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some-games-by-bee278 days ago

So, I'm really not sure how to actually win this game (but maybe that's the point?)

It seems like it is absolutely impossible to get any of the Mutualist bills passed. Every time I filibustered, not a single vote changed. I suppose this means that you could simply filibuster the first bill every day and at least then none of the Federalist bills would be passed, but it doesn't seem very possible to get any of the Mutualist ones passed.

The one Mutualist bill that I thought I did get passed, something about making stealing car parts legal again (which I thought was compatible with our "subsidized auto repair" being good) ended up also being a Federalist bill. (Although maybe it had said "illegal"? I can't remember now).

I tried a second playthrough where I filibustered every bill, and even that didn't let me save enough reputation to win--one of the days I had to miss one of the tasks in order to get to the vote on time, and so I ended up with 0 reputation.

So I'm not sure what the message is here. I think maybe the difficulty in winning is supposed to mean something... like, for example, if filibustering everything was the only way to get re-elected, the game would be saying something like "voters only care about filibustering, not about actually pushing for change" or something. But even that strategy doesn't win, so the lesson seems to be... the Mutualist party always loses...? I'm not sure.

Two other notes:

1. I found the font somewhat hard to read. I could never tell that 2s were 2s or 5s were 5s.

2. Having to hold the filibuster button is something I both really like and find annoying. It is annoying because holding down a button for a very long time is just physically annoying to do (and there are also accessibility problems with that). But, on the other hand, it definitely encapsulates the idea that standing there filibustering is annoying and exhausting. So it is definitely on point.

I do think this game is effective at communicating political concepts through gameplay! It does feel like I, as the senator, am forced to filibuster every bill to have even a chance at re-election, and it feels funny that the voters also seem to care whether I am able to boot up my computer every day, but that they don't care at all about all the dang Federalists who are actually voting for all the unpopular bills. So I definitely feel like the game is really saying something to me, but I just can't quite tell exactly what,  due to the way it ends up playing out at the end.

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RavioBoi277 days ago(+1)

Thank you for the honest review. I could pretend the difficulty was intentional and claim that it's meant to show how hard it is to be a senator, but in all honesty I just didn't have anyone to test the game but myself. The filibuster, however is meant to be somewhat tedious because that's how they are in real life. The way filibustering works is that the longer you do it, up to 2 in game hours, it increases the odds of a bill passing in your favor, but it's never guaranteed because I wanted there to always be a chance of failure. I feel like that made my game unnecessarily difficult, I will not include such heavily luck based mechanics in my future endeavors. 

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some-games-by-bee277 days ago

So at least personally I do think it is pretty okay to have highly random or frustrating game components,  and I think they are effective in this case! Making a filibuster be annoying because, well, filibustering is annoying, makes a lot of sense to me.

The main thing that I personally am looking for in games is a certain sort of clarity, I suppose--what are the game elements trying to do or say? In this case, the message is, at least to me, unclear--it seems like the Mutualist party is just doomed to fail, which is a fine message, but the game mechanics don't make that message particularly clear (or any other message).

Still, I think an important thing to note is part of the lack of clarity may be due to bugs! I'm pretty sure I never saw a single vote change in any filibuster I did, despite playing through the game twice. Of course, I was not always paying attention to the screen, so I could have missed it. But I'm pretty sure at least in my first playthrough I did watch quite closely and nothing ever happened.

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RavioBoi276 days ago(+1)

I see it's not a randomness problem but a lack of clarity problem. I designed the Filibuster to not be obvious what way, or how much it changes the vote but you do make a good point that it hurts the message of the game. The difficulty is definitely unintentional, like I said when I play tested the game. It seemed fairly balanced but I created it and knew all the bills by heart so it wasn't really a good test. For example, you mentioned the "Make stealing catalytic converters legal again bill" which is actually considered an anti-auto subsidy bill because car owners have no course of action but paying for a replacement part if their catalytic converter gets stolen, or at least that was my logic. If I were to have made this game again I would have put a little message at the end of each bill saying what it was or at the very least made it obvious what bills are for or against political positions.

Once again, thank you for sharing your opinion with me. Feedback is the best way to improve.

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