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Questions about a storygame? Thoughts on Eternal? Any other IF you're playing out there?

New game: Can you win the election?

8 years ago

Hey everyone, shameless promotion here. Check out The Mayoral Campaign. It is my latest, and there is actually no story at all. It's a game. I had a lot of fun working with variables and random numbers. Oh, and it's not easy, it will take some strategy and planning to actually win.

If you do get a chance to try it out and have detailed comments, suggestions, or see any problems that you don't want to post in the review section, feel free to leave them here! I hope you like it.

New game: Can you win the election?

8 years ago
Thank you, @Will11, for your kind comments. I was going to PM you responses, but I thought I'd post them here in case others were interested:

Money is there -- it is in your stats, you had to use the stats item to see how much cash you had. I had considered just putting all the stats info on every page but, well, I didn't.

As for the issues, I intentionally avoided that so people weren't biased. For example, if I put an issue like gun control in, I would have to have the electorate favor one side. If that side was different than the player's side, well, the reader wouldn't like it. I wanted to avoid the comments section becoming a political battlefield.

On the districts, I don't know if you didn't see it, or if it wasn't clear -- if you used the Campaign Manager item, your campaign manager would tell you which districts were "yours" and which you were going to have trouble with. And if you did any polling, you could also see where the districts were showing up at any given time.

Thanks again for your detailed comments.

And now I am wondering if there is a way I could make it (or something like it) with actual issues that would not completely alienate some section of readers by implementing some actual positions...

New game: Can you win the election?

8 years ago
You could take one problem, two or three opinions (in favor, against, biased) and work out a positive and a negative path for all of them although that's a helluva lot of work.

New game: Can you win the election?

8 years ago
Well I'm not sure how to implement that.

For example, let's say you favor banning all widgets personally. In the game, you are going to have to take a position on widgets, either for banning them or against banning them. That choice is going to have to affect the outcome of the election -- in other words, one of those positions will help you with the voters, while one will hurt you.

If you, personally, favor banning them, and that hurts you in the game with the voters, you, the reader, will not like that and may end up commenting that I'm a moron because only morons don't support banning widgets!

Now I suppose I could force you to make a selection on a position and not really have it make any difference in the game at all, but I'm not sure there's much value in that. So I could leave the game mechanics completely as they are right now, but add in a question or option about banning widgets -- that doesn't change a thing...

New game: Can you win the election?

8 years ago
Well, fair enough. I didn't say you could actually implement that, but maybe that's what Will meant.

It is indeed very difficult to cater to different opinions in a CYS story. Couldn't you just go about election techniques rather than pure, hard choices based on opinion? I'm not sure that's possible either, so just ignore my shyke and consider this game to be a nice one :D

New game: Can you win the election?

8 years ago

Played it and left my review on the story. Bottom line, I loved it. It was a fun game and I like all those stats. Good job Ogre.

New game: Can you win the election?

8 years ago
Thank you for the review!

New game: Can you win the election?

8 years ago

I had fun with your game, Ogre. Admittedly, I totally lost the second election. Repeatedly. So, I'm probably a sucky politician. (Maybe I'm just too honest. xD) That said, I found myself insanely curious about how you scripted the polls--both the appearance (okay, mainly the appearance, I want that for something) and the statistics.

New game: Can you win the election?

8 years ago
It is hard, and it is supposed to be hard! At least you won the first one.

As for the polls, what part of the appearance? The table on the page "Poll Results?" That is just a table with variables. To get it to display I actually put the code in the a script using the $PAGETEXT variable.