Music! (and other updates)

I haven’t posted recently (soorrryyyy!): I was either rushed off my feet or hard at work on Spinnortality. Here are some things I’ve done!

• The game has music now, thanks to the very talented Anthony Kroytor of City Nights Tracks! We’ve decided to go with some eerie, drone-y synth music; different music layers fade in or out depending on what the player is doing. We’ve got a few tracks in-game and it seems to work pretty nicely! After wading through hours of not-quite-right Creative Commons music it’s such a relief to have Anthony on board: each piece he produces brings a different mood or ambience to the game, and they’re all a perfect fit for the kind of mood I want to create.

• Re. game design, different products now violate different laws, so to launch high-level products you need to bend the laws of each nation you launch it in. I mentioned this last time but it’s now fully implemented.
• Corpornations are now slightly better organised and no longer game-breaking: a corpornation now generates a certain amount of income each turn; the more shares of it you own, the bigger your share of the income. Also, the majority shareholder is the only one who can change the laws. These still need more work but I’m getting there.

• You now have an estimated death-date. Some research can extend your life by 5 or 10 years, and some research allows you to transfer your consciousness into a new body. For an earth-shattering fee, of course.
• The media system is now totally rewritten. Originally there was this Byzantine system where you’d have, say, 5% influence over a nation’s media and occasionally that would mysteriously do something maybe? Now it’s much clearer. You have a certain amount of media power in each nation. Your media power fills up a bar. When the bar gets full, you can change the nation’s culture by moving one culture slider one space. It’s not as subtle as the old system but it is a lot clearer, and that makes it completely worth the change.

• You can now found an NGO (basically a big charity) which allows you to spend money to raise the company’s public opinion. (Why yes, I am a cynical person.) You can also spend large amounts of money to make a nation more prosperous.

• The game has goals! Some playtesters felt the game lacked direction, so I added three goal systems. You get short-term goals from the Board of Directors of your company, like “Break even” or “gain 3 influence in Russia”. These should keep you focused, and net you a nice little reward.
• There are also medium-term goals which I’m calling “Visions” but I don’t like that name so eghhhhh… These are expensive, long-term projects with big payoffs: a tax haven that halves your taxes, or a global retail site (think Amazon) which generates money, or a media empire that slowly allows you to change the world’s culture.
• There are also victory conditions, ie. long-term goals. They don’t do much but they’re there, at least.

• I also learned how to extend classes (to which every programmer will scream about time you hobbyist!!!, which is fair) so I was able to rewrite the code for random events and streamline the system. Players won’t notice a difference but it means I can now write more complex random events/choices more easily, so yay!

That’s all for now! I’ll update again when I have more progress.