We have now officially launched on Steam! Plus news on the Nov. 1 update.
Take the election into your own hands in Megalo Polis -- a side-splitting, real-time strategy game launching today on Steam for PC and Mac. Political junkies and undecided voters alike are in for a treat in this no-holds barred, hilarious dash for the most powerful office in the land.
In Megalo Polis, your job is to play as one of the game’s presidential candidates -- whether they can legally run or not -- and jump head first into the campaign trail to “convince” the populace to elect you president. Choose between Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders or Ted Cruz. Declare yourself a Republican or Democrat -- and compete against three opposing candidates.
Enjoy the Nov. 1 update, which adds Ted and Bernie as playable characters -- along with a number of improvements to gameplay and difficulty balance.
Huge .... version update
Huge update! … The General Election is now available in this new release. Go for the fight!
This version also contains various improvements, especially feedbacks on the election map and some minor fixes.
And last but not least the Mac version is also ready!
Version update
We're back on working on Megalo Polis, for the last campaign stretch!
This update contains a lot of small updates, right before the next one, which will provide the general election.
Many visual and audio effects have been added, improving the feedbacks from the action, on citizen conversion, for instance, or most special actions. The districts status is also a bit clearer now with sounds associated with changes, like losing one, or going to sleep.
We also integrated options on performance, resolution, etc, directly ingame.
The next update, in 2-3 weeks, will be huge, with the second part of the game offering the general election fight, and you got to play against all AIs at the same time. It will much harder to reach the top! All the bonuses and decisions in the primaries will pay off!
Version update
Here is the end of month update!
As planned, this one brings a lot of optimizations. It should enable you to play on much lower configurations now. I am able to play on my 3 1/2 years old laptop, for instance, which has the minimum required config listed on the store page. So, this is an objective reached for the project :)
There could be a few side effects to this large phase of optims, in the form of secondary bugs. We corrected most of them, but some could be left.
Version update
We have a new update!
This is a massive gameplay update, with many new features, increasing the variety and depth.
We added campaign choices, after each mission. You have to decide wether to allow support of a movie star, launch a mass mailing, include military support in your stump speech, etc. Each choice will bring in either a bonus or a malus. Make sure you engage in wise risks only!
Each character and party also now brings a specific bonus and malus. All of these combined will alter the way you take on each map. Having a short time bonus on rich districts, for instance, can be a boon on, say, Maryland and Delaware!
Another major change is in the form of mission objectives. You are presented with objectives for each zone of the mission, so from one to seven per mission. You can choose not to accomplish them, and still win the mission, of course. If you do reach them all, though, you win a special action card. It will go in your deck, and you can choose one card from your deck, to come with you for the next mission. You can be much more aggressive, or defensive, based on your liking!
As usual, we also corrected some issues, and continued polishing and balancing the game.
The next update should bring mostly optimizations, and a few interface / audio updates, as well as more final screens for the primary ending. And then we'll add the general campaign!
Making of (interface)
Making an interface in a video game is much harder than it looks, and it usually is scrapped and redone a few times over the course of a project development. It is a matter of showing all the required information, but not too much, so that it is readable, polished, and doesn't clutter up the screen. Most times, you'd like to have as few interface elements as possible. But in a strategy game, there are still many things that are absolutely necessary.
You start out during the design with very simple sketches, like boxes and texts. It looked something like this a year ago, for the gameplay interface :
All of the elements are here, and many have actually been suppressed since then. That's because we simplified the game along the way. For instance, the action cards are moving up when you want to select them, and you click anywhere on them to trigger the action. So it's much faster to use. There is no camera change either - it's automated, when you leave a city and wander the map.
The next step is to do a mockup of the interface, so that everyone agrees on what it would look like in the end. You have to decide on the art style. On Megalo Polis, it went very straightforward, and the first complete mockup is close to the final render :
The interface work is also about all the screens you go through, like the main menu, or in our case, the US map :
This is one of the most complex screen of the game. It required a lot of work, preparing and animating each state. That work is done by Raphaël, the UI expert, along with the coders. Each click and mouseover has to work as planned, so that you get the required information, and launch the mission you indeed selected.
Preparing and scripting each screen is a lot of work and finetuning, but there is also animating the page itself. You can go with a static screen, of course, but when elements move when you select them, it's overall much more satisfying for the user. This is done entirely inside Unity :
In the end, there was some tweaking of the UI all around, but not by a lot. The art style was fixed from the start, and it was mostly adapting or adding some content for clarity.
Version update
There is a new game version available.
As announced previously, this is a major change on the missions gameplay. Each mission has now a specific set of rules, changing the default gameplay slightly or immensely. Missions have thus become more simple or more difficult depending on their setting.
For instance, in Nevada, you will regularly have a jackpot in some districts, and hopefully you'll be the owner at the time - or try to be the owner as fast a possible!
In Colorado, districts can become unavailable when citizens will like a smoke. Or in Hawaii, when there is a volcano alert.
Illinois provides a corruption level, and while attracting citizens is much more effective, you shouldn't do it too much to avoid prison!
California spreads the love by giving you a bonus when you conquer a district - so that you can chain combos.
Some states also bring bonuses or maluses on conquering specific social classes based on what you have conquered previously.
There is a lot to explore and the campaign is now close to its intended form and variety.
The main game screens of the USA map and character selection have also been improved notably.
Other than that, of course, we have fixed bugs, tweaked the balance, and honed the AIs.
We still have major gameplay updates and additions coming up in the next few weeks!
Version update
We have updated the game version.
We're moving now into adding more gameplay and refining the existing screens. The updates will grow on, starting from now until end april.
The biggest change, is the state presentation screen, which will give more details on its specific gameplay, and present the state map. From there you can see when each town will be open for conquest.
You can find the state map again, in the tab screen, along with the current vote level.
We added the french localisation! Sacrebleu baguette omelette du fromage.
Your AI opponents continue to learn, and now can attract citizens..
There is also some tweaking done on balance, including on difficulty level. The "hard" setting notably removes any district lock!
The next update will see a major change in the gameplay proposed in each mission. Stay tuned.
Making of (gameplay)
The gameplay of Megalo Polis has a few layers on top of each other, and the most basic one is the interaction with citizens. The objective of each mission is to get elected, which you do by getting more votes than your opponents. And you do that by converting more citizens than them.
It's a little bit more complex, as the default rules states that what matters is the number of citizens you total, in the districts that you control. A kind of winner-takes-all rule. So you could only have one citizen of your color in all districts, and still win. Or conversely, you could control almost all citizens, but not a single district, and your score would be a whooping 0%. But in general, your level of control of districts is equivalent to the number of citizens you have convinced.
So the most basic layer of gameplay is moving around, and converting citizens. This is done very simply, as you have to stand near a citizen for a few seconds to convert it. The time varies depending on your character, on the social class of the citizen, and a few other parameters.
We spent a few weeks, at the start of the project, to get this working right - and we are still tweaking it at this stage. Clément, our main developer, was hired for the project, and was in charge of putting the first bricks together. Starting from nothing, on a completely new concept, is a real challenge. The overall idea was laid down, as explained previously, still, it had to be tested and proven, before moving to the next step of the full game production.
What Clément did, was setup a test map, place a few districts, a few citizens each, and have a bogus character move around. As we had no 3D objects done yet, it was looking weird of course.
The next step was to code the rules, and have as many parameters accessible live while testing, as possible. Half of the screen was covered with buttons, control bars, dropdown lists, etc. It soon had to be organized into tabs just to remain manageable. That's the image at the top.
Clément remembers this phase of the project :
"The important thing at this state is to build a fast and easyly manageable system. There's a great chance that you will have to throw away important parts of it, so forget all complexity and beauty of code. Go straight to the needs and provide interfaces to the game designer, so he can easily try different values and get immediate results. Ugly & Fast is a good way to prototype until you've found what your core gameplay will look like."
Once this got into place, we needed a few weeks to balance all these parameters, and make sure that the foundations of the project were correct : player and citizens speed, conversion delays, attraction efficiency, social class distance, and so on. These values remained more or less the same up to now. One notable change was an increase in the player speed right before the first release.
We also added a few more rules into the mix later on, like the neighbour bonus. It gives a bonus on conversion, when you already control citizens in the district. This parameter, among other, then got promoted to a level design factor, and changes from mission to mission, from a very low 0% (no bonus whatsoever), to around 25% (meaning you convert twice as fast when you already have 4 citizens on your side). We could even put negative values, now that I think of it.
It's a shared task between code and design, to identify which parameters must be exposed, how to balance them, and what level of complexity is acceptable in the calculations. Too many parameters is harder and harder to balance AND to code without bugs or even side effects, but in a strategy game, you need to have quite a few levers, to create choices and hence strategy.
Version update
We just updated the game version.
This is mostly a technical update, as planned.
If you installed the game previously, you might have to reset the preferences inside the game, and restart.
We did a sweep at debugging, and increased the performances.
The AI is more efficient now.
Plus some balance tweaks.
The next updates will focus more on the gameplay. Stay tuned.
