Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: democracy 4

Democracy 4 GUI update

We are still working away on Democracy 4…although I have not blogged about it much. This is partly because Jeff is doing a lot of ‘under-the-hood’ debugging and GUI support stuff, so there has not been that much to show for it yet. Unlike many sequels we are doing this GUI first and Mechanics / Content second, so for a while, it will look like a beautifully re-skinned democracy 3, until we start adding all the new events and policies etc.

Anyway… I sometimes forget how much slicker and cleaner the new UI is because I stare at it a lot, but here is a side by side comparison of the electioneering ‘perceptions screen’ for both games:

(BTW we likely will not use those same Democracy 3 icons for those 3 things, they are placeholder).

Re-sized screenshots do not do the GUI justice really, because its vector based and super-super-crisp. I do think that having a proper UI style guide, and vector graphics is going to make the new version feel SO much nicer to use. The previous game is from 2013 and starting to look like it…

There will be a lot more updates to come once we start putting in the new events. We just ordered all of the event graphics (and there are 95 of them this time, for even more actual events) and I’m looking forward to blogging about the new stuff we are adding.

Oh and in case you didn’t realize from the above screenshot, ALL of the content from Social Engineering, Extremism, Clones & Drones and Electioneering will ship in Democracy 4 as standard.

Democracy 4 Update

YES! We are working hard on this, although its been mostly under-the-hood tech and background stuff so I haven’t been updating people much on progress because there has not been *that much* we wanted to show yet, but that is going to be changing a lot real soon…

So, for those in the dark about this, Democracy 4 is the upcoming sequel to Democracy 3 (what a shock!) which is positech’s best selling game so far. Its a politics strategy game where you play the role of President/Prime Minister of a real world country and have to keep the economy in decent shape while staying popular enough to be re-elected, AND presumably helping change the country for the better (in your opinion :D).

For people who have never played the original games, the user-interface is unusual because its basically just a complex connecting web of icons. here is a screenshot from the main screen in Democracy 3:

And here is the current (work-in-progress) equivalent for Democracy 4:

Obviously the general style, fonts and so-on have all changed, but also we have moved the voter groups from the middle to the left. This gives us some interesting options, because this is now a list that can be (at the players discretion perhaps) sorted by popularity, or by membership, or any other metric. Or sorted alphabetically even, none of which were options in the old UI.

its really hard to see in a static screenshot, but the big under-the-hood changes for D4 are that its unicode from the very start (hello Russian and Chinese!), and also most of the UI is being done with vector-art rendering, meaning everything is pixel perfect regardless of screen resolution or zooming/scaling. For a game that is mostly UI, this makes a BIG difference. basically no more blurry UI elements anywhere :D. Its also cross platform from the start.

So far we are still at the ‘getting the core engine working right’ stage along with the ‘commission loads of art’ stage, so although a lot has been done, there is not a LOT that we want to show you in terms of new events, policies or situations yet. However, that will be coming soon. We already have a bunch of new ministers and voters…

Once we are putting in new simulation content, I’ll start doing regular blogs (probably video ones too) that detail the progress made on the game. I’d love to be able to tell you an exact date for us to go early-alpha (likely direct sales), Early-Access beta and final release, but I just cant be sure about those dates just yet. Obviously I’m well aware that 2020 is a US election year and we want to be coming out before the election :D Stay tuned for more updates etc, you can follow me on twitter, or join our mailing list (see sidebar) if you don’t want to miss anything.

The political compass in Democracy 4

I’m writing some Democracy 4 code today, and looking at how we display the in-game political compass. This is a graph that shows you how your political position has changed over the course of the current game.

This was in Democracy 3, and definitely back in for D4. This time around I’m stretching it to fill an entire window, as there is no magical reason why both axes have to be the same. For those unfamiliar with the concept of the political compass, it maps a political party or individual or government on 2 axes. The first axes is left-> right (communism to capitalism, or sometimes described as socialism to capitalism) and the other is up-down which is conservative to liberal.

THESE TERMS CAUSE ABSOLUTE CONFUSION EVERYWHERE.

Allow me to expands on this: There are basically TWO axes of politics, not one. In many places, people get this confused and assume liberal == socialism and conservative == capitalism. This is WRONG. There may be countries, societies, communities, and parties that make very strong associations between these two, but other positions very much exist around the world. The biggest confusion is the way US commentators use ‘liberal’ when they mean socialist, mostly because the mcarthyesque history of the US has made socialist an insult in many peoples minds (especially middle aged and older).

For example, its perfectly possible to be a liberal capitalist. I know this because I consider myself to be in that quadrant myself. I am a supporter of a (regulated) free market, a believer in entrepreneurship, and generally a supporter of lower taxes and extremely free trade… NONE of which has anything to do with my positions on..(for example)… same-sex marriage, legalizing cannabis, free-speech, equal pay or religion. Its also perfectly possible to be entirely in the opposite quadrant where you are both conservative and socialist. In fact, a LOT of 1970s British politics was in that quadrant, with very socialist (extremely high marginal taxes, opposition to free trade, very high levels of nationalization) policies mixing freely with the racist, sexist, and deeply conservative attitudes to religion, drugs, same-sex relationships etc that we would now associate with the american right. I grew up in a very strongly pro-union labour-voting community. It was not a liberal paradise.

To put this another way, you can take a far left 1970s british socialist / communist and persuade them to embrace legalizing drugs, same-sex relationships, gender-equality and LGBT issues…and that moves them on one axis but not the other.

Anyway…

The game automatically analyzes every decision you make and plots your government position each turn on the political compass automatically, which is kinda cool to watch. For Democracy 4, I thought it might be interesting to have that compass pre-loaded with the agreed (ha!) positions of a number of historical figures. For example, maybe plot President Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Obama and from the UK Thatcher, Blair and David Cameron. Maybe Angela Merkel should be on there? Maybe Trudeau and Trump?

I think this would be cool because it would be funny to to find yourself thinking ‘hmmm I may have gone a bit right wing economically here? and then realize you just swept past Reagan :D.

Of course the HUGE problem here is going to be coming up with locations for these people that don’t get me stoned to death by angry steam forum people. Lets be clear…everyone will; hate me for making this game at all…its pretty much locked-in as being the most divisive game ever made already. I just don’t want to DELIBERATELY annoy people, so I’ll probably do some research, plot some of those figures, then ask for feedback during Early Access :D

Its very tough because to people in the US, Bernie sanders is hugely left wing, but in Europe, I’d say maybe not so much… And to left-wingers in the UK, David Cameron was horribly right wing, but by US standards he was probably a member of the Democratic party. And the problem is…the STRONGER your political views (regardless of axes), the more you get outraged and want to push everyone who disagrees with you to the far extremes of the other side.

I know communities online where people argue that UK labour party deputy-leader tom watson is a ‘dangerously right wing blairite traitor’, despite being frankly hugely left wing by US standards. I’ve seen political compasses that put Hilary Clinton just slightly to the left of Reagan…

Fun times ahead…

Updates for Production Line. DLC coming & more

This is a round-up blog post covering lots of things:

Firstly some meta-stuff. I haven’t been super-frequent in updating this blog recently, and I also have been tweeting a lot less (in fact the wonder of analytics allows me to say my tweets are down 36% in the last month). I also un-followed a lot of accounts, I removed a lot of facebook friends, and I’ve quit some other online stuff. I’m trying to avoid the harsher, more serious, depressing net.

Frankly social media, and much of the internet in general is making me unhappy, and I’m reducing how involved I am with it. I have never been one of the ‘hip’ indies that knows everyone else, and I’m moving more towards being an ‘offline’ kind of person, for my own happiness.

Obviously that doesn’t affect tech support, PR, or blogging/tweeting about what I’m working on, so here we go…

NEW DLC! is coming to Production Line. I have not settled on a final name for it, but its likely ‘Design Variety Pack’ or something like that. Basically every car design in the game gets a duplicate, purely for cosmetic reasons. This is so you can have more variety in the game, and also so that you can more immediately tell which cars are the ‘expensive’ SUVs etc, without having to always resort to selecting a color for each design (Which I tend to do, but it feels a bit of a hack…).

Here is a tiny tiny short video clip of the new sedan.

And here is another tiny one showing we toggling between two designs of the same type.

All the code for this is now DONE, and I am thus just awaiting final artwork before I add this as a new piece of DLC. It has to be DLC because actually the art costs are PRETTY HIGH for this sort of thing, because it basically involves redoing a*all* of the car art for the game, as every new design variant may need a different position for each wheel variant, each seat, and so-on, and thats a LOT of art layers, modeled in 3D and rendered in 2 different directions.

In unrelated news, I’ve been working on some tweaks to the UI for the game, and the latest thing I added is this ability to toggle the showroom view to a ‘summary’ view that shows you how many of each car you have, rather than an endless stream of them. This is togglable with a button, but it auto-guesses which view to show you based on how full the showroom is when you first open that window:

I need to have that toggle in there to support both views because there is some functionality ‘lost’ in the summary view, as you then cannot select an individual car to see its views from customers, its applicable discounts, any defects or missing (uninstalled) features etc. Hopefully its all pretty intuitive and I don’t need any extra tutorial stuff for that? (I do worry about needing an extra tutorial window for that new toggle button for the DLC designs…not sure if its obvious or not…).

Anyway…thats Production Line stuff. I am also starting to help out full-time Democracy 4 programmer Jeff, who is doing great stuff on making the crispest, sharpest GUI for a positech game so far. (Its vector based, so smooth scaling and pixel-perfect UI is here!) I know Democracy 4 seems to be taking a long time, but it will be worth it, and we will have screenshots to show the world pretty soon :D

Democracy 4 ministerial artwork

So…over the 3 games in the democracy series we have experimented with various ways to get artwork to represent the various ministers that you appoint in the game to run each section of the country. In Democracy 1 they looked like this:

In Democracy 2 like this:

In Democracy 3 like this:

That last game used some cleverness to kind of randomly generate ministers from a whole series of layers. It was a grand experiment which gave us loads of ministers to choose from but… I don’t think I was ever 100% happy with the results. This wasn’t exactly cutting edge procedural animation etch, but even so I think that on balance, I’d prefer to have a relatively *small* range of interesting, different hand-crafted images to choose from than try and go all procedural on the ass of this problem..

Obviously the only problem this creates is BUDGET, in that Democracy 4 will be happy to run on your 2560 (or higher) res PC, and thus we probably need quite detailed (large) images and thus we probably need to spend a lot of money on artwork for these… *gulp*.

The other issue is that the world is a DIVERSE PLACE, and we expect to sell the game all over the world so…its an impossible problem, and people will yell at us and call us sexist/racist and other terms regardless what we do so with that in mind…

HERE (below: click to enlarge) is a bunch of 30 reference images. They are all REAL world politicians. Some are nice, some are not nice. Some are famous, some really obscure, but I think they look different enough for you to recognize each one when used in a game. They will NOT be exactly like this in the game, these are just ‘reference art’ for painting the actual in-game images.

So what I’m asking is…does this look OK to you? Don’t forget that the world of modern politics is not a utopia. There are not 50% women, or accurate representation of each ethnicity. If you are governing mexico with these cabinet ministers it may look strange, it will also look strange to govern African states with this cross-section, obviously. I know that. If the game looks like being a big hit, I’d love to vastly increase the artwork range to include more diversity. Decent character art is NOT cheap! Be aware that the majority of players will be American or from Western Europe.

I just want initial feedback. Do these look like a bunch of politicians to YOU?

BTW I don’t care if you don’t know WHO they all are, or if you HATE those people…that goes without saying :D I just want feedback on the general ‘tone’. (I’m braced for being a target for absolute hatred from every angle as we develop this game. politics has never been so ANGRY)