/Political Aide

Businessman

Security official(police/military)

I try to arrange it in opposing pairs so that I can be sure in the two recruitment missions that come with every playthrough no player will get two scientist recruitments or two bureaucrat recruitments. It keeps things varied and I know that I worry too much about replayability for a project that most people will only play through once, but that ambition is one of my curses…

And I remember tackling the exact same dungeon many times in Dragon Age 2, so I really don’t want my work to feel like that.

Hope all is well for everyone and that 2026 is better than 25.

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Generally fun but I get an error message part way through the first post South America tennis match in Austin.