I also submitted it to reddit in this subreddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/devblogs/

Party members will always vote, and always vote for you (obviously). But that is where their influences begins and ends.

Activists are the engines of turnout. they will persuade other people to vote, by campaigning and canvassing. They don’t change minds, but they do encourage higher turnout. As we all know, in a close election, turnout can make all the difference. This is a good gameplay mechanic, in my opinion because it acts as a drag and fight against another mechanic in the game…

Every voter in D3 is in multiple groups. You cannot therefore win by saying “I’ll be the party of the poor, screw the rest!’, because the poor are also retired, also ethnic minorities, also young, also motorists… and all those opinions come together to form their voting decision. In other words, every voter is a complex decision-machine. As a result, you have to ensure you have broad appeal. Having a niche party with extreme views is not going to win an election, you simply won’t get the votes. So the lesson is… have broad centrist appeal…

BUT!

The activist mechanic drags you slightly the other way. having broad appeal is great, but nobody knocks on doors and puts up posters for a middle-of-the-road all-things-to-all-men candidate. You need a vision, a tribe, a group of people who are inspired for you, support you fanatically and will campaign for you.

This all works great…but explaining it is hell. My last playthrough had me lose the election. I had a lot more party activists than the other guy. They gave me an election day turnout boost of 18%! whereas the other party had a boost of just 5%. But… My turnout was actually lower than their turnout. Why? Because a lot of my potential voters just were not excitable enough to go vote for me. I’d REALLY upset the oppositions supporters, so they were motivated (despite their weak activist base) to go vote, and my bunch were not. As a result, an election that looked 50/50 in the polls went to the opposition.

Activists take time to be recruited, and the groundswell of anger at me had created a big voting block on their side, but not many activists (yet).  The result was a slight surprise, although i found it cool, because I understood the mechanics. However, I need to do a lot of work to make sure the player understands WHY they won or lost. Complex systems need very careful GUI’s and tutorials and help.

http://www.showmethegames.com/sales.php

(Only 3 days left!)

are now running a collective AMA today on reddit! check it out here:

Today marks the official start of the 2013 SHOW ME THE SALES promotion. Woohoo! Let there be fireworks, cakes and champagne!* This is a different kind of sale than you are used to. It’s not a bundle, and it’s not being run by a portal like steam or gamers gate, or anyone like that. It’s being run entirely by indie developers who sell their games direct. The sales are direct on the developers website, all showmethegames does is just aggregate all the game information and provide discount links for you lucky people. It’s 100% indie. or maybe 200% indie, who really knows these days…

CHECK OUT THE GAMES HERE

This is a sale where there are no middlemen, or anyone taking a cut of any of the money other than the hard working pixel-bashers and code-wranglers who made the games. You buy whatever games you like, direct from the developers website. Showmethegames.com is a site owned and run by me! out of the goodness and generosity of my ferengi heart. The thing is, not taking a cut of the sales also means the ad budget is zero. Nada. Zip, nothing. So that means we appreciate people tweeting and blogging about the sale all that much more.

So please TWEET or BLOG or post about it, or upvote it somewhere so everybody gets to hear about it. We have games like Defcon, Revenge of the titans, Voxatron, Scoregasm and loads more. Plus even if you don’t like the games on sale, there are lots more on the www.showmethegames website. The sale runs from…

11th may to 18th may.

Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Tell neutral countries!

*fireworks cake and champagne not included.

In short, the banks are screwing us over.

Unfortunately, the process of getting around this is, to put it mildly ‘somewhat bureaucratic’. Now there are such things as UK banks that will let you have a $US balance in them, even if you run a business (and lets not even get started on the way that business accounts are hideously overcharged for and nickel-and-dimed compared to personal accounts). The big problem is, you can’t just go and open a $US business account. The only bank I could find that was happy to do that actually demanded I open a £ bank account with them, to which I could then ‘add on’ a $ bank account for free. Why? WHY? And for the privilege (ha!) of owning that account, I’d be charged a monthly fee. Thanks guys.

Now, after doing some simple maths, and working out how much I’d save over a month with a better exchange rate which I could manage using a proper (non ripoff) forex service to shuffle money from $US account to £UK account, I work out it is still massively worth doing. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the last month or so… Of course, banks still seemingly operate in the seventeenth century, so it takes them 10 days to write to you (why? isn’t email a thing now?) to tell you the form needs changing, so you need to send it back, and that will take another ten days and so on… And they want to see your passport (yes really) and photocopies of six months of your bank statements (yes really) and also proof of your address, maybe a bank statement (err…aren’t these online now?).

I half expected them to ask for the squire of the village to send a letter impressed with his seal in red wax before they would open a bank account. And when they do, no doubt they will mail me (isn’t email a thing now? seriously?) a lot of patronizing crap about bank loans and financing, and maybe inviting me to get advice from a branch ‘business adviser’ half my age with a tenth of my experience. Arrgh Argggh ARRRGHHHH!

The real sadness is, this shouldn’t even be a thing. Banks should catch up. There are forex services that exist purely because banks screw you over. Paypal exists because banks international payments suck. Zopa and Funding circle exists because banks loan rates AND savings rates suck. There is a whole eco-system of businesses out there that exist purely because high street banks suck so much.

I’m sure eventually it will all prove worthwhile right?

Feel free to join the democracy 3 facebook page over at www.facebook.com/pages/Democracy3/252393281560096

There are a whole bunch of voter groups. here is a nice shiny image showing what they are.

My current dilemma is adding enough effects that determine the changes over time in the membership of these groups. Some are pretty obvious, as in the three income groups membership is determined by the underlying economic simulation regarding income / redistribution / your policies on tax etc. But many are more subtle. For example, what would increase the number of liberals in your country? I already have a bunch of ‘membership’ effects, but I think it would be cool to add more, without it requiring adding tons and tons of new policies. Here are my current ideas, and I welcome more, or criticisms of my reasoning:

1. motorists should be increased/decreased by traffic congestion (more pleasant way to travel)
2. commuters increased by bus subsidies and rail subsidies (presumably making it cheaper / nicer)
3. liberals increased by race discrimination act and community policing? Also boosted by teaching evolution.
4. Environmentalists boosted by recycling, hybrid cars and micro generation grants. (daily routine or economic benefits to being green)
5. Retired boosted by pensions (afford to quit early)
6. State schools and childcare provision should boost parents membership (having kids less expensive or hassle)
7. Vigilante mobs should boost conservative membership (fear of the mob!)
8. Winter fuel subsidy should slightly boost the retired, as they live longer!

Like I say, I’m looking for long term effects on membership of a group, not just happiness of existing members. For example, car tax pleases environmentalists, but I doubt it persuades anyone to take up the green cause who wasn’t already persuaded.

But what about the same music? Is that ok? I suspect not. And some of the same text somewhere? hmmmmm

I ask this because I built democracy 3 on top of the data for Democracy 2. With the exception of the new events, dilemmas and voter groups and policies, existing data is currently being carried straight over to the new game. obviously it might be re-balanced, but I’m not sure I need to re-write from scratch the descriptions of all policies or voter groups. That seems silly.

I *have* totally binned all the sound effects, and got brand new ones, because I think that makes things sound newer and fresher. All of the policy icons are the same, but totally re-done in 4X the resolution so it’s all much crisper. That was definitely worth doing.

but I do worry that somewhere, someone will rant on reddit that D3 is a rip-off because the description for income tax is the same as Democracy 2, and thus the game is just a ‘re-skin’. Obviously it isn’t, the underlying sim was dramatically redesigned and works very differently, but you can’t tell that without stepping through all the source code. Am I wrong to panic about a tiny percentage of pedants who might feel that way? or do you expect sequels to games to be done completely from the ground up in terms of data and artwork?

I totally understand why some indies work that way. it makes a lot of economic sense. I’ve also read about indies who spend six months making a game, then just promote, publicize and do SEO for the enxt two years to milk that game, and claim that it is a far better use of their time than merely making another game. This kinda saddens me.

there are of course, other indies who sit in a dark room churning out the most cool, original and fun games that nobody ever hears about because they hate / suck at doing PR and thus remain effectively ‘undiscovered’. This is a real shame.

So where is cliffski and positech games in all this. I know quite a few cynical whiny online ‘haters’ who think I’m in the 95% PR group. They tend to be the people who say GSB looks like it was done in flash in a weekend because it’s 2D. (*yawn*). Actually, I’m closer to the dark cavern guy than the ‘always promoting’ guy. I tweet a few times a day, but only half of that is about games. I rarely post to facebook, I post on the odd forum, but not enough to have a real ‘presence’ anywhere. I’ve only been to GDC once, never to PAX or Comicon, or any other non-UK trade event. I’ve given two public talks, and appeared on 2 panels. That’s it.

My biggest ‘PR’ is probably this blog, which isn’t a big time commitment at all. I also write for Custom PC magazine in a similar style.

Getting the balance right is extremely hard. I am probably not doing enough PR for Redshirt and Democracy 3 yet, although that will change in the next month or two. The problem I face is I never know how close a game of mine is to being done until it’s more or less done, so I always think I’ll be doing PR too early. An example of someone who has done well both on making a great game AND doing great PR for it is Andy Schatz’s Monaco. The problem is, that game took six hundred years to make, and that would drive me mad. I like to aim for a game a year / eighteen months at most.

This year, I am aiming to be a bit more committed to PR. I’ll be at rezzed, with a booth this time! A proper one with 4 screens and 2 games, which is a staggeringly expensive thing to do, if I’m honest. I even bought a video camera to take to stuff like this (only a cheap one) so I can have some ‘our game at rezzed’ footage to spice up some promotional videos, and to hopefully film people playing the games to see how they play them. I might put in an appearance at other shows too,  who knows.

Hardly anyone gets the balance right, and I think it’s an essential component of an indie games success. Even more so if you have to go through ‘greenlight’ to get on steam. That’s an extra, very targeted peice of PR you now need to do on top of everything else. Arrrgghhhh…