Hi Everyone!
Ever wanted to play grand strategy game designed for the Cold War? Do you fancy replaying nuclear brinkmanship, influencing the space race, spreading ideologies, and overthrowing governments? Well, I do and that's why we're here today! Espiocracy will be a game of all those things and many more.
Today is the first post introducing the game - a.k.a. developer diary - of a 20+ series planned before the release. Each will shed details about the gameplay, answer to why questions, and sometimes brag about deep mechanics ;)
The Vision - LARGE WHY
We'll start with the most important question: who is the player?
Player persona in strategy games can be represented on a spectrum:
Transcript: from nations to characters
Cold War featured strong nations and strong characters. Both were subject to huge changes - the period has seen the establishment of over 75 new countries, a similar number of significant assassinations, and many more governments changed in elections. This leads to substantial game design issues:
- Playing as a nation: What about larger-than-life leaders? How can you override Stalin or Mao?
- Playing as a character: What happens when you are ousted? Is it a roguelike?
- Playing as a political party: What happens when you are not in power? Is it a political sim?
And these are only the first, most important questions coming to mind (you can read a bit longer explanation on the forum here). The main takeaway is that limiting the game to either side of the spectrum would spoil the fun.
I believe that the solution to this conundrum is different player persona - between a nation spirit and characters, more long-term focused, and ultimately larger in the Cold War environment.
Transcript: in the middle and above the spectrum
In Espiocracy, you'll be playing as a character-driven intelligence agency (or the intelligence community, depending on the country). You'll not only live through leader assassinations, elections, ideology changes - you will be the cause of these historical events. Although there will be no RPG-like player character (no director of an agency), every decision will be implemented by characters (operatives, agents, diplomats...) and will affect other characters, creating an intricate intersection of large scale geopolitics and personal life stories.
To make the game even more fun, your decision space will be larger than the popular image of espionage suggests. You'll be directly interacting with national decisions, in the bounds of immersion and historical accuracy - for instance, your country leader will ask you for advice about starting a war (IRL example: CIA advising Eisenhower on Suez Canal crisis) or in some situations, you'll be directly running diplomacy (IRL example: KGB in South America).
The Inspiration - small why
Espiocracy is grounded in books. Its development is supported by constantly returning and referring to:
Transcript: Strategy by L. Freedman, Cambridge History of the Cold War, Espionage fiction by John le Carré, Polish Cold War counterintelligence books, Mitrokhin Archive
In addition, a more personal and multipolar approach to the Cold War is in small part inspired by the history of my family, influenced by tides of postwar expulsions, migrations, and coincidences. My grandparents were living hundreds of kilometers apart and met only because they were expelled to the same county, my wife's maternal grandparents met in Siberia prison camps and then escaped to the county to which her paternal grandparents migrated thousands kilometers from Kazakhstan, and we met because the collapse of the Soviet Block forced my family to move to a place just a few kilometers from my wife's family. Talk about destiny!
The Principles - how
Three main principles define what Espiocracy will be about:
- Homage to the Cold War and espionage
- Focus on meaningful and strategic decisions
- Important role of immersion
Also, some things common for other strategy games will be avoided here:
- No doomsday clock
- No hidden biases or political agendas
- Not running away from controversial content (eg. the UK imprisoning gay people in the 1950s)
- Generally, no humor (the game will be on the slightly darker side of storytelling)
- No fancy graphics or beautiful music (sorry, all the work goes into gameplay)
Final remarks
If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/Espiocracy/
The next dev diary - "1946" - will be posted on 23rd of July.
PS. House rules of these dev diaries are: brevity, bullet points, and use of graphics over text. However, if you want to expand some topics, don't hesitate to chime in with a question or two :)
PS2. The wonderful photo of Cold War tech, visible at the top, was taken by John Smith.