Customizing Candidates in Political Animals

I'm a little sad that we broke our streak of consecutive monthly devblog updates last month, but it was quite the hectic month for us as we tried to get work done in between dodging family gatherings for Christmas (A perennial nightmare for Filipino introverts).  We did get quite a bit of work done though, which I'm excited to share with you all today.

Procedural Party Animals

In the process of making Party Animals it was always in the back of our heads to make some aspects of the game procedural in order to increase the replay value of the game.  The way the game is made makes full procedural impossible in the same way a roguelike might be, but there are definitely a few aspects that when randomized will change the way the game plays for you.

First off is the candidates.  We guessed that being able to select your choice of animal candidate would be one of the things that players will like about the game, so we're hoping to making quite a few custom candidates to accommodate everyone's favorite animals (I've had at least one request for a giraffe, which should be interesting).  The candidate's name is also customizable, as well as their traits.  We haven't filled in the candidate's histories yet, but each trait will have an accompanying description alongside it.  Previously our candidates had pretty set histories and traits, but we figured there was more to gain by allowing players to customize their own candidate.

Aside from choosing a candidate's history, you can also rename them, choose their home district and platform as well as selecting the staff you want to hire for your campaign.  We currently only have three staff types right now but that should increase to at at least six by the time we're done.

New Maps

Some of you might have noticed that we also have a selection where you can choose the map you want to play in. New maps can definitely change the way the game is played and at the same time add some visual variety to the game.  The maps will take much more effort than the candidates so we're rolling them out little by little and not announcing anything yet until we've finalized them.  Previously we discussed that the Summer Island map is based on Samar Island in the Philippines.  With the new maps we're hoping to interest players from around the world so they will be very loosely based on countries or continents from around the globe. That said, I'd like to introduce you to Autumn Island!  It's still very rough and has none of the new buildings, but it should be fairly obvious where we're drawing inspiration from.

Thanks for reading.  If you'd like to be updated on the latest Party Animals news including our closed Alpha, please sign up for our mailing list!

The Machinations of Politics Part 2

In a previous blog post I mentioned that we will be using Machinations in designing the game mechanics for Political Animals. Just to summarize, everything in the game, from the districts, staffs,  and events can be considered as a resource, and that the game facilitates the interaction of these resources with each other. I also described a basic node: Resource Pools, and two different types of connections: Resource connections and State connections. If you would like to learn this in detail check out the book Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest W. Adamsand Joris Dormans

In this post I will be going over the core game-play of Party Animals using Machinations while introducing new nodes: converters and end conditions. Also, this is not a step by step tutorial on how to use Machinations, because the authors already did an excellent job right here. What this post hopes to achieve is to show you how to think about game design using Machinations by using Party Animals as an example. 

One thing important to know,  Machinations is not only a tool for modelling game mechanics, but also a framework for describing  game design on different levels( high to low level). I'll start by showing the game from a high level point of view, then  describe mechanics in detail in succeeding blog posts. 

The Whole is the Sum of its Parts

Party Animals is a 'territory acquisition' game at its core. The main objective of the player in the game is to get more reputation than his opponent before the election, and he does this through various means like campaigning, bribing, and participating in game events.  Look at the diagram below:

More often than not, actions that give the player reputation also require that the player spend campaign resources. There are two important campaign resources in the game: gold and command points. I will not explain the specifics here but for the purpose of showing mechanics I reduced both resources into the resource Funds(see B in the diagram).  

Another thing of note is that the player can also spend funds on various actions like rallying(raise voter concern on district issues), and gifting patrons(improve patron relationship) which improves the efficiency of his campaign.  By efficiency I mean getting more reputation for the same(or less) amount of funds. 

Now let's take a look at the different elements shown in the diagram:

A.  Fund Production - The triangle with an asterisk(A) is a source node. The source node produces funds and the resource connection(arrow connecting  node A to node B) stores the funds into the players Fund pool(node B). 

B. Fund Pool - The circles in the diagram are called pools and they store resources, in this case funds.

C. 'Get Reputation' Converter - The sideways triangle is called a converter.  Converters take in resources as input and transform them into other resources. If you take a look at the diagram you can see that there are two resource connections leading to C , 1) [B toC] , and 2) [D to C] . What this means is that in order to get Candidate Reputation(node E), the player needs to convert funds and District Reputation(node D). Without funds or available District Reputation then the player can't 'mine' reputation.

The converter converts District Reputation and Funds into Candidate Reputation

E. Candidate Reputation - Also a pool node, getting as much candidate reputation by converting district reputation and funds is the goal of the player in the game.

F,G. Campaign Investments - As stated above, the player can spend funds to improve the efficiency of his campaign so that he gets more reputation by expending less resources. Node F is a converter node which represents all actions in the game which can help the player gain reputation. 

As an example, a candidate can give gifts(spend gold) to a patron to get bonus reputation when campaigning in the patron's district.  

Nodes F and G represent actions in the game which improve the efficiency of the candidate's campaign

When the candidate 'invests in his campaign' by spendingfunds, an investment resource is produced from node F and stored in node G. As shown in the diagram, node G is connected to resource connections [C to E] and [D to C] by state connections( dashes). This means that whenever an 'investment resource' is stored in node G, [C to E] and [D to C ]increases by 1 which in turn means that the player can mine an additional reputation resource.

H. End Game Condition - This node determines how the game ends. The state connection [D to H] shows that the game will end when District Concern( node D) is depleted (less than or equal to 0).  Note that this end condition is used only for the purpose of this article.

As stated at the beginning of the post, the diagram shows the game-play from a high level point of view, thus a lot of the game mechanics which will make the game more interesting are missing. But it does show the following:

1) The player has funds to spend.

2) The player spends funds to acquire reputation.

3) The player can invest in his campaign in order to maximize the use of his funds. Which is what the player will be doing throughout most of the game. Now it's only a matter of breakingthese three down or elaborating  on them to make the game more interesting.

Key Concepts to Understand

Some of the skills I think is important when designing games using Machinations are:

1) Abstraction

In the diagram, I've grouped together several game mechanics and reduced them to a single node. For example, the Campaign Investment node groups together mechanics in the game which the player can spend funds on to improve the amount of reputation he can 'mine'.  Learning how to 'see' similarities in mechanics and how they can be grouped will be useful when trying to model game mechanics in machinations.

2) Learn to think in terms of relationships

Game mechanics in machinations are represented by nodes,  resource and state connections. It's important to understand how mechanics in your games are related to each other. When designing games using machinations think about how the different mechanics in your game work together.

3) Learn to see and use abstract resources

In Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, the authors distinguished between concrete and abstract resources. Basically concrete resources are the ones you normally see in the game, and abstract resources are the ones that you don't but are there. Some example of abstract resources that I regularly use are strategic advantage and player skill. An example of advantage as a resource is information in a game with hidden information as a mechanic.  Certainly getting information that your opponents do not have increases your likelihood of winning the game.

In this article I've shown you how we use the machinations tool in modelling our game mechanics, as well as given a few tips which will help you learn the machinations tool. In the next blog post I'll be talking about abstracting and elaborating mechanics as well as show some of the Party Animals game mechanics I mentioned earlier.

Thanks for reading.  If you'd like to tell us about political candidates from your side of the word, you can email us at heypartyanimals@gmail.com. To be one of the first people to try our closed alpha, please sign up for our mailing list!