Incumbent parties usually do lose seats in the midterms. There are various reasons I could go into for it, but it would take me like an hour to write it all down and it’d be TL;DR for most normal people. Only three times since 1938 has the President made gains (FDR in 38, Clinton in 98, and Bush in 02). Wave elections though have been rarer. 1994, 2010, and 2018 have been the three most recent “waves”. 2006 just missed out on being called one.
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2006 was 100% a wave, more so than 2018.
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Agree,2006 is definitely a wave… it’s the wave that swept the democrats back to the house and the Senate after 10 years out in the wilderness
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Writer’s Diary #31
July 23rd, 2023
Back-to-back on-time Writer’s Diaries! Isn’t that lovely? This has been my first full week on my new writing schedule and I have to say it’s been going well! I’ve transitioned from a general “write when I can” schedule to one where I actually block out time in my schedule just to write and post these updates.
I was originally hesitant to do so, as I didn’t want writing to feel like a job, but after about a week and a half of setting aside an hour or hour and a half for a few days out of the week, I’m really liking this new system.
The Updates
- More progress on Chapter 4! I’ve finished both the Santorini and Denver legs of the trip, and am not moving on to writing the joint rally event for a congressional candidate of your party
- I can’t give too many details to avoid spoiling it, but there are a few quite adorable family scenes of the Santorini trip that I’m happy to have included
- I’ve also updated the Patreon demo to include the full portions of each of the trips so that the private version of the demo ends on less of an abrupt note
Updated Word Count: 217,000
Patreon Link: RFKramer is creating The People’s House | Patreon
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When are you planning on releasing the next public update
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Likely a month or two, though it’s hard to say.
The public demo, as I currently have it planned, will be one chapter behind the Patreon demo. So, for example, once I finish Chapter 4, the public demo will have everything up to Chapter 3 included.
Unfortunately, I can’t give a full timeline as I’m unsure how long it will take me to finish Chapter 4, but my best guess is a month or two.
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Writer’s Diary #32
August 6th, 2023
Look at me keeping on time with my updates! My new writing schedule has been going really well, and I’m happy to say that I’ve written over 14,000 additional words since my last update. I’m incredibly happy that I’ve been able to keep up with my new writing schedule, and with the progress I’ve made into Chapter 4 so far!
The Updates
- The Santorini/Denver trips have been finished and polished a bit more; I’ve fixed a few issues with stats and added in a few scenes
- I’ve also added in a scene with the person who it’s possible to have an affair with after the scandal which breaks at the beginning of Chapter 4 occurs
- Another scene between you and the Congressional leadership team of your party takes place, posing you with the difficult choice of how much (if anything) to invest in the midterm elections in order to help your own party out
- Finally, I’ve also written in the joint-rally scene that I mentioned in my last update – you will be able to decide between a progressive, a conservative, or a moderate politician from your party as a way of indicating where you believe the future of your party is headed
- In all, Chapter 4 now stands at just under 50,000 words and I’d estimate it’s a little over 60% completed!
Over the next few weeks, I will be going through a fairly busy moving period between moving out of my current apartment and into a new one, but I’ll still be aiming to keep up with my writing schedule nonetheless. Ideally, by my next Writer’s Diary I’ll have completed the midterm election scene! Still, I don’t want to overpromise anything as this small scene will require a lot of research and a lot of variants to accommodate different parties and results.
Regardless, I’m super happy with where progress stands, and look forward to writing out the remainder of this chapter!
Updated Word Count: 232,000
Patreon Link: RFKramer is creating The People’s House | Patreon
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Why is the game crashing after chapter 2??
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It’s the end of the public demo
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Oh, this looks interesting. I’m a sucker for management games like these. Will watch with much interest.
(apologies if this has been discussed already. I searched “bribe” and didn’t see anything while skimming, but it’s possible that choiceofgames forums covered up the relevant bits due to its design)
Will we be able to negotiate with the bribers about their bribery? Asking for more money’s the obvious bit, but I was wondering if it would be possible to negotiate down, to reduce the chances of getting caught.
Also, it’s pretty funny to deny the bribe monies, and then do the bribe anyways. It’s more realistic that the bribers are going “lol idiot you should have taken my money since you did what i want you to do anyways.” but I like to think they’re going ??? while President Ivan NotaKGBspy is all “My motivations are beyond your comprehension”
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I think I found a minor bug. When running as a Republican politician with a Democratic VP(Hill to be exact), selecting the progressive education plan reduces my VP’s approval, while the congressive education plan increases it. I think it should be the other way around. The party approval rates rise and fall logically though.
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this is good, i love being politician lol
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Hi friends,
I just wanted to send a quick message to let you know that, while I have gone radio silent for the past week or two, TPH is still very much so a priority of mine. The past week and a half I’ve been undergoing a move from one apartment to the next all while starting a new job.
Given all of that, I haven’t had time to do much writing, but you can expect more updates starting early September again (ideally by this weekend).
Thank you for your support and understanding,
-R.F.
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My best wishes for you.
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Glad to hear it, and I know that I said I would help before abandoning the forums, but to make a long story short I found out that while I was away that something bad happened might have happened to @YHGS and I’m being vague on purpose because this is an off topic issue.
Then I didn’t want to post this because I didn’t want to go back to that mindset, then I went to a place without internet for a few months, and then I put it off when I got back because things were crazy. Still, I’m glad to be back, and will definitely give the updates you posted a look. Though at this point I’m not sure how much the input will be used, but that is not your fault. Glad to see it’s still up and running better than the actual government.
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Writer’s Diary #33
September 9th, 2023
Hello Friends! I apologize I wasn’t able to get an update out last weekend, I unfortunately caught a nasty fever and wasn’t able to get out of bed to write. Thankfully, I’m feeling much better now and have some fun progress made.
The Updates
- In a fury of writing, I was able to crank out over 8,000 words in one sitting yesterday – this was the only opportunity I’ve had to write since my last update but I am happy to say I think I made the most of my time
- Just about all of these additions went to the midterm election scene; of which there are five possible different outcomes
- I’m also in the process of developing one of these outcomes more: slight spoiler ahead if you’d like to avoid it: There is a possibility in the midterms where the Senate results in a 50/50 split. Presumably for most run-throughs, this won’t be an issue. However, if the player happens to have both a split Senate and a Vice President of the opposite party, it’s going to create some issues. Not too much of this has been written yet (and it is a pretty rare chain of events to get to) but nonetheless it’s been incredibly exciting to start doing research to see how this may play out.
- Following midterm election night, I’ll be going back through the chapter to add in some flavor scenes and some custom dialogue that I’ve been meaning to. After that will be the swearing-in of the new Congress and selection of Congressional leadership (this will vary quite a bit depending on the results of the elections)
- Lastly, I’m hoping to give my lovely Patrons the midterm update in a week or two – I want to finish up the special sequence of scenes that I mentioned above and give time for my lovely beta testers to give it a good read-through before posting it; but current Patrons can expect the update sometime this month!
Apologies again for the inconsistent updates from me – now that I’m settled in progress should be much more frequent! At this point, I’m comfortable putting the status of Chapter 4 at about 60%-70%. And as a quick review of where the story is headed, Chapter 5 will be focused on your re-election campaign (should you decide to run again).
Also, without spoiling too much, I can say that the first possible ending to the story will be present in Chapter 4! Crazy to think that (for some unlucky readers) I’ll have the entire story written. Thank you all again for sticking with me; looking forward to the progress to come!
Updated Word Count: 240,000
Patreon Link: RFKramer is creating The People’s House | Patreon
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I don’t know if you’ve already answered this question, but do you intend to put the second term in this same story, or in another story, or haven’t you planned it or are you still thinking about whether you’re going to write it or not?
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I’m always a fan of logical early endings. If the early ending is what I think it is, I hope that we get to choose it instead of our party choosing it for us (assuming our Approval and/or Party relationship is high enough that we get the choice).
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This is a great question – and one that I don’t yet have the answer to. By the end of the next chapter, I estimate that TPH will be around 300,000 words, which would on its own already put it towards the top of Choice of Games stories in terms of word count alone. There are a few pros and cons for each:
Splitting up the two books would, to be completely honest, help me out a lot more financially. Publishing Book One (at the end of the re-election) would allow me to start getting a sense of what (if any) sort of market exists for the kind of story I’m writing. While there’s been a huge amount of support I’ve received on the forums, a fraction of CoG readers are actually on the forum. Being a published author has honestly been a huge dream of mine for quite a while, so being able to accomplish that goal a bit earlier while getting a lot of information is obviously quite tempting.
On the other hand, I did in all honestly plan on TPH being one story. Still, I think (scratch that, I know) that I underestimated how long it would take to write everything in one book. Writing it in one book would stick to my original plan for the story and it’d help me avoid learning the scary new code that’d be required to transfer variables and decisions from one game into the next.
In all, I’d truly love some feedback on this. Would you prefer one larger, higher-priced story, or for it to be split into two? One benefit of two books is obviously that I’d be able to begin editing and really improving on the first half of the story earlier. If we went down this route, we could possibly be looking at Book I of TPH being near-ready for publishing by the end of the year or early 2024.
As you can see, it’s something I’ve been quite conflicted about for some time now, and I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts or feedback on the matter!
QUICK EDIT: I wanted to include the link to the forum post that I briefly mentioned above, pretty interesting if you’d like to also take a look here!
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When it comes to book length vs financial returns, more tends to be more. The HG bestsellers tend to be several hundred thousand (even 1M+) word behemoths (the only exception is The Aether but I think it’s both the time period that it was published in, and the nature of the premise, that allowed it to be successful despite only having 64k words)–since November '17, books such as Fallen Hero 1 and 2 (2018 and 2023), later parts of ZESH, the Wayhaven books (2018, 2020, 2023), Golden Rose (2022), Breach (2019), Tin Star (which didn’t show up on the list in the post which is surprising since it first came out in '14 and clocked in at 1.4M words) have been published to smashing sales.
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