StateOS v0.1 Foundation Alpha Coming Soon

A New Stable Version Of The Game

Hi everyone, as I mentioned in April, I'd be working on a update of the game roughly being released in July. I'm on track to meet that and also as mentioned before this is not a content update. I have been aware of the bugs and the state of the game, hence why I'm making this post and to let you know I'm still working on the game.

I've been busy at work thinking about the game itself in terms of the architecture and identifying the main bottlenecks currently in the game engine. After a while of trying to fix the large bug surface area mainly caused by state management in the front end, I decided to make some important changes to the game itself which will be within in this update.

Think of this update more as a means of having a stable non-experimental version of the game that can be playable for long periods of time with little bugs.

What Is Changing?

Most features that were semi-experimental, incomplete, and were main causes of bugs have been currently removed for this stable version.

The main part of the game is still there. Which is elections and legislation. The game now has a legacy score as a temporary measurement on how good you did during your playthrough. This is based off of how many bills you passed and also how many elections you won.

Legislation and elections have been gamified and somewhat simplified.

The map system while the new system has been added, won't be in the first update most likely, but the secondary one. This new map system allows me to make maps way faster and I've streamlined the viewing of the maps themselves.

Core systems in the code architecture have been completely re-designed and re-written for stability at scale. These include the monthly, weekly, daily, and yearly update systems, legislation and election systems, general state management changes for stable UI.

The UI now has a main UI design language and which you'll see throughout the new version of this game.

This version will present a strong vertical slice for you to mess around in that does work compared to the previous very experimental messy versions of the game.

What Was Removed?

Here is a list of features that will not be in the first version of the Foundation Alpha but will be added back as time goes on. These were features that were incomplete, buggy, and or not crucial parts of the core gameplay.

• Deep political party UI and deep political party "features" I put in quotes since they weren't really usable yet and were mostly broken.

• Wiki style info for elections and for politicians. This was a nice flavor feature but ultimately unfinished.

• The main wiki itself, which will be coming back, but the game is much easier to navigate.

• Just the USA for now for countries but adding back countries will be easier than you'd expect.

• Custom parties, custom scenarios, custom events, custom ideologies, any customizations are temporarily removed. That being said, custom parties may be shortly added back.

• Election Simulator is also removed for now.

• Government metrics because of the problems with updating values and state management and the incomplete systems they were connected with in regards to legislation. This is a important priority to add back.

• Cities have been removed from the game temporarily. It will be easy to add back and will do so when I get the code base back in order. Since cities are gone, county selection and campaign setup has changed for a short while.

• News media, once again, nice to have but it is flavor text with some effects but weren't fully working properly.

• Political groups are also removed. They weren't doing anything in game, so not really needed to have around.

• Party progression, and the somewhat in depth attempts at election campaigns have been removed for now.

• The old relationship system that was weird and unfinished is also removed for now.

• Non voting sessions are removed in the legislation process for the time being.

• Party scenarios and the ability to edit, remove, and manage parties in party management setup for now.

So What Remains?

The features that remain are all of the legislation features you're used to the same for the elections as well. So the core gameplay of the game still exists.

The large array of ideologies are still there and so is the complex party popularity system. So you can still have weird worlds using the world generation setting where Marxists might compete against Monarchists and Classical Liberals in the USA. Which leads to some funny results.

Depending on if I have the time, I will be adding back custom parties as a main priority along with generated cities.

I will be sharing an update roughly a week from now sharing progress on the update as it gets near actual release. Depending on what happens, I may have some extra time to add back a feature or two before it does release. It may release near the end of June, or early July.

My perspective is that by having a stable game you can play, with the core gameplay there is much better than a giant wishlist of features that create a game that is unplayable. At the least I know what the game should be at this point and can do things properly now that especially I have the time to do so. Not in a rush like I was beforehand.

The game also turns 1 years old in terms of actual development time. I've also learned a lot from this being my first major game project.