Following the overwhelming interest and support for his deceive-em-up Spy Party, Chris Hecker has now announced he has taken the monumental decision to literally double the size of his development team, by increasing the number of staff working on the project from one to two.

Chris announced the astonishing news on the Spy Party development blog. “So, it’s true, I have doubled the team size.  This rate of growth simply cannot be sustained.”

For those not following the intriguing project, Spy Party is a adversarial game in which one player plays a sniper tasked with eliminating a spy at a party. Hunted by the sniper, the other player must do their best to mingle with the guests and appear as NPC-like as possible, whilst also performing a series of espionage-related tasks before the timer ticks away.

Character artist John Cimino has actually been working in secret on the project since September 2011, furiously slaving away at art assets behind the scenes until the pair were ready to reveal some of his work. Now ready to reveal some of the new assets he’s been working on, Spy Party is beginning to move from intriguing indie project to a timeless work of art.

Aiming for a ‘timeless’ style over realism, and inspired by the works of Pixar, both Chris and John appear confident that the new change in style will not have a impact on the game’s stream-lined gameplay.

“We’ve spent months and months defining the style of the characters, and I’m really happy with the results.  We call this style naturalistic and illustrative.  With a game like Spy Party, where the design and gameplay aesthetics are all about deep subtlety, it was important that we hit that level of  subtlety in the visual aesthetic as well.  I want the visual and design aesthetics to work in concert to deepen the game.”

Although Chris is yet to announce a definite release for Spy Party, a simple change in aesthetics has moved the game from my ‘one-to-watch’ list to near the top of my ‘hand-it-over-now’ list.