Category: business

I’m super tired and got little sleep, but whats the point of a release-day blog post if you do it weeks later? Frankly I need sleep, and a day off. Making this game is REALLY hard, and we had last minute problems, and I actually have a minor eyesight thing recently thats freaking me out. Argggh. Game dev is HARD.

Anyway, last night at 8PM my time (why? because I’m stupid), Democracy 4 went into Early Access. We have already sold a lot of copies, we had 7,600 games played yesterday, there are tons of emails, and forum posts, lots of youtube videos are cropping up, some previews and reviews…its all very hectic.

We launched with a bad bug for maybe 4-5% of players (maybe less), which caused major GUI mayhem. Icons would dissapear, or be massive, or the wrong icon. The game became unplayable, then there was major lag. It was a mess, and the worst possible thing: I could not reproduce it on any of my PCs. Fixing a bug that has no error message and you cant reproduce is…challenging. At the time of writing I’m feeling pretty good that I’ve fixed it, within 14 hours. Thats actually *not too bad*, although it still probably dinged our steam reviews a bit. (if you bought on steam and like the game PLEASE give us a nice thumbs up review!).

I made a lot of mistakes, and I guess this is as good a time as any to confess to them. Mistake #1 was that I didnt treat every warning in my code as being serious. I was seeing some warnings about icons being sized wrong, but it didnt seem to show up on screen, and I figured it was a harmless thing when they got resized correctly before being drawn. who cares right?

Turn out that on some PCs, in some screen resolutions and in fullscreen mode… This caused MAYHEM of EPIC proportions. I just wasn’t seeing it under any circumstance in my test cases. PLUS! we had a lot of pre-EA alpha players who had not experienced this. But… yesterday 4,500 hours of Democracy 4 were played in 14 hours. No wonder stuff cropped up we had not seen before.

We converted the game to be 64 bit a few days before release (Mistake #2), which sped up the start-up time, and future proofed the game against any insane move my microsoft to ban 32bit…but this seemed to be the cause of the bug. It also stopped it running under WINE. I decided the 64 bit middleware had broken the game. I reverted to 32bit, it achieved nothing (but got us WINE back), but wasted my time in tracking down the real cause…

Eventually I think we have found whats going wrong, and here is Mistake #3. Some of our code was just blindly accepting data and doing what it thought was right. This is BAD. You should code defensively, and if you are about to draw an icon on the screen, its worth checking that the width is not -25 or 10 billion pixels wide. if it is… then somebody probably screwed up, so don’t draw it.

Anyway… this sort of thing is SUPER stressful, because we have moved from the lovable, friendly ‘community of friends’ atmosphere of my early-access players on my own discourse forums, to the terrifying confrontational angry wasteland of the steam forums, where people pull no punches. Its always fun to be told your game is rubbish, or biased, or you are a stupid/lazy developer who doesnt know how to code etc. Oh fun times!

Anyway… its out there. it was in the steam top sellers. it might still be, I’m too busy to look! And you can now get the game from us direct using the widget below, OR from steam gog or the humble store.

At some point I’ll do a proper update with a bunch of stats about wishlists and release and all that (we had about 20,000 wishlists on launch day), but I need to deal with the huge list of stuff in my inbox first… Thanks to everybody who put down their hard earned money on buying my game, its hugely appreciated. I hope ya like it!

You will be excited to know that wordpresses automatic clickbait generator rates that headline as 73/100 because of the ‘power word’ *new*. I get points for the ‘uncommon’ word *awesome* too. Is this really human civilisation at its peak?

anyway…

I’ve just updated Democracy 4 to build 1.09 (still in alpha from our website here BTW), and there is a huge list of 31 official fixes plus some minor stuff I didn’t bother mentioning like grammar fixes (thanks ginny). The fixes are many and various but a lot of them are balance tweaks to make the game a bit harder, and various extra links between items have been added, and a bunch of equations adjusted.

I should probably call out the fact that prt sc key on your keyboard now drops a png format screenshot inside

\my documents\my games\democracy4\screenshots.

In fact it bugs me a bit that often you have to ask about a game with ‘how do I print or copy a screenshot in X’ where we all have a button that basically says SCREENSHOT BUTTON right there in our faces on the keyboard… bah. Plus its 2020 and hard drives/internet speeds are awesome, so screw lossy jpgs, I’m saving stuff as pngs :D.

For anybody unsure, the game checks once a day (if you run it obviously) to see if there is a new version, then pops up a box to tell you, and tells you what’s in this version, but then you have to go the humble bundle link and re-grab the installer and re-run it over the top. If you need your link resent, you can do that here. (be warned, sometimes they go in ‘spam’ or ‘promotions’.

I have exciting news in that yes, we now have a listing on steam, and so its officially coming to steam on the 6th October. If you think that’s really soon then *gulp* so do I, but I like deadlines :D. Obviously that’s EARLY ACCESS, not the final game release. So much more work to be done before then… although I expect that by that date we will have a bunch more countries in the game, even if its all still in English at that point.

So anyway… wishlists are a thing, and more important than you think because steam apparently takes the number of wishlists into account in promoting new games, so its super-helpful to have people who are interested in the game wishlisting it in advance. You can do that using this handy little widget below this text here…

Exciting stuff :D. The trouble is there is discussion among indie devs as to how many wish lists you need to get promotion for your game. Some people say 5k minimum, 20k awesome. Others say 50k minimum. That sounds like a lot. I have no idea how things will go in the mere four weeks between now and my steam release, but I’m hoping for a shot at 20k anyway.

This means I now have a new thing to check and obsess over EVERY DAY as part of my job, as though steam sales / direct sales / stock market / exchange rate / ad performance / youtube views were not already enough! Luckily I have a monitor that can keep 64 spreadsheets on the screen at the same time, so I guess that’s just fine :D

So yup, this was a long time coming and I feel worthy of a proper blog post about it. Actually, TBH there is not much else to do in the hours after hitting the big old release button. For those who just want the link, you can now grab the game here.

Now on to some thoughts about the process of making the game.

Democracy 3 is positechs most successful game by some margin. It came out a long time ago now, and we did four (yes FOUR) expansions to the game (Social Engineering, Extremism, Clones & Drones and Electioneering) and one semi-sequel (Democracy 3:Africa). There was then quite a lull before the release of Democracy 4 today, so what actually happened?

The coding in this game is HARD, and the design is super-hard. The number of interconnected things to balance, combined with the fairly whacky way in which its coded around a neural network means this is real headache inducing stuff to work on. Towards the end of Democracy 3 I was seriously burned out mentally from the stress of it. I am a workaholic, and work is fine for me, but the constant debugging-hell of the complexity of the beast was gruelling for such a long period and I needed to switch focus.

So I met Jeff Sheen, and he agreed to make Democracy 3 Africa, and meanwhile I got involved with game publishing in a bigger way, which led to Big Pharma, Political Animals and Shadowhand. I cant cope without coding, so I started coding a totally new game, the car factory simulation: Production Line.

That game took a while, and did very well, and spawned 2 expansions too, and all the time I was doing that, Jeff was improving the core engine of Democracy 3 and working on the new UI for Democracy 4. As a result we updated D3 with unicode support, which meant it could work with other languages much better.

So when I finally switched from Production Line to D4, we already had an engine that was doing vector graphics (yay! crisper UI) and unicode support (yay! Russian and Chinese translations without any problem!). The main work on Democracy 4 was related to mechanics-related stuff, like a redesign of how voters handle money, support for coalition government, and the addition of new ways to get political capital, plus news reports, situation warnings, a new UI to examine stats in the game, and the complete redesign of the main screen and the way icons are sized/positioned/rendered.

This was TRICKY.

And then we had the last few months of stuff which has been adding in all the up-to-date stuff like fake news, polarization, border walls, police body cameras, UBI, a private space program yada yada. Politics has changed since Democracy 3 and we really needed to represent that as much as we could.

Frankly, it has taken us too long, and we have become a bit obsessed with the UI design, and getting things to look crisp, and for the core simulation to be WAY more accurate and less buggy than D3. I would say 75% of the work on D4 is under-the-hood improvements the player cannot immediately point at. I *do* think it has been worth it. Also, this was my first ever project as an indie where I was working alongside another coder, which is something I have nmot done since my lionhead days, and never as ‘the boss’ so that was a whole new skillset and experience to worry about as well.

(And you can probably tell by all this that it means Democracy 4 is the most expensive game positech has made, in terms of dev cost, which adds an extra level of worry and stress all of its own)

And that brings us to today, which is exciting because its more the beginning of a journey than the end because D4 will be in alpha, and then in steams Early Access. We NEVER HAD THIS IN D3, which meant that some parts of D3 were flawed, and we didn’t have enough feedback early enough to fix them. With Early Access, this will be much, much better. The Democracy community is awesome, and I expect to have a really cool conversation with players about what needs to change, expand, be improved upon, or even removed. The wisdom of crowds is a real thing!

I should also point out that this is scary, and stressful, because OMG politics. We released Democracy 1,2,3 in relatively stable times. There was no fake news, no Donald Trump, no allegation of election hacking. No coronavirus, no black lives matter protests, politics was actually more polite (although we didn’t think so at the time).

Most importantly… social media was barely a thing. Now, Social media is THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. That means a more angry, divided and tribal playerbase is to be expected. Moderating forums will be…interesting. Handling abusive emails from players is something I really hate. Unless you are someone selling creative works online, you cannot imagine the impact of strangers randomly sending you abusive messages 24/7 has on people. Its bad.

But hopefully the good outweighs the bad. So far, commentary on the developer blogs has been awesome, and I’ve been very clear that we know our own biases are bound to be in the game somewhere, and are open to constructive criticism. With any luck, we can avoid the game starting all out civil war, with blood on the forums!

Thanks to everybody’s encouraging words as we have been working on the game so far. Its much appreciated :D. Onwards and upwards… I guess I should embed the widget here…