Howdy, howdy —
Like the body politic, I’ve been deep in campaign mode the last few months, building out Political Arena’s campaign mechanics ahead of our 0.3 Early Access release. This one is a biggie: 0.3 will extend gameplay past the current two-year congressional term and introduce elections and campaigns for playable representatives and senators. (Presidential play, the other biggie Early Access milestone IMO, will come later.)
Campaign!
Anchoring our first go at election mechanics are Political Arena’s simulated voter blocs, broken down by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and education.* I’m well and truly 150,000% amped for this — to the extreme… raised to the gabillionty. I’ll go into more detail in upcoming updates, but I want to highlight a few features and dynamics that have me clapping with delight like an overstimulated seal:
- The strategy involved in allotting limited campaign funds across different arms of your campaign, each of which serves a distinct purpose and many of which are better suited to reaching particular constituencies.
- Our reaction system architecture, which chains game events together. NPCs consider not only the events themselves but often how much news coverage those events are getting. This produces more realistic news cycles, in which genuinely significant developments can get drowned out and second-day stories often become the story.
- The “no, after you” dynamics of polling and campaign entries and exits. More ambitious lawmakers are less likely to drop or opt out of a campaign, even when doing so would consolidate support for an ideologically like-minded opponent.
Arf! Arf! Arf!
(That’s Overstimulated Seal for “Wishlist now!”)
Let’s all be unstable together!!!!!!!!
Building out the architecture for both career and campaigns requires a lot of foundational work — managing orders of magnitude more game data, keeping save times sane, making sure senators don’t serve until they’re 200 (even if it often seems like they do). It’s taking a minute to get everything in order.
On that note, we’ll be introducing an unstable branch on Steam that will let players opt into the next version of the game as soon as that version is … stable enough to be unstable.
The community has already provided extremely valuable perspectives and feedback that have improved the game immeasurably. An unstable branch will make for a better game that improves faster by more closely involving the community. The moment 0.3 is … stably unstable, I’ll let you know. I’m excited for your thoughts on ways the game can be better — and on whether I misspelled “Mississippi.”
Time to get back to it. At present I’m wrangling with the distinctly meta task of simulating polling margin of error. There’s a metaphor there, I’m sure, and by the time we get to simulating an election-night needle, I promise I’ll have one.
— Eliot
*That might sound obvious, but try simulating the politics of elections and you’ll soon realize what a depressingly small role voters play. Vibes-wise, they remind me of a famous person playing an unexpectedly small part in a TV show who gets a “Featuring” credit at the end of the title sequence.
