Particracy

Particracy is an online political strategy game, to be released in 2018.

by Wouter Lievens

First Anniversary

Today it is exactly one year ago that I wrote the first line of code for the new incarnation of Particracy!

Some statistics on the size of the project as of today:

Back-end source files (Java)

 1,016
Back-end source lines (Java)

 73,357
Front-end source files (Java)

 196
Front-end source lines (Typescript)

 20,884
Front-end templates lines (HTML)

 13,511
Database tables

 168
Implemented features

 478 / 772

Those 772 features are the ones I’ve fully listed and explored right now, I anticipate to add at least another 200 by the release, so that final number of functional requirements would be around 1000. About 50 features are continuously in a state of “busy”, meaning they’re partly implemented.

 
by Wouter Lievens

Simulating a worldwide economy

An important reason work on Particracy Classic or its handful of reboots I have undertaken over the past decade has always stalled, was that my vision of the game requires simulating a worldwide economy, and that is just really hard. Not just a player-controlled economy you see in games like Civilization or Stellaris, but an actual private sector with supply, demand, exports and imports, and government taxes, investment and regulation on top of that. Sounds easy right? One person I was talking to a few years ago referred to this particular challenge as the problem that brought down the Soviet Union, which to be honest did daunt me a little. This time around however, I’ve gained a few insights and developed techniques that I’m confident will enable me to build a decent economic model to act as a foundation for the simulation aspects of the game.
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by Wouter Lievens

Technical Details

For those interested in the development side of this project, I thought I’d write up some information about how the game is being developed. If you’re not interested in the technical side of things, you could always forego this post, or just skip to the fancy colorful diagram at the bottom.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.Bill Gates

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by Wouter Lievens

Various bits of progress

This will be a small update, as I’ve been working on many different parts of the game, but haven’t finished any major arcs, so I don’t have a big write-up lying around. Hence I’ve decided to show off some random, unfinished bits of the game.
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by Wouter Lievens

Systems of Government

Particracy is all about simulating modern national and global politics, turning all things political into an interesting and challenging game. To that end, it will feature considerable diversity of systems of government, so that players will more easily identify with their (ultimately fictitious) nations and its neighbors. The real world is obviously the main source of inspiration for political structures and systems that can find their way into game features, but the balance with gameplay and technical constraints has to be maintained. In this article, you’ll get some insight into the political systems that will make it into the game.
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