Ah this all looks very good. I am very sorry about the tiring amounts of research. I hope it gets better. I knew a lot of people in APUSH, AP Human Geography, and AP Government who bought grey market Adderall for that exact reason. If these blue-blooded resumen who go to the modern equivalent of the Arisaka Academy, couldn’t do it without buying the world’s second most boring drug, then you are quite possibly the greatest researcher of all time.
Don’t worry about them. They turned out fine. Edmond police will let you off with a warning for just about anything. Whether it’s littering, running a red light, vandalism, murder, or attempting to blow up the world. Unless you go half an inch towards OKC. Those people put the Oblivion guards to shame. They spend all day every day gunning people down for jay walking.
One time, my Uncle Jeff stole a free balloon in OKC. He got off easy and was only shot 37 times.
In all seriousness, I appreciate the amount of effort you put into this. Good job.
Little Off topic. but I love the fact that we can address the southern border with mexico, by signing a executive order to address the southern border by building a border wall. this was definitely inspired by ol boy trump wasn’t it. This will certainly not come back to bite us in the ass. (it will) but anyway we could pretend to be trump in the game for pretty obvious reasons. Oh just quick question by signing the executive order to ban middle eastern people from traveling to the Usa for 120 days how will this affect the middle east trip.
Hey all and happy October! To my Patrons: an extra special hello just for you.
A quick side-note, I wanted to apologize for not being able to get out an update last week. My grandmother unfortunately had a fall and I took the train back home to spend the weekend with her. She’s alright now, but obviously I wasn’t able to get much writing done, or post an update. With that being said, I do have some lovely progress that I’ve been able to make this weekend!
With that, I am once again considering adjusting these updates to permanently switch to every-other week, though I’m not entirely decided one way or another yet. Now, onto the fun part!
The Updates
I have finally started writing out the part of the Middle Eastern visit in Israel. This has taken a lot of research and planning, but I’ve actually gotten around to writing it now which is quite exciting.
With that, you’ll be able to remain neutral on the issue, or to shift support of the U.S. closer to Israel or Palestine (both with their own benefits and drawbacks of course)
I’ve also started to work on a rough outline for the last state visit I need to write (Asia), and hopefully writing that will require less research than this one!
Finally, I’m also excited to be going back into the earlier chapters and will be adding a lot more to the prologue. Specifically, there’ll be a lot more work put into defining your relationship with your spouse and developing your own character more. Still, I’m not sure when this will get written considering how much work I have left on just Chapter 3!
Upcoming Demo Updates
Last thing: I’m still hopeful that I’ll be able to update the demo across the board soon! I’ll be releasing the portion of your trip to the Middle East in full to my Patrons within a few weeks (I’d like to finish writing it and have my beta testers look over it first), and am still planning on a sale for my Patreon next month.
I am also hoping to release an updated version of the demo to everyone soon. It’s been so long since the last public demo update that what’s publicly available is almost unrecognizable! I obviously won’t be releasing the whole story, but I do hope to release the updated Prologue through the end of Chapter 2 to the public since quite a bit has changed and I’d love the feedback.
I’m amazed at how much research and dedication you put into the writing, and appreciate the work you do trying to bring nuance into the story.
As with all artistic endeavors, especially a political one, there might be a chance for some bias to appear accidentally. Regardless, it’s appreciated that you try to be as accurate and meticulous as possible, which removes as most chances as possible for inaccuracies and accidental bias to appear in the game.
Keep up the good work, and will love to see the next Writer’s diary.
@RFKramer So question, if the mc signed the executive order to ban middle eastern people from traveling to the United States for 120 days. how will this affect the middle east trip
Do you know what would be pretty hilarious? A cheat menu in a presidential sim. I would like to be a super dictator LOL, but other than that, this is a great game. Keep up the good work.
I wanted to thank everyone who sent me messages checking in – I am doing alright and have been working on writing more, I just haven’t had the time to write one of these updates due to some personal issues.
The Updates
Thank the heavens, the trip to the Middle East is written! Writing this portion of the story took a lot out of me, and it’s great to be able to keep chipping away at the monster that is Chapter III.
As a fun bit of info for scale: Chapter III so far (about 75% done I’d estimate) is already at 61k words. The entirety of Chapter II was 64k words.
While I am not 100% happy with where the trip to the Middle East stands, the entire story and main plot points are all written, and I fully plan on going back and adding in more smaller scenes and details once I feel less fatigued from it haha.
With that done, I’m now moving on to the final of the four choices, the trip to Asia (Japan, South Korea, and China). I imagine this will also take me quite some time, but it’s certainly a morale boost that it’s the last one.
The remainder of Chapter 3, after you return from your trip, will be a Cabinet meeting detailing updates of your Executive Orders and legislation signed, finally ending with you delivering a speech before the UN General Assembly. I did have a lot more scenes planned, but they’re going to be pushed to the next chapter in order to keep all of them around the same length.
Upcoming Demo Updates
I wrote a bit about this in my last update but wanted to restate a lot of it as a reminder as well as provide some more information.
For Patrons, your demo is updated now! You now have access to the full trip to the Middle East, and I hope you enjoy it! It’ll be under an additional post titled “The People’s House | October Edition”, it should be the one posted right before this.
For all of my other lovely supporters, two exciting pieces of news:
I am still planning on an Election Month (November) Sale for my Patreon. I’ll be lowering the tier prices by around 30% on October 31st (that way existing Patrons also get the sale price for renewing)
I’m hoping to release a big chunk of the Patreon version of the story to the public by December at the latest. I’m planning on releasing it as soon as I go back to spruce up the Prologue a bit more, but a big public update will be coming out late November to early December if I don’t get around to it earlier.
Once again, I apologize for the delay in updates, but I hope this makes up for it!
Since my mc is already committed to stirring the alphabet soup this seems like another decent and relatively low cost potential justice reform that could have major impact down the line and is sellable under progressive conservatism as fair justice and defense of individual liberties.
Unfortunately, I realized late last night that Patreon does not allow for any sort of sales or changes to tier prices without deleting and creating new tiers. So, unfortunately, I was not able to create a sale for the month of November as I had originally planned.
With that being said, I am still hoping to do something special for the month of November, and am open to any and all suggestions. A special mini-story (no more than 10k words), a non-interactive story about one of the characters in TPH for more of their background, or really anything else you can think of.
Once again, I truly apologize, but Patreon just doesn’t allow this as a feature. I’ll be releasing my next Writer’s Diary this weekend, and I’m excited to share with you a lot of the great progress that has been made into the last potential trip abroad, to Japan, South Korea, and China.
Thanks again for all the support, and I hope to be able to bring something exciting in place of a sale,
Thanksgiving, which is an American holiday I never understood personally, does have the traditional Turkey pardon, which could make for a nice scene with the spouse and kids afterwards, particularly for those mc’s who opted for younger kids…mine has two teenage boys, who unless they are vegan or vegetarian would probably rather have eaten the Turkey than see it pardoned considering the appetites of healthy teenage boys.
Which brings me to the pardon in general, my mc would probably limit his use of that power to the absolute minimum, so if his can be the 21st century administration with the fewest presidential pardons he’d probably consider that a success.
Definitely planning on having a good ol’ Turkey pardon, not sure what chapter it’ll get put in but it will be included at some point.
I will definitely get back to this and double-check tonight. The public demo hasn’t been updated in quite some time, so it’s possible that this has been fixed and just not updated. Either way, I’ll take a look, thanks for pointing it out.
Glad to hear you’ve enjoyed it so far! This was definitely a big goal of mine so I’m glad the more personal elements are showing through even in the first portion of the story.
This might be more of a sequel game proposal than a November one, but what about a fantasy Cold War game in a world where magic and science coexist? (There are nuclear weapons and wizards.)
I do have a post on my Patreon about some of my future ideas, but none so far have been set during the Cold War or have many fantasy elements.
Truthfully, while I could see myself writing more historical fiction, I just don’t know if I’d be able to pull off a fantasy story. There are a ton of incredible CoG authors and writers that are excellent at writing about magic and wizards, but I just don’t know that my writing skill set matches that sort of writing.
While I do love reading fantasy stories, I definitely prefer writing more “real” ones. It is possible I do write a more futuristic story next (poli-sci-fi as I now like to call it), set far in the future where there’s a unified Earth government and far different political challenges than today, but that certainly isn’t fantasy. I’ll definitely keep an open mind, but I doubt I’d be able to write a convincing story that meshes history and elements of fantasy.
I’m not sure how I would be able to create a more realistic Tropico-esque game that isn’t what I’m currently writing in TPH. I know that Tropico has elements to become far more authoritarian, which is something I’d like to include in my next game, but I feel that there wouldn’t be much difference between the two aside from the setting.
As for this, I feel like I touched upon it in my last post. There are already so many excellent fantasy authors. I like writing more grounded stories because I feel that’s what I’m best able to write and because I feel like there are far less stories that are not fantasy.
I’m not entirely sure of what you might mean by some elements of fantasy, but I don’t plan on writing any stories (at least any time soon) that include elements of magic or the supernatural (vampires, werewolves, etc.)
