Comments for Clout: The Game

Thanks for the feedback and support! Ganking and griefing are not legitimate gameplay options and I don't know why other games allow them when they're very easy to prevent in a programmatic way.

Character traits can equal out to zero points just fine in many different combinations. You cannot choose EVERY trait, which is not a problem or a bug. That's what the reset traits button is for.

Thanks for the feedback and support! Passing contributions pay out at the end of the day. Says so in a couple places, including the top of the bill list. But everyone misses it and asks this question anyway.

Just the removal of that NPC from the game. The point is strategic use to remove figures that impede your party, and facilitate installation of NPCs more aligned with your cause in positions of power. Currently VIPs don't affect the game, but this will be changing very soon. I just wanted to make sure you could combat them first via the assassinations.

It's kind of a long explanation. Choosing to run a mission will take you to a screen that tells you more about it and allows you to cancel out. I'd recommend not using the new missions for a couple days while I test them more. They're technically accessible, but not truly released as a feature yet.

Thanks for the feedback and support!

yeeeeah... I've been meaning to change that for a while. I need to make the csp indicator a bit more vague first on the look screen.

No piece of equipment at a similar cost and the same tier/slot is strictly better than any other. This is by design. In fact, I believe those two items are identical/near identical in stats and are only different to allow for a male/female style of dress.

You can't see your own exact constituent support, but the status screen and subterfuge screen give you indicators that should be more than enough to get a good idea of your level of constituent support. It's intentional that you don't see the number.

Every scandalous action you take is logged by the game and can later be uncovered by player-run investigations. Other than that, there is no drawback aside from the monetary cost.

VIP assassinations have no special conditions like a normal assassination, as they target an NPC. Success = death of the target.

The scandals from these items are incredibly minor compared to other scandals in the game, and the purpose is more to use them to drown out worse scandals than to actually cause problems for characters that incur them.

What? Games can't be fun unless they're less than 2 hours long and you never have to come back and play them again. Everyone knows that! LordBucket hath shown us the light!

Thanks for the feedback and support! I'm sure your constituents respect your dedication.

Thanks for the feedback! I never added a specific way to private message in-game due to the fact that it always runs within either Kongregate or Facebook, both of which have their own messaging functionality. However, the biggest drawback of this is that now that the game is multiplatform... Kongregate/Facebook users have little to no way to coordinate interactions. As a result, I will be adding a way to make people your associate in game so you can crony them. Making someone your associate will require approval, and can be revoked. You will only be able to privately contact your associates. This should help significantly reduce unwanted tell spam. I will be implementing this most likely after I finish the new missions and make a tweak to safe deposit boxes.

I probably will add one of these eventually. Originally I didn't include one because I was trying to avoid javascript entirely. This eventually became impossible, and then pointless once ported to Kong. Now it's simply a low priority. However, I have been getting to more and more low priority things lately as I run out of planned features to add. Really I only have a couple more to go before I consider the game out of Beta and start working on The Lobby.

Yeah, bill passing contributions pay out at end of day when the bill actually gets applied to the nation. It says this in a couple places, but a lot of people seem to miss it. You can find more than a couple comments to this effect in the comments history already.

Chat logs only last for a day. That's how Kang views it, but I wouldn't take a couple people in chat as being indicative of the views of the entire playerbase. Also, removing that would be fairly unrealistic as Congress in real life sets its own salary.

Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately, the complexity of the game at high-level play makes it very difficult to introduce new players to all facets of the game. I've tried to lock out as little as possible at CT1 since otherwise people get upset about not being able to access things. The new players experience in general has been improved significantly over the last couple weeks and the game now retains the vast majority of players, usually only failing to interest the ones who create with names like "asdfjkli1212". Even those people sometimes ask for a name change because they didn't expect to like the game but did...haha.

This is how it was originally going to work... but I couldn't think of much of a point in doing it that way as opposed to the way it is now.

I wouldn't... the game doesn't explain everything that clearly. It's pretty complex.

stress decreases once per day at the end of the day. It does not decrease incrementally throughout the day.

Gaffing occasionally is no big deal. Also, each bill is customized with respect to every ability, so it would be infeasible to list everything out. On top of that, even if it would be possible to do so in a readable format... I don't think I would. It's intentional that you put some thought into what you're playing instead of just throwing out random abilities. If you thought about something and it still doesn't make any sense... might want to report it. Some bills probably have mistakes, especially new ones.

If you end a day with >25% stress, you definitely won't reduce to 0. That's a normal feature of the game. The 25% is also reduced by 1% per active bill you have in Congress.

I looked into your character history, and it looks like you got the daily message, meaning your stress went down. Your current stress also doesn't seem to be exceptionally high. Did you end the day with more than 25% stress? That's the most that will naturally decrease in one day.

We're getting reports that developers the world over are recanting their energy-related ways in the wake of LordBucket's prophetic vision. They just didn't realize what they all NEEDED to do until he came along. A new era of prosperity and good-will for all has come about in the days since this glorious revelation has swept the globe, and word is that he's being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now? Limited energy systems in games predate graphical MMOs. The purpose of an energy system is to balance casual players against active players and foster inter-character interaction because you can't do everything yourself. The purpose isn't to annoy you because you "have to come back". You personally may prefer games you can finish in one sitting, but many people prefer having a persistent character in a persistent world. For example: about 3600 people have created a character, while I think the grand total of 2 or 3 people had some kind of problem with the energy system as a whole like you do. So I'm pretty sure developers world-over don't "need" to stop making these games because internet user LordBucket doesn't approve.

Clout Tier 3. However, it's not implemented yet because party/team chats aren't really active enough for it to have a point. I'll put it in when it has more of a point.

lol... clearly it's a result of all the stress from the time I spend developing :P

Presently, they look pretty. Eventually, the president will veto stuff randomly in accordance with his party, and the vice-president will replace the president should the president be assassinated. The justices/legal side of stuff will play into court challenges on binary bills (not yet implemented), and the state/defense secs will have something to do with foreign relations (barely implemented). The Speaker Of The House is the only player-held office, and they will have special powers related to committees when one is finally elected (at EOM. Was planned to happen last EOM, but I think christmas screwed that plan).

Ah. I see. I could theoretically implement something like this, but I'd have to flesh out the idea a lot more first to make it all make sense. It's honestly probably not something I'll add for quite a while, as I intend to finish up a couple features with this game, move it to V1.0 and then focus my development efforts on The Lobby, a "companion game" to Clout. I will still maintain and develop Clout as necessary (since The Lobby ties into Clout, this will be frequently necessary), but there will definitely be a gap in any major development until The Lobby is well underway.

No problem. I'll try looking into that issue with IE again, but as I said for now you can just punch in your message and hit enter. That should work.

Ah... yeah. You should be able to hit enter to chat once you enter text. I believe that works in IE. I have no idea why it hides that button. Everything is specified to the pixel. Sometimes IE just does wacky stuff and I can't figure it out.

That's odd.... what browser are you using?

That is correct. Some people are unfortunately confused by this, but I couldn't think of any better way to put it. "Renewable" wouldn't really cover it due to the variety of topics the bill is intended to cover.

Stress or energy loss? No... but every bill affects the nation stats seen in the World section.

It erases the scandal from the game, which will not only prevent it from being discovered in the future, but also effectively take it away from anyone who may have already discovered it as their leads and sources dry up and whatnot.

One person playing many characters. It's a big problem for turn-based games, since it's very easy to do. There are various ways to prevent it, but most will sometimes catch legitimate players in a situation that appears to be multiboxing.

Not unless you do it via Kongregate. I have plans to add some sort of messaging feature, as well as the ability to crony people who are not your kongregate friends (or facebook friends, for the facebookers).

Thanks for the feedback and support! I always find it kind of lame when it just says "come back at level 2" or whatever for no apparent reason in a game... so I tried to add some flavor to it in order to have it make a bit more sense.

Humans are notoriously bad for the environment. Also, all of the win condition bills are quite extreme (Abolish All Laws and Declare Nuclear War On Russia are two other examples)

haha... yeah, waaaaay too many European countries to list them all out. That was my quick solution.

I'm not sure what you mean? If you've found that your stress increased unexpectedly, there was some kind of hacking done early this morning that made a couple people get hit with phantom missions. I've fixed the exploit, shored up protections against such things in general, and have been restoring those affected. So if your stress is weirdly high for some reason, let me know and I'll fix it.

Not exactly. You only lose CSP for campaign contributions if you take one outside party lines. In that case it's sort of like an "instant scandal". But if you take contributions to introduce stuff you'd support anyway, nobody bats an eye.

Because you were not hit by a mission. You experienced a bug. It's now fixed.

Thugs did not put you at negative health. They cannot do that. A bug did.

Whoops. I modified a script to change how missions finished and it had a typo. I fixed it, and everyone has been given an energy restore.

You can't die from thugs. Their max damage is too low to do anything but put you in a hospital. There are also a variety of auto protection measures in place for violent missions. Once you get hit by one, you get a level of police protection depending on the type (assassinations garner more protection than thugs). Being in the hospital also confers significantly increased difficulty to missions run against you (even if they were prepared prior to your hospitalization/etc). I may still add hireable protection of some sort, but I haven't worked out how that should work yet. Realistically it's pretty hard to die from skullduggery. It's much more likely to temporarily remove you from the game with lots of stress/a coma.