Prototype Version 2 coming soon!

The mockup (and I must stress it is just a mockup) above should be familiar to anyone who's played Crusader Kings 2 or indeed any game that used Paradox Interactive's Clausewitz Engine.  In this blog post I'm going to go over some of the new directions our next prototype is going to go, taking a lot of inspiration from the aforementioned games.

Prototyping is all about figuring out what works and what doesn't.  this is something we're learning the hard way by prototyping our way to a version of Party Animals that we're happy with.  After we released the first prototype last month for feedback, we had another meeting at the Glorietta 4 food court and decided on a few changes.

Adding Campaign Staff

We'd discussed the idea of recruiting "Party Animals" into your campaign before, but we decided to give them a more prominent role in this new prototype.  Instead of all the actions being taken by your candidate, you now have campaign staff that can travel around the island to do actions for you.  This gives the player a lot more flexibility in terms of decisions.  Whereas in the previous prototype the player was restricted to doing actions only in the district where they were located, now your staff can prepare a district for your arrival even while you're conducting a campaign in a far off district.  This means a wider range of strategic options, which is ultimately more entertaining.  Additionally having the staff front and center plays to the name of the game.  Choosing the right "Party Animals" now becomes central to your strategy.

Getting rid of the itinerary

While I thought that the itinerary system was quite clever and fit the theme of the game very well, it became quickly apparent that filling out a scheduling form is just as boring in games as it is in real life.  It also introduced difficulties when trying to reconcile it with the addition of campaign staff, so we ultimately decided it wasn't worth keeping.  We're replacing it with a much simpler calendar that tracks the time it will take for actions to resolve.

Shifting towards a strategy audience

If Paradox Interactive's motto is to make "smart games for smart people" we went into Party Animals wanting to make "smart games for regular people", the idea being to combine the depth of the games we love with a more humorous, approachable look and feel.  When combining two disparate elements there's always a risk that you will end up with a product that pleases no one, and we noticed that with the first prototype there was strong polarization between people that liked it or were bored by the game.  The people who really seemed intrigued by it were the kind folks on the paradoxplaza subreddit who if anything thought the game was too simple.  So we're shifting towards that audience by creating the deeper, more strategic gameplay that they enjoy.

The new prototype should be up very soon, and if you're interested in trying it out, please do join our mailing list!