Hello everyone!
We hope you’ve had good Christmas holidays and are ready to bid farewell to 2020. Well, I mean… who isn’t?
This is a perfect moment to share with you what we’ve been up to these couple of weeks. That’s because – aside from the “new year, new me” shenanigans – we’ve finished gathering and analyzing all the feedback you’ve given us on IAYP: Prologue. And we’re ready to make some bold design decisions!
First and foremost: we’re incredibly thankful to everybody who played our game! Double points if you cared enough to share your experiences with us – both negative and positive. And while it feels great to receive praise, we’ve still got a game to finish, so we cannot afford to overlook the common criticisms, i.e. stability & optimization issues, confusing gameplay and railroading.
Although the main game is going to immensely improve on all of those, your feedback has highlighted your expectations of IAYP. We’d really like to make IAYP unforgettable for you – not just in a singular choose-your-own-adventure type of way, but also in a more randomized and uncontrolled setting. We want our game to be a bit bolder and more unhinged than other political simulators, without dropping the charade all the way – after all, as this past decade has shown us, politics really is all about appearances!
- We’re going to make IAYP more dynamic and roguelite-ish, by, for example:
- Making each playthrough denser. Less waiting, more choices!
- Getting rid of $ altogether and instead using the economy stat as currency
- Introducing some small persistent progression systems (e.g. project/tech trees start of hidden, but once researched, remain uncovered in subsequent playthroughs)
- Including some form of point/evaluation system at the end of each playthrough
- much, much more…
- We’re going to put more emphasis on protagonist’s political self-identification, introducing a new feature – political compass, complete with 19 political affiliations that will affect the type of legislation that the president signs on a near-daily basis!
- We’re going to focus on two distinct gameplay pillars:
- Largely randomized dialogues and events: the meat of the story and the spice of life!
- Robust secondary features to give the players (including those looking for a more serious experience) numerous opportunities for min-maxing and strategizing. This means that we’ll be interlinking all features closely and giving them enough depth to turn e.g. the map or project management into an optional mini-game
- We’re expanding the importance of Action Points – no need to worry about all these features right away, given the limitations!
Okay, that’s enough for now, before I get too excited… Of course, it’s not all good news: as some of you might have already been suspecting, this means that we still have some things to do, pushing back the publishing of the product a few extra months. Realistically – I do not think this could have been avoided, especially in light of the optimization issues present in the prologue. We hate to do it to you again, but we have to get our cyber playground in order, else everyone could just end up getting punked.
And meanwhile, why don’t you share your thoughts in #president-chat? Are we moving in the right direction? Or am I just rambling like a madman? Are those mutually exclusive?
Thank you for your continuous trust and support! We’ll do our best to not betray your expectations & keep you up to date with our affairs! Tons of love from the team, we wish you all best of luck in 2021!
