Not All Senators Are the Same 🏛️ Dev Diary #2

In the earliest prototypes of Senatus, every card showed the same senator.

• Same face.

• Same tunic.

• Same beard.

It was practical. It worked. But it wasn’t Rome.

And Senatus is not about abstracting the Roman Senate. It’s about confronting it.

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The Placeholder Problem

When you play a card in a debate, you’re not moving an icon: you’re trying to convince a person.

Until now, however, every senator looked like a clone from the same gens. This first iteration has served us to test internally the card game.

However, now it's time to give each Senator a proper look.

A Living Senate

From this version onward, every senator is generated procedurally from a pool of combinable elements:

• Different faces

• Varied hairstyles

• Body types

• Skin tones

• Hair colors

• Beards and facial styles

Each card now represents a distinct individual within the Senate.

These are not just cosmetic tweaks.

The cumulative effect is what matters

when you look at the board, you no longer see an abstract grid of influence.

You see an assembly, a political body

The Senate of Rome.

Why This Matters

In a game centered on debate and persuasion, perception is part of the design.

This visual variability:

• Reinforces the feeling that you are negotiating and convencing real individuals.

• Adds identity and character to the Senate as a whole.

• Makes each playthrough feel subtly different from the last.

It may seem like a small change, but it transforms the atmosphere of the game. Politics is not uniform. The Republic was not homogeneous. And now, neither is the Senate.

That's all for now, see you in the next dev diary, senator!

The Senatus Team