Dev Update #10: Crime & Punishment

It's been a wild month in the newsroom at Stop the Press! When the last dev diary went to print, the Steam page had only just rolled off the presses. I had no idea that less than a month later I'd be making in-game headlines to announce that the game had already blown past 10,000 wishlists.

But there's been no time to celebrate as this month I've been drilling down into the system of crime and punishment, so this dev diary is a great opportunity to share a little more about that side of the game.

The Censorship Bureau has authorised the release of the following previously restricted information...

Even though I haven't gone into detail on this in previous dev diaries, many of you will have seen in the trailer a little hint of the censorship system.

There are 4 different levels of censorship in the game, from low (where most headlines are permitted as long as you're not directly inciting violence) up to Draconian, where anything less than full-throated support of the regime is against the law.

The level of censorship will change up and down over the course of the game, depending on who's in power and how tightly they feel the need to control the press. It starts at Low censorship, but as the crisis engulfs King Louis and his Royalist regime, his Secret Police and Censorship Bureau will rapidly crack down.

That means that headlines that might be perfectly legal one day could be illegal the next. As you're editing headlines, you can see whether or not they're illegal (the colour indicates the severity of the violation):

Every time you break the law, the Censorship Bureau who read all newspapers in Guadelique will issue you with a penalty notice. You can ignore the fine, but that doesn't mean it'll go away...

If your crimes mount up, your case will get referred by the Censorship Bureau to the feared Secret Police. Whether or not they take immediate action will depend on a number of things including the number and severity of your crimes, but also your readership numbers. After all, if nobody reads your paper why would they expend effort going after you?

At first you might get a friendly warning that they're taking notice of you...

Or a not so friendly warning...

You'll never know exactly how much trouble you're in, but your Editor keeps a log of any interactions, so you can try to figure out how thin the ice you're standing on is. Sometimes you might notice things there you weren't otherwise aware of...

Continue to transgress, and you might start getting Secret Police officers turning up at your press...

I’m focussing on getting the demo ready at the moment, and in the demo there’s not time to commit enough crimes to warrant the really serious penalties… but the Secret Police have a fearsome reputation for a reason, so if you continue to disobey, you’d better be prepared to face severe consequences...

There are ways to mitigate this, however. Print a few pro-government headlines and they might start to back off. Sometimes the police might strike a deal for help advancing a particular narrative in exchange for looking the other way (more on that mechanic in a future dev diary). Or you can take a more blunt approach...

In extreme circumstances where your survival is at stake, you might choose to sacrifice one of your journalists...

Of course, you might be printing slavishly pro-government propaganda anyway, in which case you mind find the Secret Police more of an ally than a threat. Just watch out if there’s a changing of the regime as the new government’s agents might not be so friendly...

PS - If you're looking for dev diaries from before the Steam page went live, they're all in the Discord server where all of these updates are also posted.