The Shadow Government Simulator News

[h2]Hello fellow co-conspirators![/h2]

Last time around, I showed you the first implementation of the quest-reward system; with players able to complete their side objectives and get bonuses out of it. After playing it a couple of times however, I felt it was missing a little something...choice. Sure, you could use the quests to inform which region to invade next, but once you were IN the region, the quests didn't have as much influence as I wanted.

So I made some changes. First, I expanded the system to have three quests per region instead of one:



But crucially, I also changed the reward system so you had to choose a bonus after victory. Now, within a level players will have to choose which quests to focus on. Even if they complete all of them, however, they can only take one reward back home; making the desicions all the more juicy.



Next up..... a break!

Because even chupacabras need to hibernate for a bit 🛌🏾 I'll be taking a small break over the holidays, but we'll be back with more conspiracy-laden updates in 2022!

[h2]Discord Challenge[/h2]

Last week we had a literary challenge, where our cult members had to come up with their very own christmas conspiracy fanfic! It was awesome to see the variety and quality of the submissions,ranging from poems to noir. At the end of the day Templar CheesusCrust won the competition with his poem the Elfinati Plot. It's a long one, so won't copy the whole thing, but here's a taste:

The hidden group of Illuminati
Made a branch of Elfinatti
Their methods always quite sloppy
Jolly saint nick they now tried to copy

Spread out on that night in December
You never quite know whose a member
From Auburn to Rome
Sneakin in your home

A year of surveil
Ready to prevail
The good they maintain
The bad they go tame

You can read the rest of it on discord . This week we're getting into the christmas spirit and doing a secret santa!! Join our server to participate 🎅🏻

Happy conspiring!
Rafa

[h2]Hello fellow co-conspirators![/h2]

One of the ideas that excites me the most about Shadow Government Simulator is the fact that you can control nations as well as individuals with equal ease. I mean, you know you've made it as a secret society when both nation and kings bow before you. I've always wanted the game to reflect that and for you to be able to gain abilities from the countries you conquer.

Believe it or not, that already exists in the game! However, it's complex and hard to see, much less remember what powers you've already acquired. I'm revamping the whole system, but one of the more important things is also the simplest: badges.



That top ribbon collects a badge for each power/update/ability you unlock. These are aquired by completing quests (check out our last newsletter to hear ALL about those!) and conquering nations, They practically represent your expanding power as you take over society. So, for example, completing the quest "Control Western Africa's military" will give all your units +1 bravery for the rest of the game (and a cool badge).

Right now they are simple stuff: "give +1 charm to your HQ" or "get +5 funds each turn"; but I want to expand them quite a bit. There's a lof work left to do, from making a screen where players can choose the abilities, to getting in more complex effects. It'll take me a while, but the infrastructure is there and I'm ready!



[h2]Discord Challenge[/h2]

Last week our @AI swooped in and rescued the challenge by proposing we try our hand at the hardest game on the internet Notpron. This collection of puzzles is infamosuly obtuse but, amazing everybody, the Illuminati managed to get all the way to level 50 🤯 (You can try it yourself, but be warned)

A new challenge will start on Monday; and if you like cars and crime, you'll like this one. Join our discord to check it out!


Happy conspiring!
Rafa

[h2]Hello fellow co-conspirators![/h2]

First things first.... FELIZ DIA DE LOS MUERTOS!!



My fave holiday of the year! Have a good one everybody

💀🎉💀🎉💀🎉 💀🎉💀🎉💀🎉💀🎉💀🎉💀🎉💀🎉


About SGS stuff, for the most part, the objective of our game is quite simple:

capture the leader-> capture the region -> capture the world -> profit?

(honestly who knows why secret societies want the world...)

This makes the game pretty straightforward at a high level, but it also limits how the game plays. If players are always trying to get the same thing, they'll always behave the same way.



Now I do have more game objectives planned: (i.e. Capture the military in x turns, etc..), but that is kicking the can down the road. What the game really needs to spice things up is...... secondary goals! So this week I focussed on precisely that, and created Quests!



They are still very much WIP and I don't love the name Quests (send any alternate names you can think of to our discord! ), but they work great. Basically each level will have up to 3 side objectives, which players can try to complete during their run of the level. Thought they are not obligatory, you'll have to be very cautious when playing in order to get them. this will force you to try our new strategies.

Why would you want to risk your neck to do this? Well, because if you complete the quests, you earn the right to use the nation's power to affect others!

That's right, I'm reworking the national ability system because it's confusing and not getting any playtime. It'll take me a couple of months, but this is the first step there

[h2]Discord Challenge[/h2]

I had a discord challenge all lined up this week and then:



Well..... that's unexpected :/ Thankfully our very own @AI came up with a devious plan to save the challenge week. Check out what she planned by going to discord and joining the challenge!

Happy conspiring!
Rafa

[h2]Hello fellow co-conspirators![/h2]

Puppet Master was always meant to be a hard game. As a gamer I like a bit of a bite in my usual fare; to really get the noggin thinking. So when testers came saying, the game was tough I was all "yup, makes sense" and got on doing smaller adjustements (like last update's shields).

However, a couple of playtest and streamer videos last month really opened my eyes that I might have a major problem on my hands. I was seeing vets, not new players, having trouble by the third or fourth region and that was a big issue. To investigate, I made an excel simulation of my game (much easier to modify then the game) and found.... well the game quickly became impossible.



And I'm not talking extraordinarily hard. I meant that if playing hard mode, by level 10-12 you'd be maxing out global exposure. The fact that we hadn't heard of this was because no one had reached that level yet... which should've been the first warning sign. So I speant this week reworking the difficulty balance, which meant I had to rework the difficulty backend. I can talk at length about this, but I won't bore you with the details.... I'll just show you these sexy excel graphs of the result:



Maybe not what you expected in a dev post, but a lot of game design happens on spreadsheets (which gets my designer heart fluttering). Here you can see that we would expect an average player on easy to reach level 4 difficulty and end the game with a global exposure just above 25%; if that player tries on hard mode, they would end up with over 80% exposure, and playing regions of difficulty 11. And if they try insane.....well, the game is still impossible at that point, so that's why I'm not shipping insane difficulty :P

This week I'll finish up the difficulty and send it out to testers to give it another go. I'll let y'all know if we get survivors!

[h2]Discord Challenge[/h2]

A new challenge for our community will start soon; join our discord to check it out!

Happy conspiring!
Rafa

[h2]Hello fellow co-conspirators![/h2]

Our message is spreading into the unsuspecting minds of podcast listeners! Last week I was interviewed by the good folks at The SWW Show about how our game came to be. It was fun being in a podcast, and if you want to learn more about the original inception of the game you can check it out here!

On the development side of things, I've been taking a look at the end game and fortunatley (or maybe I should say unfortunatley) many bugs were found. A lot of them were boring stuff related to how the AI saves their own turns and how data is compiled; but they did take a fair amount of work to solve. However, I did take some time to work on cool visual stuff like shields!



Shields as a concept have existed for a while in the game. There used to be a pretty sucky situation where you'd convert a unit and then the AI would immediatley convert it back. It was really furstrating. So I added the shield trait, to protect your new acquisitions. It wasn't easy to visualize though, hence I added the foce fields seen above.

That was the first iteration of it, but after some discussion with the good folks over at Discord (thanks guys!); we decided it was too sci-fi, so we explored ways to make it look more tech-y. This was the final result.



There are still more end game bugs to fix, but while trying to beat the campaign over and over, I realized an important thing...... it is waaaaay too hard. So next week for my sanity and yours, I'll be focussing on a balance pass of the game with the goal to stop making it, in the words of a tester: "every skill level is somewhat masochistic"...

[h2]Beta Change Log[/h2]

v0.2.33 Is live on steam; it includes:
🔹An improved audio manager. There shouldn't be any more audio bugs
🔹The 'connect' button is now part of the regular ability panel to make it easier to see
🔹A new tutorial showing people how the map works (Some folk were confused by that)
🔹New activation menu now shows what traits are gained/lost on activation
🔹New shield VFX so it's easier to know who is protected from conversion
🔹Slightly improved messages when abilities are added/lost
🔹 A slew of bug fixes and smaller improvements

Happy conspiring!
Rafa