Happy Monday! A TLDR reddit post of the last three devlogs is due for today. So if you're from Reddit, hello! As usual, screenshots are attached above.
Welcome back to another big update for StateOS, which is a lot more interesting than yesterday's devlog.
Headline Features: Saving Your Campaigns
You can now save and load your campaigns. You can now experiment with different strategies, take risks, and return to your career whenever you wish. I've also invested time in optimizing the save files to keep their size manageable from the start.
The Clarity Update: Understanding the Game
A deep political simulation is only fun if you can understand its moving parts. I've introduced a suite of new UI elements and feedback systems to demystify the mechanics of StateOS.
- Bill Authoring Effects: When proposing a bill in the new full-screen authoring modal, you'll now see a clear breakdown of its potential effects on the state, city, or nation. This is a tool for understanding game mechanics and making informed legislative decisions.
- Campaign Action Results: A new results modal now appears after you take a campaign action, showing you the immediate impact on key metrics.
baseScoreDisplay: To help you gauge your political strength against election opponents, the baseScore is what the game uses to calculate your polling and who wins the election. The higher your baseScore is, the better. In harder difficulties, I may disable this.- Party Popularity Over Time: Head to the main dashboard to find a new line chart tracking how political party popularities shift over time, visualizing the changing political landscape you are a part of. Party popularity has been a feature I added months ago, but until now, you couldn't see a line graph of how it changes.
The Political Lifecycle & Executive Power
Run for Re-election
As your term in an elected office comes to a close, a re-election modal will now appear, prompting you to run again as an incumbent. You can launch a new campaign for the position you already hold and fight to keep your seat.
The President's Cabinet
I have implemented the first phase of the Presidential cabinet appointments. For now, this allows the President to replace key government heads. There will be a modal at the start of your term, and you can select the different department heads and change your choices before confirming all of them. A realistic appointment process is not here yet.
Major UI Overhaul & Fixes
New Government Offices UI
The Government Offices UI has been completely overhauled into a much more visually appealing and functional full-screen, split-layout design. This makes navigating the various branches and levels of government a far better experience.
I have also added the settings and wiki buttons in the main campaign screen.
Critical Bug Fixes & System Integrity
I've fixed a few bugs as usual.
- Fixed: Outdated campaign actions have been updated to work with the new, optimized data structures.
- Fixed: An issue where players running for re-election would have their stats (like funds and name recognition) incorrectly reset to zero has been resolved.
- Fixed: The campaign standings will no longer incorrectly display the player's party as Independent.
- Fixed: Resolved a major data conflict where two different sets of data for city governments were causing numerous bugs, including the player not appearing in their office at the start of the game.
- Fixed: Corrected faulty matching logic that prevented the player from being properly assigned the Presidency when starting a game in that role.
Housekeeping & Strategic Removals
To improve the user experience and optimize the game, we've streamlined a few things:
- Removed: The redundant government office sub-tabs have been removed in favor of the new, centralized UI.
- Removed: The old government seat modal is no longer needed, and the seat cards are no longer clickable, simplifying the interface.
- Removed: I have stopped generating all politicians for all cities at the start of a game except the player's current city. This is a strategic decision to improve performance and will be replaced by a more dynamic and efficient system for simulating local politics.
The Road Ahead: Taming the Scale
StateOS is a game of immense scale, potentially simulating millions of "politicians." To ensure it runs smoothly for everyone, my focus is often heavily on performance.
- In Development:
- Continued work on compressing save data to prevent large file sizes and speed up load times.
- Designing a Level of Detail (LOD) system for AI candidates. Opponents not directly running against the player will be simulated in a more lightweight manner, drastically reducing save file size and processing overhead.
- Adding congressional district map generation.
- Overhauling the politician's view modal to be full-screen and more detailed.
Extra Notes
I am deciding to release a gameplay video on September 27th, I mentioned the 29th yesterday, but instead the 29th will be the free demo trailer which the free demo is coming out on the 30th. The demo is basically almost just about ready and complete.