As I write this, Super Tuesday in the Democratic campaign has made things even more exciting. Both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden picked up a tremendous number of delegates and it is looking like we're going to have a brokered convention.
As with previous editions of The Political Machine, we are timing our game updates with major political events and so the first one, due out tomorrow, will bring in some new features and content.
On the content front:
New Candidates. We've read some of the Steam reviews and some of those who have played previous versions of the game have complained that we don't include as many candidates. There's a good reason for that -- in 2020, each candidate is pretty unique. Playing as Bernie Sanders is very different from playing as Trump or Biden. Each has their own ideology tree. By contrast, in 2016, all candidates were essentially identical other than graphics and some stats.
New Issues. We have some additional issues we're adding into the game. We'll talk more about them when released.
New ideologies. Our ideology trees tend to be themed after a given candidate. That said, based on feedback, we are going to provide some additional unaffiliated ideologies in the game for custom candidate creation.
On the feature side:
Advanced Setup. We have gotten the message loud and clear, many players want to be able to play longer (in terms of turns) games. While our testing showed that most (>90%) of players preferred 21 weeks as the sweet spot (the number wasn't picked randomly) we definitely want to support those who would prefer to slog it out.
Random Event Frequency Some players expressed a desire to have more control over the frequency of random events on the map. We have a lot of plans in store for this feature over the coming months (we are waiting to see what actually happens in the campaign and then incorporate them into the game) but it does make sense to let players be able to fiddle with this setting.
Starting Money Players who want to start out with nothing or with a ton of money for both sides will be able to choose this.
For those who want to see some of the big features coming during the campaign, check out the forums for the road map.
In the meantime, we are very excited to roll out features based on feedback and what's happening in the campaign.
Thanks to the all-new ideology system in the game, we have the ability to affect during the course of the game the importance of features. Combined with streamed updates, we can continue to give players access to the latest polling data on issues and candidates.
Cheers!
-brad (lead designer)