Puzzle Spy International

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Latest news

• Patch Notes·28 May 2026Official

  May 2026 Update

  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 Mancini (The Pink Panther) and we couldn’t be more happy with how the game sounds thanks to Alex’s hard work. We’re super-excited to be able to share the soundtrack with you. Also, the game and the soundtrack are now available together in a bundle, the appropriately-named “Game + Soundtrack Bundle.” Together, both items are 10% off. If you’ve already purchased the game, you can still get the bundle, which gives you just the OST for that 10% off. But on top of that, today (May 28) marks the start of the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase, which PSI is once again participating in. For the run of this Steam event, the game will be 15% off. (So if you get the Bundle, yes, the discounts stack!) We’re honored to be part of this festival, the biggest puzzle game event of the year on Steam, and plan on buying a bunch of stuff ourselves during it. (We now have time to play some of them, given that we’ve got the game and soundtrack out, and Talia has finished her Masters program and graduated!) That’s all the news for now. Thanks for tuning in, and happy listening/puzzling!Mike and Talia Travel-Friendly Cake...
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• Patch Notes·10 Apr 2026Official

  Update note for PSI 1.0.1

  Fixed a problem where music would be turned down but the map transition music would be played too loudly.
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• Patch Notes·30 Mar 2026Official

  Launch Update

  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. A while after that last layoff, I needed to be working on a game again and so we dusted off PSI, edited it down to a much more manageable length, and got to work. I think I’ve mentioned it in this space before but we eventually realized that we’d edited it down TOO much and went back to thoroughly rewrite the entire ending. That of course meant designing more puzzles as well, but we really think the story is much more satisfying with the longer ending and we really like the new puzzles we’ve added. We hope you will as well! Game development doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it’s too dark and dusty in there – and I’m especially glad to have had the support of several online communities of fellow game developers as we’ve worked on this game. Most of all, the group of (mostly) local San Francisco Bay Area indie devs The BAD (Bay Area Developers) Collective has been so supportive in this project, from standing co-working sessions, playtesting, and just generally talking through the process of small-team game development. But I’ve also been supported greatly on the coding and implementation sid...
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• Patch Notes·25 Feb 2026Official

  February Next Fest Update

  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 labeling picture cards, and now there are some additional text clues per card available for whomever needs them.The other big thing this past month has been finishing both the new Date Announcement Trailer and the as-yet-to-be-revealed Launch Trailer. I had never worked on any video editing before (aside from the PSI Gameplay Trailer) and while I’m reasonably happy with how that first trailer came out, it’s admittedly pretty slow. I wanted the new non-gameplay trailers to be more punchy and exciting, so I chose some faster-paced music that Alex Doty wrote for the game. The Date Announce trailer highlights Alex’s theme for the enemy base, and it’s got a real groove to it. It was so much fun synching up in-game animations to its driving guitar! And while I don’t have editing chops, I’ve been a game animator for years and a lot of those same skills and instincts came into play assembling this. I shared an earlier version with a friend who is a professional gameplay trailer editor and expected a ton of crits, but in the end he only pointed out a small handful of areas for improvement. I w...
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• Patch Notes·3 Feb 2026Official

  February 2026 Update

  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 getting a trailer together: Recording footage of my playing, exporting custom pieces of art from the game, cutting and editing it together, and synching it all to one of Alex Doty’s more intense pieces of spy music from the game. I’m really excited about the result, which is a lot more punchy than the slow gameplay trailer that I produced earlier. Alex not only provided the music but he’s also quite adept at sound mixing in general, and it working on a final sound edit of the trailer this week. It came together really smoothly, so I may end up with enough time to produce a second trailer. If so, we’ll have one to announce the release and another to announce the launch. One of the things we want the trailer in time for is the upcoming Steam Next Fest, which Puzzle Spy International will be participating in. As I’m writing this, tomorrow is the broadcast of the Thinky Awards sponsored by ThinkyGames.com. PSI is nominated for the most Anticipated Game of the year. But I’m super-excited to see who wins all of the awards! The week after the NextFest will be the Game Developers Conference in...
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