RMMV MR PRESIDENT: THE NATION BUILDING GAME

[dangerousbob]

Hey everyone!
Those of you that have played my games know that I love political satire, and now I bring you something new! Introducing Mr President, the game where you get to make your own nation! I wanted to make a game like Sim City that was more topical.
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Engine: MV
Playtime: 1 hour (with heavy replay value)
All ages
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Setup:
You get a randomly generated banana republic set in Oceania that you must take from start to finish. You will be asked a set of carefully crafted political questions that will be set onto a political scale. Actions you take will adjust this scale and this will effect how the game plays out.

Your stats are built around 3 metrics.
Population, Jobs and GDP.

You get population by building houses (population is taxed for income).
You get jobs by building commercial space.
And both together add to GDP which gets you votes.

You must win re-election and the game ends after the end of your second term.
The election cycle is 25 minutes in user time. So the full game runs about 1 hour, but you can play out and build your nation how you want it in different ways for re-play value. Do you want to build a thriving democracy? or do you want to submit yourself as an emperor and rule for life? Build it the way you want it.
You will then be given an overall rating (feel free to post it on the forums!)

You can download the game here:
FOR MAC
FOR PC


Also don't forget to check out my other games:

LAZER EYES 2: An adventure game where you play as Lazer Eyes, who had nano bots put in his brain at birth. With great powers he spends his life on the hunt for his big evil brother Blue Ray! Blue Ray has unleashed Robots and Dinosaurs onto America and only Lazer Eyes can stop him. Action Adventure RPG.

DEFECTION: Think Oregon Trail meets North Korea. You play as a box factory worker trying to escape to the DMZ with his grandma. Puzzle based RPG.

 

[dangerousbob]

*bump* no feedback? dang, tough crowd.

 

[Dymdez]

I am definitely trying this out today. Looks hilarious and fun.

 

[Leon Kennedy]

Well gave this a test run. Overall I'd give this game a B+ was pretty interesting and out of the ordinary for rpgm games. I expected this to be some sort of trump game but quickly found out I was wrong about that it's your own nation you build and stuff. Below is a quick 5 min play though just showing the beginning of the game.

 

[Freank]

hahahahah. No so "politically correct"

 

[dangerousbob]

Awesome! Thanks guys let me know what you think! Yeah I was trying something different. And of course I am welcome to feedback.

 

[Marquise*]

I love how you can build on roads and lakes

 

[dangerousbob]

I love how you can build on roads and lakes

the special building icons come up on the road. it was easier to just have an area marked off that i could have the icons "hide" on to be pulled up via scripts later.

 

[dangerousbob]

Any feedback? What did you like most about the game? What did you think it could have had added?

 

[Golden Unicorn Gaming]

Well gave this a test run. Overall I'd give this game a B+ was pretty interesting and out of the ordinary for rpgm games. I expected this to be some sort of trump game but quickly found out I was wrong about that it's your own nation you build and stuff. Below is a quick 5 min play though just showing the beginning of the game.

I loved your choices to start the playthru

 

[barnzie8]

Oh my copy of Sim city classic does not work on my laptop, will download.

 

[Jamtec01]

Hey there, I just played Mr. President and thought it was very good. It's definitely fun to play and heading in a good direction and actually made me laugh a few times. The face art is on point, I studied a couple of your characters and it reminds me of family guy/ south park/ Ren and Stimpy art and I love that stuff. Some things I would like to see added to improve the game are, 1st problem I encountered is the world bank deadline. You should give the player at a certain time to repay the world bank or they will default. Either I forgot about this while playing or wasn't aware and this became my first game over. 2nd thing to fix is the mercenary stage. If player fails the mercenary stage then its game over and all the city building is down the drain. I was building my country up very well however I failed the mercenary stage which initiated the game over and it felt extremely frustrating. OH yea by the way the music is also on point, it reminds of Sim Earth or one of those old games. Thanks man for the game and let me know if you need help with anything. I'm good for brainstorming, tips and basic art stuff. Take care.

 

[Kojagiri]

300MB is rather huge. Could you look at optimizing it to 100MB levels?

 

[dangerousbob]

Hey there, I just played Mr. President and thought it was very good. It's definitely fun to play and heading in a good direction and actually made me laugh a few times. The face art is on point, I studied a couple of your characters and it reminds me of family guy/ south park/ Ren and Stimpy art and I love that stuff. Some things I would like to see added to improve the game are, 1st problem I encountered is the world bank deadline. You should give the player at a certain time to repay the world bank or they will default. Either I forgot about this while playing or wasn't aware and this became my first game over. 2nd thing to fix is the mercenary stage. If player fails the mercenary stage then its game over and all the city building is down the drain. I was building my country up very well however I failed the mercenary stage which initiated the game over and it felt extremely frustrating. OH yea by the way the music is also on point, it reminds of Sim Earth or one of those old games. Thanks man for the game and let me know if you need help with anything. I'm good for brainstorming, tips and basic art stuff. Take care.

thank you for the nice review! i was actually going for "Extra Credits" look on the art (its a youtube history channel). there are some balancing issues that can be hard to test yourself because as the creator, you know yourself what you have to do to play the game, so sometimes it makes testing hard. out of curiosity what path did you take with your nation? did you try to make a thriving country or go the dictator route?
if i do another one i'll keep you in mind. i am always up for ideas.
i actually enjoyed doing a game that wasn't in a traditional RPG style. I may do something like that again. You know what one of my biggest challenges was? coming up with a name for the game. Im still not happy with Mr President. But I would enjoy doing a game with this style again.

 

[Jamtec01]

I chose a pathway to a thriving country. I probably over thought things as I was carefully placing down items and thought about each policy. I'm a hardcore planner in real life so these kind of games always excite me.

 

[kaukusaki]

I wonder if it's similar to shadow president/cyber judas (showing my age here lol)
*clickity*

 

[Altrana]

I didn't expect to be blown away by this, but I was! Now, it's no masterpiece, it has quite a lot of flaws, but it's something I for sure wouldn't be able to make myself. It takes a different direction than most RM games and it's pretty much not even and RPG at all! I've been playing it non stop for about 20 minutes now (not a lot of playtime but my criticism still applies) and I think I've made myself a pretty good Banana Republic. I really like the artwork and tilesets too. This game is not without problems though, here are some features I would love to be added:
1. A name for your nation. You can name the party, but not the nation. It would be cool to see that name in the top right or left corner.
2. Maybe a second page for flags. So far, it's a bit limited.
3. An opposing party or maybe the ability to, after your first president is voted down, to continue with the nation in a different party or in the same one, just with different people. If this is already implemented then shame on me, I didn't play enough to find out.
4. Events happening every so often: war, corrupt cabinet members, riots, protests, etc.

 

[dangerousbob]

I didn't expect to be blown away by this, but I was! Now, it's no masterpiece, it has quite a lot of flaws, but it's something I for sure wouldn't be able to make myself. It takes a different direction than most RM games and it's pretty much not even and RPG at all! I've been playing it non stop for about 20 minutes now (not a lot of playtime but my criticism still applies) and I think I've made myself a pretty good Banana Republic. I really like the artwork and tilesets too. This game is not without problems though, here are some features I would love to be added:
1. A name for your nation. You can name the party, but not the nation. It would be cool to see that name in the top right or left corner.
2. Maybe a second page for flags. So far, it's a bit limited.
3. An opposing party or maybe the ability to, after your first president is voted down, to continue with the nation in a different party or in the same one, just with different people. If this is already implemented then shame on me, I didn't play enough to find out.
4. Events happening every so often: war, corrupt cabinet members, riots, protests, etc.

Wow! Thank you so much for the kind review.
Ever since I finished Lazer Eyes 2, I have tried to make my games nontraditional to make them stand out from the rest here on the forums. I got the idea for this when my two roommates where arguing over the US election. I thought it would be fun to make a game where each of them could play through it and see how their decisions would pan out.
I could see the potential of the MV engine beyond just normal RPG games so this was largely a test to see what I could do. So far I have what I felt like a good mix of "life events" but agree there could be more. Originally I had planned on making the war feature a bigger part of the game, but felt I would keep it to nation building.
Has anyone gone full Dictator yet??

 

[Altrana]

Has anyone gone full Dictator yet??

thanks for giving me the idea

 

[reno385]

Ugh, this game has turned me into a xenophobe. I don't care how you run this country, just stomp those Verdes out of existence!

This was a fun and interesting game with a great tone and atmosphere. I love city-building games so this was up my alley (I was the Pool Party).

A few complaints:
-Firstly, game overs sneak up on you way too easily. On my first two tries I didn't build up my army in time and got invaded by Verde. Because income is slow in the early-mid game, if you aren't already close to building the army base by the time you get the message that Verde is building their army, it's already too late. Also, I wasn't expecting the side missions to lead to game over and so didn't save ahead of time. I suppose the option to save at any time is obvious, but since I was in the mindset of a city-building game, it hadn't occurred to me. I would definitely suggest giving the player some warning when there's gonna be potential for a game over soon.

-In the early-mid game, once I exhausted my loan but before I started generating a lot of tax, there was a lot of sitting around waiting for money to come. Maybe have another event or two at that point to boost the bank, or make the seaport a little cheaper to facilitate trade faster?

-The ideal ratio of each building type is unclear. Unless I missed it, there's no way to see your GDP, so I never knew if I was building too many or too few offices per house unless the advisor specifically told me so. It was also unclear if gov't buildings had a proximity effect, if I was building more emergency services than I needed, or how much actual pollution there was in my city (I had a gas plant, but also 4-5 parks, so I assume that's enough to offset). In the end I got rated as a 2nd world nation, so I assume my GDP must've been too low.

-I don't know if this was intended but the game actually ended halfway through my second term, shortly after I upgraded to nuclear missiles. Could be because I ran out of space to build?

-Not really a big deal, but could use some quality of life improvements. It would be nice to go straight from your island territory to your office without having to load the main city map in between, and I think a "Move" choice in the menu or something to that effect leading to a scene where you choose your location, would be smoother than using items to change areas. Also, it's a tiny bit unsightly for your save file to show the build cursor when you save on the map, I don't feel that that's necessary. Granted, that's probably more hassle than it's worth if you don't know how to edit the code, so again not a big deal.

All that said I enjoyed the game. The background tune in the beginning, the NPC face images and the pictures that appear when you click on some buildings were all very nice touches that contributed to the tongue-in-cheek satirical mood, and it was a satisfying sense of accomplishment to get to the late game and be generating all that money. The political twist was neat and I enjoyed the open-ended design, with your choices shaping what opportunities are available to you later. All in all I took 3 separate attempts at the game, and each one played out differently, so it definitely has replayability. Most importantly the core design was quite solid, it was a lot of fun and rewarding to continue building my city until there was just no room left.

I think you're on to something with this kind of game, and I'd love to see something else like this in the future.