What's happening / TLDR: Developer diaries introduce details of Espiocracy - Cold War strategy game in which you play as an intelligence agency. You can catch up with the most important dev diary (The Vision) and find out more on Steam page.

Onboarding - getting new players to understand the game and play it well - has been a major target of development in the last few months. Unsurprisingly, a grand strategy game combining complexity of the Cold War with complexity of detailed espionage has very steep learning curve. This dev diary will walk you through various features we developed to aid the initial hours in the game.

Assisting The Director

On the first tick, you receive short introduction with local historical context:

For more details, you can open larger interactive "situation report", which aggregates most important data about the country and the intelligence community. Every item has its own tooltip with further details. It's designed for more advanced players rather than beginners, assisting them in replaying the game in new countries. It's also repeating by nature - the report is sent again every five in-game years, and later reports contain also summaries of the past five years.

Your officers can maintain some autonomy and initiative, if you allow it through orders:

Your deputy can regularly send you a memo with recommended management actions:

Among many other reports (for instance "nuclear bulletin" or "important elections"), recent addition to the game is "The Book" - named after CIA's presidential summary of events in the world:

0 Jan 1944 :(

Game Pace

In addition to ad hoc tools described above, we are making the game more comprehensible by carefully managing pace of gameplay. Instead of throwing everything at the player in the very first tick, the game unveils or intensifies mechanics over time, cleverly translating the history of the Cold War into player's agency (agency understood as ability to act, though it certainly doubles as changes to intelligence agencies as well).

For instance, at the start date, the world is covered not just by an ordinary "fog of war" - it's under overwhelming "fog of WW2". Initially, local intelligence simply does not exist as a parameter (it's zero/unknown), most actors are hidden, expansion is limited by multiple factors, intelligence agencies have low (austerity) budgets:

Over time, it passes, the world becomes well-known, and more intense expansion becomes available:

As the Cold War escalates further, so do gameplay possibilities:

Even in the late Cold War, the game through pace management can introduce new appropriate mechanics (eg. deeper counterintelligence game, worthy of espionage in the 80s).

Goals

While the game is a strategic sandbox by nature (like any other grand strategy game), it features subtle nudging towards certain goals. For instance, as a part of mechanics described in the previous section, early post-WW2 period includes a number of on-map targets:

The system of national interests (see DD#28) is becoming more detailed and plays natural guiding role during gameplay:

Within the system of objectives/achievements, there are also a few very clear objectives for beginners:

And, naturally, the game has detailed tutorial which gets you through detailed sequence of missions, divided into objectives, divided into steps to achieve them, interspersed by concise explanations:

Configuration

On the meta-level, you can play the game in a sandbox mode, and/or even turn off the most challenging mechanics:

Some players prefer first observing the world of a complex strategy game to get the gist of what can happen and why - we deliver "Observer" mode as well:

And we are working also on an optional experimental "transition" mode in which previous director hands over responsibilities, one by one over time, to you - the new director. It's not a tutorial and it's not delegation/automation, instead it's a third unique "easing in" mechanic with scripted behaviors, uncovering parts of the interface, and well-designed series of interesting decisions.

Final Remarks

Next dev diary will be published on November 6th.

If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/Espiocracy/

There is also a small community around Espiocracy:

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"While you are here, you have no last name, and will not use it" - First instruction during OSS training