Previously...1 - After The Beta2 - Stuff That Was Cut3 - One More Thing That Was Cut
Stuff That Was Added at the Last SecondSometimes when you cut something, a big hole is left behind. Or, after bringing a bunch of different elements together near the end of development you run into stubborn problems you couldn't foresee and that you can't cut your way out of. I hit a few of these. I tried my best to avoid adding things near the end but it still happened. (A lot apparently, this is a long postmortem entry.)
Reason for Denial StampI consider this one of the better late additions. During the beta, a common question would come up: "Do I even need to interrogate a discrepancy?" The answer for the beta is "No." For a long time, the answer for the full game was also "No." There was a similar issue with detention, where it was never required and had no concrete benefit in the beta. I changed that by adding Calensk and giving you an incentive to detain. The interrogations were harder to solve. Very late in the development, I decided that I needed a way to outright
require the player to interrogate. That's nice but how?
Let me take you back to an early alpha:
Early alpha denial gatingThat's a really old version (Check the bell and computer screen, also dithering), but it had a cool feature. You couldn't deny people until you found something wrong. It was a great way to gate your progress but ultimately felt
too gamey so I took it out. Now I needed it back, only gooder.
Something that people (including me) said about the game was that "stamping is fun". I had a general desire to add another stamp somewhere and this ended up being the perfect place. I came up with the REASON FOR DENIAL stamp that appears only after you find and interrogate a discrepancy. If you want to deny somebody, you need a reason. Some nice things:
- It can be introduced midway through the game.
- It changes how certain players play (those that never interrogate before denying).
- It fits in with a nice story element (journalist complaints).
- It lets players stamp more.
- It adds more procedural rigamarole.
- It looks bitchin.
It even has a circuity-look to justify how it can be enabled only after interrogation.
Because of circuits.Additional Rulebook PagesOne of my mantras for the design in Papers Please was "keep it vague". That goes for both the story elements and the gameplay mechanics. I wanted the player to be overwhelmed at first and to have to feel their way through the interface and ruleset. Unfortunately, a common complaint from the beta was that things were too hard to figure out and weren't explained well. I really liked the idea of "winning" a labor lottery and being thrown into a job with no training though, so I was hesitant to fix this. Eventually, in the last few weeks before shipping, I decided to add a ton of pages to the rulebook to centralize what was previously a slew of scattered information.
Detailed info on the Access Permit and its seals added to the rulebookPreviously, new mechanics were introduced in special bulletin pages. To help the player out, I was keeping these instructional pages in the bulletin for a few days after they first appeared. Things started piling up though and the bulletin got pretty bloated as a result. The proper long-term place for this stuff is in the rule book.
Bulletin and rulebook version of the confiscation instructionsImportant information is still introduced in the bulletin but it also gets a place in the rulebook and disappears from the bulletin on the next day. Doing it this way unified enough instructional material that I could actually be
more vague in other areas. A lot of work near the end of the project but worth it.
31st DayMe, right after the beta: "The game will be 30 days." Later, I put in a supervisor encounter (Dimitri) every ten days and it was settled: the game would end on the 30th day after the last talk with your supervisor. Perfect.
When it came to actually lay out the story though, it was obvious that not everything would fit in 30 days. The biggest problem was too many events near the end game that required exclusivity.
In particular, the final story pressure deals with illegally confiscating Obristan passports for your own family. Due to other events, the earliest I could introduce this pressure was on day 29. If the game is 30 days, that only gives you 2 days to get 5 passports; not enough.
One option was to cut more stuff to make it fit. But then I'd be removing completely finished encounters or events just to get a nice round number of days. Dumb reason so I extended everything by one day and the endgame events got just enough space to spread out well.
Not Completely Incompetent GuardsThis is one of those things that took a rare moment of clarity to even notice. The guards in Arstotzka can't aim for shit. They missed every single time throughout the entire game, 8 attacks in all. This actually worked well with my desire to make the player responsible for stopping these attacks on their own with the sniper rifle. But really it makes no sense. These guys can't be that bad.
Honestly I didn't even consider this until coming back to tweak a terrorist attack after working on something else for a while. One of the benefits of doing code, design, art, music, and sound for a game is you often get a fresh look at old work. After noticing it, I quickly modified a few of the attacks to actually end with a guard stopping the terrorist(s). This was a case where I had to put game mechanics in the back seat just to keep the overall logic reasonable.
All that training, all those bulletsLots of EndingsOnce the image+text style from the intro was recycled for the endings I had a good system for adding endings easily. This had a bigger effect than I expected. Now it made more sense production-wise to allow the player to do more things with more consequences. Instead of carrying player decisions through the entire game I could terminate things early with an ending. Or decisions that did carry through could have their own unique variation of a later ending. It sounds like a cheap trick but honestly the alternative was to not have these decision points at all.
I also felt like the endings didn't need a huge payoff. At least, not one that I could produce. Like most other things in the game, they're succinct and a little vague.
One thing that I think made these simplistic ending sequences more satisfying was the added music. Most of the gameplay takes place in near silence. There's only one song that plays during the title and night screens. By having two more songs just for the ending sequences the tone changes enough that it feels like more of a big deal than it objectively is.
Should be out soon.
TestingComing soon...
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