Warm greetings to all of you! We had an amazing launch and post-launch period during December with an outpouring of support from all of our players. The Torpor Games team is ecstatic. Our dreams have pretty much come true. Let’s talk about what we have accomplished and where we are headed from here.

As of the time of writing this post we have reached 900 reviews on Steam! Furthermore, we landed in the top 20 releases of December 2020, a massive achievement for our young studio. It was also a great honour to have been reviewed by sites like Screenrant (4 out of 5), Softpedia (85 out of 100), Gaming Trend (85 out of 100) and praised by sites like Rock Paper Shotgun, The Escapist, and even the German Public Radio for an entire four minutes!

Also many thanks to the Templin Institute for awarding us best game!

Our team closely monitored and supported the launch. The efforts were focused on three aspects: analysing the stability and assessing the bugs, applying fixes and improvements to make sure most, if not all players have a smooth experience, and supporting the marketing campaign to reach as many people who could enjoy a niche game like Suzerain.

In a period of 21 days, we have pushed five hotfixes and one minor content patch to make sure the game was sitting on a strong foundation. Our team read all of the feedback and this helped greatly to help us identify issues and fact check the issues. The team also found some time to rest over December to shed off the weight of the intense pre-launch period.

We can’t thank the players who posted detailed bug reports with save games on Discord enough. Currently, we are collecting finished game saves on our Discord server and we would appreciate it if you would post your game saves so we can improve our balancing for the next patch!

Let's talk about the near future. We have finished design and most of the planning around the 1.1 content patch internally named "Rayne Train." This patch will be divided into three core elements: features, new content, bug fixes. Some of the feedback we received noted the lack of a summary at the end of the game which we decided to address.

Here is a screenshot showing a part of the summary screen. The political compass which is based on the background political leaning system in Suzerain. Please bear in mind this is only a concept and is not final. We are also pushing for another feature that is more focused on a visual addition. We don’t commit to anything before it makes it past the testing phase which these haven’t yet entered. Our studio always sticks by the underpromise and overdeliver approach.

There are some other areas we want to address and add new content to the game in different ways to improve the experience. Our main focus will be on the election and our secondary focus will on some of the endings that need further design reinforcements. At the same time we want to address the lower priority bugs such as database errors, typos and unintended balancing problems.

As one can imagine this patch will take some time and we will only commit to a release date and the full content list once we have tested our candidate and are happy with the results. Many thanks to all of you out there who have supported us with a purchase, dropped a review, shared the game around the internet, and even expanded the lore.

A Morgna her coren!

See you next time in the January broadcast!

The votes have been counted and Anton Rayne has been elected president! His term will begin on December 4th. Watch our release announcement trailer here:

The Maroon Palace awaits.

The development journey of Suzerain that began many years ago is coming to an end. We are very excited to share what we have worked on for so long. It is an emotional journey for the team who have put their heart and soul to this and managed to get it across the finish line.

A special thanks to Fellow Traveller and everyone who has supported us every step of the way. Let’s talk about what we have accomplished in October. This month saw the game near scene completion all the way up to Turn 11 (the last game turn) with one of the ending scenes and the different epilogues being actively worked on moving into November. Our design implementations are complete. Special shoutout to Tung who has led the effort and brought it to the finish line.

Chief Justice Orso Hawker is preparing the inauguration ceremony for Anton Rayne.

A final effort is being made on finishing the news, reports and some misc narrative support content for the later turns. This helps ensure the player experience has the narrative feedback on their choices that make the game feel alive. This work will end soon, marking the game fully content complete!

Meanwhile, we have also begun testing the game with voluntary testers to make sure the most critical bugs are taken care of for release. Our special thanks to the more than dozen people who dedicated their time to help us find issues so we can increase the quality of the game at launch. Our development team has already made nearly a hundred fixes and many more improvements are still to come.

Our Original Soundtrack Composed by James Spence has also made its way to Steam!

So what is next in November? More testing, more bug fixes and the final implementations of narrative support. There will also be the final balancing passes after collecting data from the testing runs. We are ensuring that all the numbers that are being calculated in the background add up to meaningful content changes. The last ticket item will be the Steam achievements design and supporting our marketing campaign for the release.

Want to see the latest version of the game? We are going to be a part of the upcoming Escapist Indie Games Showcase! There will be a livestream on November 12th at 8pm CET / 11am PT, where you can directly ask questions to the developers. You'll be able to watch the livestream on their Twitch or YouTube channel.

The Suzerain demo will also be available throughout the festival so if you never had a chance to check it out this will be a perfect time to do so. This is our big moment and if Suzerain appeals to you in any shape or form we would love it if you shared the game with your friends and wishlist it on Steam.

See you next time at the launch of the game! The Maroon Palace is waiting for you on December 4th.

See you next time in the December broadcast!

September has been full of exciting developments for Suzerain and the team at Torpor Games! We attended the PAX Online event and want to send our warmest greetings to all the new citizens who joined our cause after checking out the demo!

As you can see, we've also changed the name of our developer diaries from "Monthly Report" to "Broadcasts" to make them sound a little more newsworthy.

Torpor Games is growing further. We hired Tung, our first intern as a company!
With a computer science background and a currently pursued study of game design, he makes the perfect addition to the team. Tung is tackling internal QA and is moving onto supporting important tasks like the final design implementations for release.

We also delivered an internal milestone build and finished the scene setup for the most complex part of the late game. This means that the content setup is locked for eighty percent of the game. For that part only minor changes can be made within scenes, decisions, bills and other narrative support content.

The team is full force making progress on the last bits and pieces. Many hours were spent on testing to solve the outlying issues regarding the triggers. Since Suzerain has become such a dynamic game, testing has proven to be an important factor to deliver a functional game. We can’t have any disconnected branches or missing links since these are hard blockers for players.

Moving forward into October we are finalising many facets of game development. Among these are the design and content implementation of endings, filling missing sub-branches of content that would be critical from a narrative standpoint and making the final passes on the codex, news, reports etc. Endings are what make games special and memorable, so we are working through a massive library of choices to make sure every type of player is satisfied with their ending.

Our Election Campaign has begun on social media and Steam! We will take new and old citizens alike on a lore journey, to get you familiar with characters, settings and newspaper biases ahead of launch. Keep an eye out for the upcoming posts and spread the word about the extensive universe of Suzerain that becomes better and better with your feedback.

Next up we are heading to the Steam Autumn Festival! There will be a livestream on Friday the 9 October at 18:00 CET where you can directly ask questions to the developers on Steam. The Suzerain demo will also be available throughout the festival so if you never had a chance to check it out this will be a perfect time to do so!

See you next time in the October broadcast!

“Laceriten, Ecciniten, Bretreniten - Liberty, equality, fraternity.”

The month of Emperor Augustus is behind us and it is a good time to take a look at the tasks we accomplished and the road ahead. This report will include a few teasers towards the middle so if you don’t want to know anything about the late game please don’t read further.

A new writer joined us! Rachel has joined the team to help with writing, editing, and finalising the personal storyline. She is a very skilled writer who has already improved a dozen scenes and the overall narrative design of our two exciting story flows.

Our narrative review continues and we are tackling societal elements that were lacking consistency and prevalence throughout the game. The world of Suzerain is different and old, and we needed to make this obvious to the player in order to achieve full immersion. Moreover, some of the gaps between decisions and scenes are being slowly mended to increase the interconnectedness of the story elements in the game.

Guess what these flags represent and respond in our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/vMucF4c

The conclusion of the main political storyline is near thanks to Ilke’s design efforts and we are taking a final look at the late game decrees, the media influence and police actions. Other key choices are also considered before we take a step towards the finalised endings as they are connected with a portion of these actions. We have also finalised the design of the decrees panel and implemented the functionality. You can find an older mockup of it below.

[CONCEPT - Contents Subject to Change]

The Oligarchs storyline ended along with the range economic expression of planned, mixed and market economy doctrines with additional economic choices being near to completion. Ozgun has excelled in executing the final storyline. Key characters like Walter Tusk and Marcel Koronti are as expected playing a big role.

We have added a key choice of either nationalizing, privatising or not changing the big four corporations in the story with a bespoke UI. In the interface the player can further determine the percentage of ownership being bought or sold by the state. There are also a set of choices depending on previous player decisions that are very exciting. Will you eat the rich or feast lavishly with them?

[CONCEPT - Contents Subject to Change]

We attended Gamescom 2020 through the Indie Arena Booth. This cool digital event drove attention towards our game and increased our presence on Steam. Next up is PAX Online from September 12 - 20! We’d love it if you share your experiences with Suzerain on social media to spread awareness and support our election campaign!

Additionally, our Producer and Managing Director Ata has been working on the next business step in the evolution of Torpor Games. We will make a press release on the exciting subject when the time comes!