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Tropical Manipulation is a digital boardgame - a simultaneous turn-based strategy game in which 1-4 players manipulate an island's economy, government and each other to be crowned the Champion of Capitalism and keep their store open.

Some of the features:

• Tabletop feel, digital implementation - experience the strategy of a boardgame in the power of a video game!
• Price makers, not price takers - sell by setting competitive prices and letting the customers decide how much they'll buy!
• Simultaneous turns - no waiting while players cycle through a turn order!
• Take-that! mechanics - directly and indirectly trip up opponents while pushing your own store's profit margins forward!
• Symmetrical start, randomised state - win matches through your superior strategy, not your luck!
• Super-cool, unannounced singleplayer features - dream about what these could be until they're announced closer to release (2017)!

Full details can be found here: http://www.goldensyrupgames.com/tropical-manipulation

It's about 50% complete. The announcement video I made a few weeks ago shows most of the progress up until now:





I'll be blogging the rest below!








If you like this, supporting me by following me on Twitter or Facebook would be massively appreciated.

[GSGBen]

UI

Recently I've been working on replacing some of the placeholder UI styles with curved edges and button styles.

Here's an example of how it started off, last year. Everything was just a different shade of crap:

And here's how it was in the announcement video. A nice 3-way gradient was created to be used in all the theming, and the general design changed to 'fun, colourful, contrasted against transparent black'. These were still using the stock UE4 buttons:

Recently I had another UI element that was looking too sharp, so I added curved edges and was blown away by how much nicer it made everything to look at (which is easy to test when you're developing and iterating for hours at a time). I then extended the curved edges to every border and fell in love with it. I added this to the buttons to, and gave them an embedded-looking border to stop them seeming like they're just sitting on top of the UI:

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Expansions

Today I polished up the animation that plays when a new expansion is built:








Each player gets three potential expansions they can build behind their store, with each row opening in a different round. Each expansion has a default type of tourist it caters to, but the other types can be built on them for a higher cost. Tourists spend the same amount they spent at stores at expansions afterwards. Players share in this (regardless of whose store the tourists went to first) based on (player expansions of type / total expansions of type).

This means that players picking tourist types to sell to will have to take into account which expansions their opponents might build.

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Loading Screen Messages

I've added support for funny loading screen messages (in the vein of The Sims/Sim City) while remote players load the session:







The current ones are:

• Corrupting the government
• Heating the volcano
• Mixing mojitos
• Selling timeshares
• Indoctrinating employees
• Reticulating splines
• Applying humidity
• Fudging numbers
• Pre-selecting employee of the month

If you can think of a funny entry with a tropical or corrupt-business theme, post it below and I'll add it to the game.

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Created this fish monster by accident today

[GSGBen]

Global Chat

I first saw this idea used in TableTop Simulator, and it's fantastic.

If you're an indie multiplayer game, the indie problem of "where's my audience" is increased immensely - part of the fun of your game is now tied to the player count. This means that you need to bring players together as much as possible, and for an indie game this is best achieved through in-game global chat - as soon as you fire up the game you've got a community to jump in with.

My global chat is backed by IRC, connecting to an irc.geekshed.net channel (#tropicalmanipulation). It's based off these functions, which originally used IRC to connect to twitch: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?102506-Connecting-to-Twitch-IRC

So if you're adding multiplayer to your game, I highly recommend adding in global chat along with it!

[GSGBen]

Prettier Pie Chart

The pie chart used in the game is key for players because it explains the price mechanics in an easily understandable way. Today I took it from placeholder to pretty:

Old


New

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Dancing?

Dancing? Dancing!