Monday, July 23, 2007
Sons of the Silent Age
I have completed everything that constitutes version 0.9, there's a lot of feeback now, plus there are the splash screens when starting a new game and when a game is over. In practice the game is done, only game balance has to be adjusted.
I'll describe briefly the structure of the game that has emerged with this version, this is not gonna change, as the jump from 0.9 to 1.0 will address stabiliy issues, game balance and possibly code optimization (believe me, now the code really sucks, part of this is due to the fact that until a couple of months ago I had a limited version of the engine that didn't let me use arrays, or finite state machine. I didn't use these features of the full engine because this would have meant to rewrite the game from scratch, I'll use them in future games, the only practical advantage for now is the chance to play an executable).
The player impersonates the head of the Israeli government, the player's final goal is to be re-elected as this is the first and final goal of every politician. One term lasts 25 turns (this length might be adjusted), at the last turn, if Israel hasn't been destroyed or a global thermonuclear war hasn't been triggered in the meantime, there's the general elections. To win the elections the player has to gain 50%+1 of the votes, he can hope to do this by convincing the public opinion: in order to do so the player must have Israel survive and possibly win a war. Declaring war will have a negative effect on the public opinion, if Israel is attacked the public opinion will rise, and in case of victory it will skyrocket. Other factors affectig the public opinion can be added during the testing phase.
The player doesn't have free-hands, because Israel is a democracy constatly kept under observation, not only during the elections, but every single day. A government (especially the Israeli one, which is the product a very divided society) must always weight the pros and cons of every action, and it can happen that, after some scandal or some other thing happening in the internal or international arena, the government simply cannot to some of the things it could theoretically do if one only watched at the majorities in the parliament or at the mere powers assigned by the constitution or other laws. These difficulties are modeled in the game as a higher or lower number of policy tokens, the decisions that can be taken by the player each turn.
I'll do some tests and then I'll release the official version 0.9
I'll describe briefly the structure of the game that has emerged with this version, this is not gonna change, as the jump from 0.9 to 1.0 will address stabiliy issues, game balance and possibly code optimization (believe me, now the code really sucks, part of this is due to the fact that until a couple of months ago I had a limited version of the engine that didn't let me use arrays, or finite state machine. I didn't use these features of the full engine because this would have meant to rewrite the game from scratch, I'll use them in future games, the only practical advantage for now is the chance to play an executable).
The player impersonates the head of the Israeli government, the player's final goal is to be re-elected as this is the first and final goal of every politician. One term lasts 25 turns (this length might be adjusted), at the last turn, if Israel hasn't been destroyed or a global thermonuclear war hasn't been triggered in the meantime, there's the general elections. To win the elections the player has to gain 50%+1 of the votes, he can hope to do this by convincing the public opinion: in order to do so the player must have Israel survive and possibly win a war. Declaring war will have a negative effect on the public opinion, if Israel is attacked the public opinion will rise, and in case of victory it will skyrocket. Other factors affectig the public opinion can be added during the testing phase.
The player doesn't have free-hands, because Israel is a democracy constatly kept under observation, not only during the elections, but every single day. A government (especially the Israeli one, which is the product a very divided society) must always weight the pros and cons of every action, and it can happen that, after some scandal or some other thing happening in the internal or international arena, the government simply cannot to some of the things it could theoretically do if one only watched at the majorities in the parliament or at the mere powers assigned by the constitution or other laws. These difficulties are modeled in the game as a higher or lower number of policy tokens, the decisions that can be taken by the player each turn.
I'll do some tests and then I'll release the official version 0.9
# posted by Marcus @ 3:33 PM 
