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[DustyDrake]

Can we shoot people in the crowd or the guard?
Perhaps if we're bribed a certain amount...

[dukope]

Oh, that key idea is a stroke of genius. It ties the sniping in with the main game mechanic nicely.

Pretty much the only reason I take a shower any more is to think about stuff like this.

Can we shoot people in the crowd or the guard?
Perhaps if we're bribed a certain amount...

SSSSSHHHHHHHHH!

[tequibo]

Finally got around playing it.
It's neat, and very interesting, but on a day 3 I got a man who said "Here we go" on a "Papers, please" request but gave me no paprest. So we just stared at each other for some time. Then I have closed the shutter. Then opened it. Then I have tried to stamp night club ad and give it to him. Then I said that entry is not guaranteed on a megafon. Then work day was over, but me and the man stayed there. I have tried exitind to main menu and trying again, but the same man did the same thing, so I'm not sure if this is a bug, or was I'm supposed to do something else?

[dukope]

Finally got around playing it.
It's neat, and very interesting, but on a day 3 I got a man who said "Here we go" on a "Papers, please" request but gave me no paprest. So we just stared at each other for some time. Then I have closed the shutter. Then opened it. Then I have tried to stamp night club ad and give it to him. Then I said that entry is not guaranteed on a megafon. Then work day was over, but me and the man stayed there. I have tried exitind to main menu and trying again, but the same man did the same thing, so I'm not sure if this is a bug, or was I'm supposed to do something else?

Ok, you gotta help me out here. When you closed the shutter, it gives you a citation with instructions. Did you read these? Did you follow them? How much did you understand and how far did you follow this lead?

I added this extra hint (along with a post-it note on the bulletin) for beta 0.5.7 in the hopes to solve the roadblock here. But it still doesn't work. I'd like to know which part is still failing because I've got to fix it for final.

Don't feel bad, my design is still failing here and lots of people still miss this.

[team_q]

I think it's because you don't need to spot out the differences with your booth software in order to successfully deny people entry. In order to get the special rejection slip, you have to use your detector to spot the differences, so you can get stuck if you have just been finding the errors visually, not calling them out and rejecting people. This method is what is taught at the start of the game. It happened to me the first time I played though as well.

[tequibo]

Ok, you gotta help me out here. When you closed the shutter, it gives you a citation with instructions. Did you read these? Did you follow them? How much did you understand and how far did you follow this lead?

I added this extra hint (along with a post-it note on the bulletin) for beta 0.5.7 in the hopes to solve the roadblock here. But it still doesn't work. I'd like to know which part is still failing because I've got to fix it for final.

Don't feel bad, my design is still failing here and lots of people still miss this.

I think it's because you don't need to spot out the differences with your booth software in order to successfully deny people entry. In order to get the special rejection slip, you have to use your detector to spot the differences, so you can get stuck if you have just been finding the errors visually, not calling them out and rejecting people. This method is what is taught at the start of the game. It happened to me the first time I played though as well.

Ohhh, I got it now.

Yeah, before that I checked rulebook, but I just overlooked that part. At the beginning of the day, when I first read it, I thought it is only about additional papers, and I did not highlighted it, as Erik said, I just stamped "deny", but I did used highlight when there was wrong date.

I think I got confused because before this moment every time you accept or deny entry by stamping passport. And it's sudden change in this main mechanic.

(on a side note, I wish I could stamp other papers too, without any affect on a gameplay, just for the sake of it)

[dukope]

I think it's because you don't need to spot out the differences with your booth software in order to successfully deny people entry.
...
It happened to me the first time I played though as well.

Ohhh, I got it now.
...
I think I got confused because before this moment every time you accept or deny entry by stamping passport. And it's sudden change in this main mechanic.

(on a side note, I wish I could stamp other papers too, without any affect on a gameplay, just for the sake of it)

Gotcha. Thanks for the info guys. I can see now that the leap at this moment from just stamping to being gated by inspection is too much. Citations and bulletin hints or not. Gonna put some more thought into how I can lower this barrier, smooth out this bump, and nail this metaphor.

[team_q]

Or just have a slot with the slips on hand.

[Comrade Beric]

I don't see why it matters how many people said no.  1% of the planet could say yes and everyone else say no, but that would still be 70 million copies sold, which is insanity.  Logically, the pie chart is meaningless.  What matters is how many people have said "Yes" and whether or not that number is high enough.  2,500+ people saw your game and clicked "Yes."  That's 2,500 potential sales, just in the very limited Greenlight community.  That's what matters.  I think you're doing just fine.

I know I love the game.  I found out about you from a random post about your comic relief guy on r/indiegaming and have been overjoyed with your title ever since.

[fallacy]

Glory to Arstotzka!


I learned about this game in the fine RPS article and after playing the current beta, I registered only to come here and say:

Your game is brilliant.
And I love the music and sound effects. The way you implement it is magnificent and reminds me of Hotline Miami and Cart Life, both masters in doing this.
And I love the dystopia setting. Not many games do it right, and you do it.

Now, I only have two requests:

Please, when you finish it, offer a DRM-free version via BTMicro, GOG or other distributor/portal. Your game already has some votes in GOG's wishlist:
http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/papers_please

and please, go over the RPS article and read some comments. Some people have some awesome ideas on what you could implement.


(Also, congratulations to the Pioneers Dev too. I noticed he commented on the beginning of the thread and I learned about it the same way I learned about Papers, Please and I look forward to the game. And I also hope he give us a DRM-free version. Sorry for the hijacking, you can detain me now).

Glory to Arstotzka, comrade!

I too have voted in the gog wishlist. Also, I have top secret information. [email protected] is top secret email address. Use wisely, comrade, and GLORY TO ARSTOTZKA!

[pluckyporcupine]

I'm still a bit iffy on the idea of sniping because it just feels like that doesn't quite go with the job description BUT you have implemented it in a really clever way so I'm sure it'll start to feel natural over time.

EDIT: Also, to add to the conversation earlier, for me, by far, the hardest part about learning how to play was realizing that you could highlight entries in the rulebook to check for discrepancies. Due to the way the bulletins read, I started highlighting every discrepancy pretty much from the beginning, despite not being "required" to, as they mentioned earlier and that had taught me that it reveals things that you can't catch just by looking at it. But I'm pretty sure I didn't figure out the rulebook functionality on my own and that I had thought it was just a reference.

[E_FD]

Hi,

Found out about this game through RPS, really excited by it, registered here just so I could post some comments. (I'm playing the 0.5.7 build.)

-Difficulty: My first playthrough hit what I expect is supposed to be the ideal level; if I worked as fast as possible, I'd just barely manage to break even when paying for rent/heat/food/sometimes medicine, and occasionally make a little more. Which feels like it inspires just the right amount of panic to try to get through as many people as possible. By the second playthrough, when I was familiar with all the rules, I was building up a modest profit.

-The old man without the passport on the 3rd day flummoxed me, and I had to do a search online to find my way past him. Looks like a lot of people have had the same problem; I think there are a couple problems that make this one confusing: First, it's the first case we meet where we have to use the investigate function on the rulebook. Before this, we could just spot the errors visually and deny the passport, or use the investigate button on, say, the person and their passprot photo or indicated gender to notice a discrepancy. Second, using the investigate button to click on the empty desk to represent that he's passportless really feels unintuitive; it's not something I would've ever guessed to do if I hadn't looked up the solution on the web.

My suggestion would be to make the Temporary Visa Slip used for denials available all the time, maybe in a stack at the end of the desk, so that we can deny people without passports without having to puzzle out the steps the game wants us to take to identify their lack of passports, even though it's immediately visually obvious.

-Finally, I noticed it mentioned a few pages ago, but about an earlier build, so I'll just point out that this is still in: When denying entry to the brothel owner/human trafficker, I get a citation that reads "Brothel help invalid". Also, I don't know if this is deliberate, but even after denying him, the newspaper article the next day mentions the girls being murdered or something to that effect. I'd gotten the impression that I could have prevented this just by denying him entry; is it supposed to be necessary to detain him?


That's everything. Love the concept, love the visual style. Congrats on producing such a unique, engaging game!

[barley]

-Finally, I noticed it mentioned a few pages ago, but about an earlier build, so I'll just point out that this is still in: When denying entry to the brothel owner/human trafficker, I get a citation that reads "Brothel help invalid". Also, I don't know if this is deliberate, but even after denying him, the newspaper article the next day mentions the girls being murdered or something to that effect. I'd gotten the impression that I could have prevented this just by denying him entry; is it supposed to be necessary to detain him?

the way I saw this was that he was in charge of a ring of people forcing women into prostitution and that if you deny him the ring keeps working (and he can run it from outside the country) but if you detain him he can be interrogated and the ring can be shut down

[Comrade Beric]

I actually do have a single simple suggestion.  I know that the game is meant to feel like you're shuffling around papers in a panic, and it works really well for that purpose.  The only time it doesn't make as much sense is at the end.  When you're giving all of a person's paperwork back to them, I can imagine a guard just scooping them up and handing them back, as opposed to giving them each one at a time.  I was thinking perhaps the right mouse button could be used as a "scoop" option in which every document you wave your mouse over gets dragged.  Including the rulebook, citations, etc.  I mean, if you're going to be scooping this stuff, it behooves you to try to stay organized on your desk, otherwise you'll end up catching everything when you're just trying to give the person back their papers.  Also, doing it this way, I think, preserves the panicked feel of shuffling papers because it's really only useful during that one moment at the end when you're just trying to get rid of the papers.  Moving them all onto your desk like that doesn't help much because they're all stacked on top of each other and you'll still have to separate them to check names and whatnot.

[Crunchepillar]

Hi. I was doing a run where I just deny everyone except cobrastan and people that are ballsy enough to walk up without a passport and I got a bunch of writeups for denying people that aren't supposed to be, which is expected of course, but on the third day I got a writeup for "Invalid News0" and "Invalid News1" after denying the third or fourth person in a row.

[Karachokarl]

I think that's because you let a suspected murder through. If you read the news, there's a guy wanted for murder, whom you probably didn't check properly?

Interestingly enough, you can find out that he is a wanted criminal, but then just deny him entry anyway without detaining him and without getting a penalty for not doing so.

[Sar]

-The old man without the passport on the 3rd day flummoxed me, and I had to do a search online to find my way past him. Looks like a lot of people have had the same problem;
...
Second, using the investigate button to click on the empty desk to represent that he's passportless really feels unintuitive; it's not something I would've ever guessed to do if I hadn't looked up the solution on the web.

Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but isn't that exact thing in part of the instructions in the game itself? I seem to recall reading one of the beginning-of-the-day letters which said something to that effect.

[dukope]

@Comrade Beric
Thanks! And yeah, the percentages don't really matter. Valve just likes to dump a bunch of stats onto the author's Greenlight page. It's nice for the curious, but Greenlight doesn't even do approvals on a strict stat ranking.

@Crunchepillar
That sounds like a crazy bug. Gonna look into that one. The "deny everyone" or "approve everyone" technique will get fixed. More than 5 citations or so on one day will be a game over.

@E_FD
The "Brothel help invalid" thing is fixed in my dev builds, but beta 0.5.7 is just a few tweaks to 0.5.5 and doesn't have that fix.

@Comrade Beric
Thank you for the suggestion but I'm probably not going to add a special button or technique just for returning papers. At least, not right now. I'll think about it for a bit. Although it sounds kinda cool at first, I want to avoid adding a right-click-drag function for this one feature.

Pimp Arrest
You need to arrest the pimp to save the girls (talking about the dev builds). Otherwise he calls up his homies and they kill everyone. Denying will also penalize since his papers are in order.

The Missing Docs
Thanks johnki & E_FD for the extra explanations. As Sar says, there are explicit instructions in the bulletin:


But the problem is the conceptual change from:
    Get the docs, check em out, inspect docs for fun
to:
    Get nothing, inspect certain rulebook rule to proceed

Some people make this leap no problem. For others it's so far off the radar as to be nonexistent. It even looks like a bug and once that happens, brain over. I'm working out a way to fix it for everyone. Fun challenge actually.

[Stereotomy]

Fantastic game! The trailer is incredibly effective, and you've done a great job of making something original and entertaining. Love the art style and the music.

So, a few of my own thoughts on this (pretty spoilerific):

-Inevitably, some reviewers are going to talk about how the game mechanics undermine some of the 'difficult choices' you have to make. For example, why worry about getting one warning for letting the wife without a pass in? Unless you're doing badly, it's not going to cost you anything.
  But actually, I think this is a feature rather than a bug. One thing you'll hear from people who have worked in places likes the ones being parodied here is that people will always find a way to work exactly within the letter, not the spirit, of the rules. The way you can, right near the end of the day, start stamping at random to get more pay if you haven't had any warnings fits in with this too.
  Of course there could potentially be gameplay balance issues with the mechanic, but certainly I don't think it takes away from the experience. It lends itself easily to a difficulty setting too.

-The other side of that coin is that it's a problem when doing something has no gameplay consequences. Letting the trafficker or the suspected murderer through doesn't lose me anything, and in fact I never have a reason to detail rather than deny (as far as I can tell). You seem to be setting up some kind of pseudo-achievement system with the medals, and there are effects in the news the next day, which I suppose might cover the individual characters, but there really needs to be something to make me hit 'detain', or at least some resaon to consider it.

-An actual gameplay issue is that nobody ever has more than one potentially dodgy feature in their documents. What this means is that, for example, if somebody doesn't give me a document I need, I highlight the discrepancy and they give it to me, I now instantly know that there won't be any other discrepancies and I can let them through without bothering to read any of their details.

-It's a bit weird that I have to take somebody's fingerprints when they claim to have two names, as the fingerprints are actually irrelevant.

-This will probably get more explained in the full version but what's the logic behind the medals? I get one for letting a woman with a pretty convincing sob story through, but I also get one for letting the crazy old guy with the fake passport through.

-I don't have much sympathy for the people getting stuck on the old guy day 3. It does say in the rules what to do in that situation, and you've put in an extra hint. On the other hand, they're the ones who are going to walk away thinking the game is bugged, which isn't good for you.
  I think somebody said it before but probably the best way to deal with this is to make sure you have to highlight a missing document discrepancy before this. Maybe a missing ticket which would be provided on asking. Then the warning you receive for denying the person (if you don't ask for the ticket) can remind you to check the daily memo for what to do in that situation.

[Hempuli‽]

I just tried this out of whim, but man, this game is fantastic so far! I love how the awkwardness of the controls adds to the overall experience; there's some really cool atmosphere going on here!