This week was spent working to convert the last bit of CivRep into a single player experience.
Bill Crafting
The voting portion of the game had always been the most discussion-centric of all of our mechanics. Converting it into a single player experience was something that required a lot of brainstorming, paper prototyping, and coffee.
Iteration on Amendments
The amendments had been a decent success in our prior playtests, so we decided to further expand them while also clarifying how they worked in the game. One little issue that came up before was that players were not sure if amendments were connected to each other. For example, in the earlier prototype, we had an amendment to legalize marijuana, and another amendment to regulate the sale of marijuana. Playtesters were often unsure if they had to first pass the amendment to legalize marijuana before passing the amendment to regulate sales (which was the case in our game), or if they could just regulate the sale of marijuana without legalizing the substance.
In order to clarify the connection between various amendments, we created a new interface that showed how different pieces of legislation were related to each other.
Now, players could visually see that in order to legalize recreational marijuana, you had to decriminalize it first, and before you can pass amendments to invest money into the city, you had to pass an amendment that would increase tax revenue for the city.
Feedback for NPC Council Members
In order to simulate the discussion and compromises that made the multiplayer prototypes so compelling, we created four other NPC council members who would provide feedback on your bill. Each of these NPCs has an agenda, and the players need at least majority support in the council in order to pass their bill. The players can draft up a bill and present it to the council. Depending on which amendments they chose to include, the players will get various feedback on their phones from each of the NPCs which discusses why or why not they will support the bill. The players can redraft the bill any number of times until they are happy with it, before they can submit it to receive the final results.