I released a copy of the new Democracy build to a few testers and got some good feedback, already got some bugs fixed and new tweaks done because of that, but this build still needs some tweaking for balance, and the code that decides which change in variables is attributed to which effect needs fixing. basically if an event annoys some people, its reporting them as upset, but as the effect wears off later its reporting them as getting happier, which is true, but not attributable to the same reason (the resuilts then look backwards).
Sales are still pretty good. possibly they are starting to slow slightly. I'm off on holiday now, so It will be interesting to see how sales are handled for the next 10 days or so.

My web traffic is approaching 30gig/month and I'm looking around for different providers. My current webiste host keeps introducing cheaper packages and not moving me over to them, as well as wanting 5 dollars a gig for overage. Seems a bit tough, so I might be moving. Not looking forward to the hassle that will involve though... I have a VERY old site with a lot of crappy old files on it...

I just read this pretty cool article (free reg required, use bugmenot.com)
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050520/cifaldi_01.shtml
one of the conclusions of it is that the way to be a good game designer, is to just design a lot of games. I think this is very very true. Ive designed a fair few now, some were ok, some were bad, some are great :D but its only by going through the full process many times you really learn.
Maybe this is why we have so many bad games these days? Games are taking longer and longer to make, so the number of titles under the belt of the average designer is probably really low now?
just a thought...

wow I haven't posted for ages. This week was, of course, Revenge of the Sith week :D. I have to say, I thought the film was absolutely superb. Some cringe moments, but very very few, and it was incredible to watch. I think Hayden Christensen? has redeemed himself massively in this film. Very very very good stuff. And Yoda kicked serious ass :D
Still been working on improvements to Democracy, and its still selling damned well. I've finally got a working system for changing the membership of voter groups over time, so you can raise car taxes, and eventually see a decline in the number of motorists. This is a long requested feature so hopefully people will like it.

Hits Vs Sales
Just checked out the plimus report for my games to see what the percentage of 'hits to sales' is. That's the percentage of people who buy the game compared with those who select it, basically those clicking the buy button to see the price.

For Starship Tycoon its 5.45%, for Democracy its 12.21%.
No wonder its selling well.

And a higher conversion rate means more and more advertising possibilities become profitable.
meanwhile Im bugfixing and making a first pass at allowing the simulation to change voter frequencies...

I just added a brief post-mortem for Democracy here:

http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy/postmortem.html

I'm in the process of finding some good advertising locations for Democracy, plus waiting on some new artwork for it, and also looking for a bugfix within Starship Tycoon. So there is a lot going on. I haven't had nearly enoguh time to spend on playbalancing the newly tweaked build of Democracy.
Sales continue to be pretty damned good.
The thing that everyone is talking about today is the promo video for the new 'xbox 360' and whether or not its the most hyped tedious embarrasing crap on earth.
So far the verdict is yes.

Heres the funky new banner ad for democracy (looks much better on a white background...)

I've been making a lot of minor tweaks to Democracy lately,but I know objectively there is a lot more to do. It would be an easy game to improve if it was an FPS or RPG, or even a 2D space shooter, but its such a strange genre that its really hard to find ways to improve it graphically.
Short of getting a graphic artists to totally rethink the interface, I'm almost boxed into a corner with the main GUI.
I keep making changes for the better, so I know I'm onto the right thing, its just a long slow process..
Sales are still good, and the new banner advert is fantastico. It should be finished tomorrow and then the adverts can begin mwahahahahahahaha!

I'm working on both the 'reports' bit of Democracy (which summarise whats happened), trying to add some causal information to it, and also the front end GUI stuff.
heres the latest screenshot of the new 'choose game' screen:

Theres a lot of other ideas I have for 'fleshing out' the main game, hopefully I'll get some of those in too, and spend another week of solid play-balancing too.



YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?

This army maybe?:

Working on some GUI and code revamps for democracy.