Spinnortality is going pretty well! Here’s what I’ve done recently:
- The research tree is done for now. If I realise there aren’t enough branches later on I’ll add to it, but it’s good enough for the moment.
- You now receive “decision” emails. Functionally these are just messages with choices at the end: “An opportunity has arisen! Should we take it, or ignore it?” They’re a bit basic right now but I want to make them more complex and allow for more expressive, interesting decision-making down the road.
- A big one: each nation now has a legal system! There are a number of laws – for taxation, genetic research, privacy etc. – and each nation has a law value going from “None” to “Max”. You can now bribe (ahem, “donate to”) political parties and gain favour and influence over them; you can then spend that favour by influencing them to change the laws. This is important since, up to now, there was functionally no reason why you would bribe politicians. Eventually I want to link these laws with whether or not you can launch products in those countries.
- Oh, if a nation collapses into anarchy now, you can impose order on it by spending military connections on it. When the nation emerges from its state of conflict, you will be holding the reigns of power. (If it’s a democracy or one-party state you’ll control the leading party.) One fun result is that if you decide to found a corpornation with this ability you’ll emerge holding 100% of the nation’s shares, which you can then sell for massive profits. It’s hugely overpowered right now but I kind of like that you can do that.
There have been some other tweaks too, of course. You can now see income breakdown by nation and by product, for example. Handy stuff like that.
One problem I’m grappling with is that $100m at the start of the game is a HUGE amount, but $100m once you get your empire up and running is a drop in the bucket. I could just scale all in-game costs with player income (eg. not “This costs $20m” but “This costs 5% of your average income”) but I don’t want to do that with all costs since it’ll make players feel like they aren’t making progress. Hm.
And look, I made the globe all neat and stuff!
james patton 