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[Hempuli‽]

By the way - is there a chance that in the finished game there'd be multiple problems with a passport? I mean mainly situations where you need to take fingerprints and they turn out to be fine - it'd be interesting if that could happen, but there'd still be a problem somewhere. As it is it's a bit silly that if for example the passenger forgets to give you their passport and you ask for it, you can know with 100% certainty that they're clear.

[dukope]

By the way - is there a chance that in the finished game there'd be multiple problems with a passport? I mean mainly situations where you need to take fingerprints and they turn out to be fine - it'd be interesting if that could happen, but there'd still be a problem somewhere. As it is it's a bit silly that if for example the passenger forgets to give you their passport and you ask for it, you can know with 100% certainty that they're clear.

Yeah. This was mentioned in the last few pages. The counterintuitive thing is that more errors makes the game easier, not harder. So in general, each immigrant will have at most one thing wrong. But this makes certain encounters too predictable (immigrant hands over a document after forgetting it) so I'll add an exception in those cases. In the final version, there may be errors in the newly-provided docs.

[RageKit]

Adding Story elements in something that firstly looks roguelikish is sooo nice. It breaks the monotony in a very good way. I'll definitely keep an eye on this game.

[tterrag]

Something just happened I'm a little curious about. I was processing an Arstotzkan citizen when I saw their ID card and passport listed two different dates of birth. Naturally, I denied the application for this discrepancy, only to be cited and told the applicant was clear for entry - I'm fairly certain had I approved it, I would have been told the birth date was invalid. I was wondering if something was up there.

[TacoDeBoss]

Please stop posting about the pros and cons of Steam here.

TacoDeBoss, MegaScience, and ktom: This is a devlog for Papers, Please. It's not even remotely close to a discussion thread about Steam, of which there are surely thousands peppered across the internet. I'd appreciate if you could edit out your recent Steam-related posts since they have nothing to do with the development of this game.

Sorry. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion but I tend to try to convince people they're missing out on something awesome whenever they say they don't like something that I do

[Stereotomy]

By the way - is there a chance that in the finished game there'd be multiple problems with a passport? I mean mainly situations where you need to take fingerprints and they turn out to be fine - it'd be interesting if that could happen, but there'd still be a problem somewhere. As it is it's a bit silly that if for example the passenger forgets to give you their passport and you ask for it, you can know with 100% certainty that they're clear.

Yeah. This was mentioned in the last few pages. The counterintuitive thing is that more errors makes the game easier, not harder. So in general, each immigrant will have at most one thing wrong. But this makes certain encounters too predictable (immigrant hands over a document after forgetting it) so I'll add an exception in those cases. In the final version, there may be errors in the newly-provided docs.

This doesn't actually fix the problem. It still means that if I ask somebody for a document they haven't provided and they give it to me, I can inexplicably rule out there being anything wrong with any other document. And in the case of something like checking aliases or gender, the remaining possibilities for problems are very limited.

I think there should never be more than one actual error (because as you say, that makes things easier rather than harder), but there should sometimes be more than one potential error. As in, once everything's fully investigated, there will at most be one actual error remaining.

That still leaves room for people to 'game' it a little, by checking things that can never be corrected (e.g. passport expiry date) before things that can (e.g. mismatching names). But honestly that doesn't really seem like much of a problem.

[Konidias]

I agree that there should be the potential for an error on a missing document as well. Then at least you have to give it a glance to make sure it's correct. I actually assumed when a person didn't hand me a document right away that they were worried their forged document would be detected... so I checked them carefully. But they were always correct.

It's kind of like "level 2" in a sense. You passed level 1 and then you are on level 2 and have to determine the next set of potential discrepancies with the newly handed documents.

[Anonymous]

Have you considered adding the ability to deny or approve brothel invites and replies when doing so? It might add a lovely bit of spice to the game. Also the ability to add stamp marks to just about everything under the stamp might be good.

[JimmyJimJimJimmer]

Hey guys, just thought I'd share with you all a Let's Play I made; it's from the view of a guy who really loves living in, and working for, Arstotzka. You can find it

And also,

!


I hope such self-promotion isn't frowned upon here; if it is I can remove this whole top section of the post.

On an unrelated note, I managed to both accept and arrest the human trafficker, which lead to me receiving both headlines the following day. I caught it on video, and will most likely upload it in another Let's Play can be seen in part 2 of my Let's play, but to replicate it you just need to show the man the note, accept him into the Arstotzka and then quickly hit the "Detain" button. That way you should have both arrested him and accepted him, leading to both headlines being shown, which really messes up the newspaper.

Update: I uploaded part 2 of my Let's Play and realised that I also get a few citations for "Invalid Gender" when the gender is correct, as far as I can tell.

Spoilers ahead, though I think if you wanted to avoid spoilers you wouldn't be looking at the DevLog in the first place.

I come across Ludum Dari at around 3:20 and the paper is at 5:00. I manage to detain and accept him by passing him the accepted passport, then I give him the note before giving him his ID card back. Then, when he says he'll break a girl in two I quickly hit the detain button.

As for the incorrect genders, they are at 09:26 with a one "Olivia Hagen"; though she does kindof look like a man looking back on it. And also 13:04 with "Aya Petrova", but again looking at it, she could possibly be a man. Maybe I just shouldn't go to Arstotzka to pick up women?

[Phugmeister]

Very nice game! Original and compelling.

Is it possible to collect all tokens in the beta? (the coins the immigrants sometimes give you) I've only been able to find 3 so far. And I don't know what the larger spaces in the home screen are for, either.

*****spoiler alert*****

Tokens are obtained by:
- Letting in Jorji
- Letting in the husband-wife team (both of them)
- Letting in the mother visiting her son (only after notifying her that her passport is invalid)

*****spoiler end*****


Another thing:

(...) You're not the first person to complain about the issuing cities. I think TB even explicitly ignored them. Again, this is one of those things (along with the too-small desk and lack of hotkeys) that I really enjoy about the game. An inspector needs to know lots of random facts. And the only cost of not knowing is time to look it up.

This is my minor complaint about the game, too. The problem is not so much that it takes time to verify the cities, it's more that it's not really worth the trouble gamewise. The time you waste checking the cities makes you worse off in the end than if you just take a chance and disregard the city when deciding whether to approve or deny somebody. Perhaps there could be a bonus when you get everything right on a given day? Or something else that would create an extra incentive to check the city every time, at the moment I feel it's not worth the trouble.

[RobRendell]

The time you waste checking the cities makes you worse off in the end than if you just take a chance and disregard the city when deciding whether to approve or deny somebody. Perhaps there could be a bonus when you get everything right on a given day? Or something else that would create an extra incentive to check the city every time, at the moment I feel it's not worth the trouble.

This point of balance will change as the details of the penalties change, though.  I believe dukope is already planning on having the penalties escalate in cost; if you also got fewer than three warnings each day before you start getting fined (or if there's some sort of carry-over of warnings between days), the benefit-to-effort of checking cities would increase.

[Frostiken]

I'm a little confused on the protocol for mismatched pictures. Unless I've missed something, I noticed mismatched pictures and they say 'It's an old photo'. I do the fingerprint scan and it comes back with their name and no aliases.

What then? I've denied someone, and get told they should've been cleared. I allow someone, and get told that they had mismatched photos and should've been denied.

I don't get it, I get penalized every time no matter what I do it seems.

[Phugmeister]

You have to compare the fingerprints being printed by your computer to the fingerprints they give you after you give them the slip.

[dukope]

@Phugmeister: [tokens, empy spaces on night screen, issuing cities]

There are only 3 tokens in the beta, so you got them all. The empty spaces will come up in the final game. And as RobRendell mentions, the issuing cities aren't as ignorable when the penalties are escalating. I still haven't gotten to actually balancing the escalation, but my goal is to force the player to think long and hard about ignoring any piece of information.

@Frostiken: [fingerprints]

You need to compare the fingerprints. Sometimes they don't match. I was surprised to see a few playthrough videos where people give the fingerprint card to the entrant, then completely ignore it when it's given back with actual fingerprints. I've added some text to the identity record to hopefully make this a little more clear:




New Domain

I dragged my feet about registering a proper domain for the game so when I went to get paperspleasegame.com it was already taken. Squatters are the best. Luckily the name works with one of those new-style trendy domains. Thanks Sweden!

>> PapersPlea.se <<


Price Announcement

Instead of just announcing the price right-out, I decided to take a day and throw up a small mini game:



I used Haxe/NME's html5 target for this. It was written from scratch and took only a couple hours. Surprisingly, the hardest part was getting drag-n-drop working right on iOS. I had to add a little javascript touchevent handler to cancel the normal page-scroll events. And due to whatever quirk of Jeash (Haxe/NME's javascript flash API library), the canvas element needs to be the first thing on the page to get the correct mouse coordinates on a touch device. So if you play it on a mobile browser, the top "PAPERS, PLEASE" title thing is removed in order to put the canvas div at the very top.

Even with these few hiccups I'm amazed with how smooth it went. I definitely wouldn't have bothered if it required writing pure javascript, which I loathe. So add another point to the Haxe/NME column.

[RobRendell]

Hi, dukope - the link on your "How much will it cost" image is wrong (goes to paperplea.se rather than papersplea.se).

[EDIT] I was initially worried that the "how much will it cost" minigame was a way to take votes on the price and I was messing with your statistics by trying every amount, but soon decided that it was just a thematic way to announce your price.  Cute

What's the conversion rate between the Arstotzkan Zorkmids and other world currencies?

[Frostiken]

@Frostiken: [fingerprints]

You need to compare the fingerprints. Sometimes they don't match. I was surprised to see a few playthrough videos where people give the fingerprint card to the entrant, then completely ignore it when it's given back with actual fingerprints. I've added some text to the identity record to hopefully make this a little more clear:

Oh outstanding, perfect.

I don't know why, but I somehow assumed that the little printout was... the fingerprints he gave me? I don't know why, it seems so obvious now.

Yay! I helped with a thing!

[josh_s]

Fantastic. Played the beta through to the end a couple of times. Good combination of compulsive gameplay and engaging setting. Great to see something so original getting a wide distribution.

[Bandreus]

This is amazingly well done. Great execution there 

[MegaScience]

I'm sure by now you know the Yogscast is doing a series on this game?

I'm curious if Nilesy (of the Yogscast) might also do videos on it. He's all about methodical. But on the point of the game, you're going to get an influx. The only reason you might not now is they forgot to link the game, but they should link it in the future. At least, I linked it in a comment to someone asking. Might top comment, get people coming in.

[Dr. Cooldude]

lol I'll expect more manbabies to come here now