Category: game design

It”s amazing the extent to which your finely honed and perfect game completely falls to pieces when you introduce more than one level isn’t it? I’ve just been adding France as a playable nation to Democracy 3.

Part of that involves a few hours searching for french surnames and looking up how many croissants they eat (50 million/week), and part of it involves reading the odd article and lots of wikipedia/CIA factbook to get the population / tax rates and so on roughly correct. The thing is, it will *never* be correct. I cannot make any vague promise that France in Democracy 3 is an accurate model of France in the real world. it is a close-ish kinda guess. I’m sure French gamers will let me know what I got wrong, but writing a  simulation that applies equally to the UK and France is kinda mad, so things are bound to be rough. For the record, here are some of the simulation differences in the game for France:

1. French people are generally more likely to strike.
2. French people are less prone to antisocial behavior and alcohol abuse from the same level of alcohol intake
3. They have less farmers and and less patriotic than the UK. they also have less smokers.
4. They are more Religious than the UK
5. They have a boost to tourism, compared to the UK.

The UK is basically my ‘base’ country and other countries are defined as adjustments to that. You never need to know it works that way as a player :D

I should have done this ages ago. It wasn’t anywhere close to as tricky as I assumed it would be. The polling screen now has a timeline along the bottom with little icons for everything that happened in each turn. if you hover the mouse over one, they expand to show all of the ‘stacked’ icons for everything that happened, together with tooltips. You basically have to remember/guess what you did,. so if it was a policy, you need to remember if you raised/lowered/introduced/cancelled it. I might add further tooltip data to clarify that. Either way, this is definitely an improvement.

Click to enlarge.

Apart from the fact that it now has tabs for focus groups and policy popularity, I just think that the general color scheme and layout of the new polling screen (bottom) is miles better than the old one (top). Democracy 3 is the game I could always see in my head, I just couldn’t actually make it until now…

So I think you can probably see the problem here right…

Behold my cutting edge game design tools!. Anyway, I got annoyed that ‘wasteful economy’ in Democracy 2 was pretty nebulous, and tried to fix it for the sequel, and realized I probably needed a measurement of wages for that, and then tried to avoid adding ‘competitiveness’ or ‘exports’ because frankly its complex enough as it is…

Generally I’m pleased with most of this,(BTW the bottom left circles are low and middle incomes), but I hav2 big phat question marks, namely

1) How does wages affect GDP and vice versa

2) how does productivity affect wages and vice versa

Can I fix this WITHOUT adding new variables? Do I really need wages? my plan is to be able to add a new item of ‘uncompetitive economy’ which is basically just an extreme example of low productivity. Essentially, we are paid too much and achieve too little (Italy! ahahahaha hahah ahah…). How does this fit in? Basically labour laws (restrictive practices) will keep wages high despite low productivity. Is that really possible? if so, maybe the combination of high wages and low productivity will reduce GDP (implicit hidden factor of reduced competitiveness).  maybe low wages could be another positive input into international trade, or perhaps I *do* need competitiveness and have both cheap imports and international trade (re:exports) keyed from it? with wages pushing competitiveness down and productivity pushing it up?

ARGHHHHHHH!

I have long wanted to code a particular system for Democracy 3, and finally got around to adding it, just before I (recently) put in mod support. I’m calling the system in general ‘overrides’. Essentially, what it is, is a way for someone to create a text file that specifies a connection between two game objects and define them with a new equation, or negate them, or add a totally new link. This is best served by an example…

“AND ON THE EIGHTH DAY HE CREATED GAMBLING”

There is a relationship, coded into the game (data-driven of course) between gambling policy and the happiness of religious voters. By default, as you legalize and liberalize gambling, religious voters become more upset, with a degree governed by an equation, such as -0.2*(x^3), where x is the intensity of gambling (degree to which it is legal).

This equation is picked by me, as being my best guess of the general effects of gambling on religious people. However… In the USA, I get the impression gambling has a more negative connotation. You guys banned online poker, for example. Maybe religious people should be more annoyed? maybe -0.4*(x^3) or maybe the curve should be 0-(0.45*x), or whatever else you like… Overrides allow this to happen, because each country has a folder full of overrides which get automatically applied when that country is played, enabling me to tailor each country a bit.

It gets better…

In theory, adding the capability for a folder of player-designed overrides is trivial, meaning players who decided that in their view, gun ownership reduced, not exacerbated crime, could save out an override to that effect, and never be offended by cliffs liberal gun-hating ways again! :D

Also… it’s a modders paradise, because not only can you add new simulation values, policies etc… now you can zero-out existing effects. So if the game has object A affects object B, and you want to mod it so in fact A affects C and then C affects B, to add some subtlety and complexity and extra feature… then you could do that without *ever* having to alter the original game files at all. This should make experimenting with player-made mods much much easier, and less risky than normal.

I hope people get stuck in and use them :D