Yakoob on 5/10/2017 at 21:13
Thanks :D Fixed the typos, will be in next release!
Yakoob on 12/10/2017 at 19:42
Some reaction videos from Geek Girl Con. It's good to see players arguing over the themes you wanted them to argue over :)
[video=youtube_share;kG2vLbY_g7k]https://youtu.be/kG2vLbY_g7k[/video]
Thirith on 11/11/2017 at 11:30
I played it yesterday; neat game with cool ideas! One thing that didn't work that well for me, although that'd probably be difficult to avoid: I chose not to have a clear, one-sided agenda, which resulted in me being told that the newspaper wasn't really read all that widely and therefore it wasn't particularly influential - so I felt little to no responsibility for the things that happened (primarily: one national star being killed).
Yakoob on 12/11/2017 at 05:35
Thanks for checking it out :) That's a hard thing to avoid - if I just made nothing happen, then people would feel bored without any sense of progress. Though there is a possibility of just having a good festival with nothing bad happening, but you need to be really careful about being balanced.
I've been working on a new episode, and taking all the feedback into consideration.
Thirith on 12/11/2017 at 09:53
You've probably thought about this before, but you could try pushing the message in your narrative that if you're too balanced, you're responsible for what is happening by *not* doing more. I think that especially the daughter character could be used to do this: she could berate you for your comfortable neutrality in the face of people's rights being abused. And/or you could actually up the pressure on the player character by making it possible that he's fired or at least demoted before the week is over, and then you'd see the results of someone else choosing a more extreme approach in the position that was once yours. I kinda like that idea, although it would of course mean quite a big change.
Yakoob on 13/11/2017 at 05:41
Oooh I like that, definitely gonna incorporate NPCs nagging you a bit more. You can actually get fired in HEADLINER, but not until the last day. But I have a hunch most gamers would feel "cheated" if they got fired early and saw what some AI did instead of them.
Thirith on 13/11/2017 at 06:33
I could imagine something like the following:
1) You get demoted before the end of the week and you spend the last 1-2 days doing the headliner thing with utterly inane, irrelevant articles ("Try the 10 day transgenic tomato diet!" vs. "Is your man secretly a Purist?") in a smaller, crappier office). Same gameplay loop, but the game tells you in very clear terms that you chose to be irrelevant, so here you are, making irrelevant choices.
2) You get outright fired and you spend the last 1-2 days at home or wandering the streets, and you get a copy of the paper you used to work for; you then pick and choose which of the wildly one-sided articles you read, in a variation of the same interface.
While these options would strip your choices of their consequences, I think that this would be more in keeping with the themes of Headliner (will you use the power of propaganda, and if so, how?) - and to that end, I think you may need to be willing to frustrate your players. As it is now, I ended up with the game telling me two contradictory thing, namely that I was causing the paper to become irrelevant because no one reads it, and that I'm partly responsible for what happens because my choice of headlines influences opinions out there. Personally I'd gladly be 'cheated' out of agency by the game if that's the price for the game being more logically consistent in this respect.
Just brainstorming here; don't worry, I don't expect you to implement any of this, but if any of the ideas spark something off at your end, all the better. :-)
Yakoob on 13/11/2017 at 22:12
Mmm the way you describe it could indeed be very powerful. It's like the poem "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out..."
And "you chose to be irrelevant, so here you are, making irrelevant choices." would be a great end-game line :D
