NOVEMBER 2021 BROADCAST
Citizens of Sordland!
Your President is addressing you today on this special date. It is an honour to celebrate with all of you the first anniversary of the release of Suzerain. Here is a list of highlights of the last 12 months:
December 2020
- Suzerain launches on Steam, GOG and Humble on Dec 4, 2020 and is immediately widely acclaimed by fans and press.
- First reviews come in giving Suzerain a Metacritic score of 81 and is praised by prestigious press outlets such as Vice, Rock Paper Shotgun, PC Gamer and Spiegel.
- Received angel investment, as well government grant to port Suzerain.
January 2021
- End Game Summary screen and customisable Anton are added.
- Publisher initial investment recouped.
February
- Suzerain breaks its previous record and reaches 460+ concurrent players on Steam.
- Largest patch 1.1 released.
March and April
- Suzerain wins Best Expert Game at the German Game Awards.
- Torpor Games runs it's first fanart contest, picking 3 winners: @Pyrde's Sordish language website sordish.org, @Dy's illustration of the 4 Presidents and @IngsocDmnt's Wikipedia page of Sordland.
- Irene Preuss joins the Torpor Games team as Marketing Manager.
- Suzerain participates in the most important festival for narrative games LudoNarraCon.
May
- Suzerain reaches 2,000 reviews on Steam.
- Suzerain launches on the Epic Store.
June
- The Fateful Hour Bundle is launched on Steam, together with The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante and Yes, Your Grace.
- Daniel Emig joins the Torpor Games team as Programmer.
July
- Suzerain wins The People's Choice Award at the Games for Change Awards.
- Juan Franco Lagar joins the Torpor Games team as Programming and QA Intern.
- Held a successful Hearts of Iron IV Community event with the dev team.
August
- Second largest patch to date 1.1.6 is released. Patch 1.1.7 launches shortly after.
- The We Live in a Society Bundle launches on Steam, together with Death and Taxes, Orwell, Beholder, Do Not Feed the Monkeys, Not For Broadcast and Mind Scanners.
- Torpor Games team gets a dedicated office.
September
- Steam Rich Presence is enabled.
- Suzerain launches on the Nintendo Switch and receives immediate praise from the press.
- Tokyo Game Show selects Suzerain for their Indie Exhibit.
- Kamila Shirinova joins the team as Art and Programming Intern.
October
- Stijn Verstraete joins the Torpor Games team as 3D Artist.
- Achievements added to GOG.
November
- Suzerain is nominated in 3 categories in the German Developer Awards (Best Game, Best Design and Best Story), as well as in 2 categories in the GermanDevDays Indie Awards (Best Game and Best Story)
- We reach 3,000 reviews on Steam.
We want to thank everyone who has purchased the game in any platform, left reviews, shared on social media, press and partners. A special shoutout to our mods Kay, Naro, Aysar Siddiqi and PAB, our amazing community, and as well as the whole team at Fellow Traveller. None of this would have been possible without you! Danki!
To celebrate the anniversary our office is holding a contest to look for the lyrics of the new anthem of the state of Sordland. We look forward to recieve your lyrics (in English or Sordish).
Submissions will open next week Friday Dec 10th, on our Discord. We will post rules and details during the upcoming week.
We ran another AMA last week, this time on the r/NintendoSwitch subreddit. You can check it out here.
Finally, we can officially confirm that we've started setting up our merch shop and we hope to have it up in the upcoming weeks. Here are some teasers of what we're working on.
Stay healthy! We'll have some important news to share with you at the beginning of next year.
OCTOBER 2021 BROADCAST
Citizens of Sordland!
October has been very fruitful with major developments in both our projects. We have neared the completion of our implementation phase and even begun deploying on all operating systems we are targeting to release on for Project #2. However, several larger issues remain. There have been some memory challenges in one of them which we are trying to overcome as we speak. Our focus will be to finish the implementation and starting the testing phase in November.
The unannounced secret project has made massive steps forward with our first environment nearing prototype level completion. We have began sketching the second environment we are going to create. There has been major feature development progress, so we are very positive about the current status of what we achieved. Yet there are some major design hurdles and creative questions that have come up. We are trying to refine the core of what we are trying to build, and it is proving challenging. But we all are excited by these learning challenges which push our studio to improve. We are hoping to be able to reveal more before the end of the year.
We are very satisfied with the Suzerain Switch reviews, as well as with the interest from the Reddit community.
The most recent review on StackUp scores Suzerain on Switch with a 9 out 10.
We ran an AMA on the r/Nintendo subreddit at the beginning of the month, which you can still check out here. in case you missed it. We're also planning to run a second AMA on r/NintendoSwitch in the upcoming weeks. Keep an eye on our Discord, Reddit or Twitter to not miss the dates.
On other news, Torpor Games continues to grow with Stijn Verstraete joining as a 3D artist, welcome Stijn!
Originally from Belgium where he studied Digital Arts & Entertainment, and worked for the VR games studio Critical Charm for just over a year, Stijn has joined Torpor as a 3D artist, mostly focused on environment and technical art.
Stijn enjoys telling stories through art, evoking certain feelings and making people think about our world, while making things look pretty.
Join our Discord to read more about Stijn's role and interests!
We look forward to sharing more news very soon!
See you next time in November!
SEPTEMBER 2021 BROADCAST
Citizens of Sordland! September has been an intense month for us, with many developments and news.
First of all, Suzerain is OUT NOW on Nintendo Switch. Check it out here.
Pixel Magazin (German): Das politische Drama “Suzerain” ist jetzt für Nintendo Switch erhältlich
On the 8th of October at 7pm CEST / 1pm EST, we will be holding an AMA on the official r/NintendoSwitch subreddit, come join us.
Suzerain is also part of Tokyo Game Show this weekend, with a -25% discount on Steam running until the 4th of October!
In other news, a new member has joined the Torpor Games team, welcome Kamila Shirinova!
Kamila is joining as Art and Programming Intern and is currently studying Information Engineering. Before that, she studied Computer Science for 2 years and has enjoyed drawing since an early age.
Join our Discord to read more about Kamila's motivations and interests!
Earlier this week, Ata spoke to Riad Djemili, CEO of Codecks, our favourite Project Management tool, about the development of Suzerain in the Game Production Podcast series. Listen to the interview here.
During the month of September, the studio has been very active, with our production capacity nearly doubling, due to Kamila joining the team and other members increasing their commitments. It was also the first time when most of the company was together in Berlin after 3 relocations were completed. It is usual to work with international colleagues online but having most of the team together in our new office is really something else.
This week we have also released our latest patch on GOG including the achievements feature.
After the release of Suzerain on Switch, we are now working on two main production pipelines.
The Suzerain-related second project is now speeding up in the implementation phase as we are increasingly adding more UI elements. Research also has begun on some OS specific subjects. We hope to share some teasers soon!
Meanwhile our second pipeline, the unannounced secret project, is ticking along very well with strong visual concepting and experimentations being concluded. We are also experimenting in a new visual environment, which is very exciting. Narrative design has received an overall push forward with the timeline being detailed and story subjects being documented at the high-level. Additionally we have begun the first UI mockups to begin designing the user experience from a visual and information standpoint.
To support some infrastructure and database questions of a completely new caliber than before, we have reached out to some developers from other games who have helped us raise the right questions and find the right answers. This was very helpful overall and shows the importance of the strong gamedev network as we also help out other developers with their questions.
All in all September has shown a great amount of progress. Looking forward to what October has in store.
Vectern sis da!
See you next time in October!
AUGUST 2021 BROADCAST
Citizens of Sordland! There have been some important news in August, and we have also some updates coming up very soon.
Here's a little update from the team! As you have heard our Switch release is coming soon on the 23rd of September with pre-orders kicking live on the Nintendo Store on the 16th with a launch discount of -20%!
Suzerain is coming to Nintendo Switch on September 23rd!
Mark that date down and tell your Switch friends! At the start of August, we made the final deliveries for the Switch release build. We achieved a high standard of quality for a platform we have never developed something for before. It was a great learning experience that took intense development time from the arrival of the dev kits in early January 2021.
To break it down the timeline looked like this:
- Early Research and Design: December 2020 – February 2021
- Implementation Tests: March 2021 – April 2021
- Design Completes and Implementation Finishes: May 2021 – Mid June 2021
- Testing and Polish: Mid-June 2021 – Early August 2021
All in all, we are very happy that this massive challenge for the development team is mostly out of the way. As usual we are already looking forward to updating the Switch version with a small polishing patch after we receive feedback from the players. Gamedev never stops!
Here are some fresh Switch screenshots:
As some challenges end new ones begin. Design work on the secret project has advanced as several feature concepts were laid out by our main designer Ilke with strong collaboration from the team.
Torpor Games is very excited to attempt to break game design norms (succeeding is another story ) by experimenting where we can and where it makes sense within the creative vision. Most of experimentation can be thrown away so we are not getting attached but attempting something fresh and new maybe even for the games industry is always exciting. Expect a tease about this in Q4!
Throughout August we worked on two Suzerain patches: 1.1.6 and 1.1.7. Both went live with a list of content updates, balancing, lore improvements, bug fixes and polishing. The two patches both contained 2.5 months of internal changes to the game.
We are happy to have reached a very high standard of quality and stability on the Suzerain PC version. Additionally, we have added Steam Rich Presence with live status updates from the game (some including your biased choices) landing on your profile and friends list.
The long-requested GOG Achievements also made it to the testing phase and once approved by the store should go live in September.
Mid-August we have decided to reset the repository of our unannounced project to start fresh on certain parts to refactor and improve while retaining old code structure to save time on development time. It’s been a bit challenging to get the ground running but we are very excited to have caught up on momentum with our first testable delivery coming internally in the second week of September. This project is key to helping Suzerain reach new audiences and to spread the message of our studio beyond our current reach.
Something else we announced in August is the We live In A Society bundle, which includes games that portray a systematic dilemma with social and political consequences.
You can now get all of this games with a -15% discount:
-Suzerain
-Death and Taxes
-Orwell
-Beholder
-Do Not Feed the Monkeys
-Not For Broadcast
-Mind Scanners
Finally, Suzerain has been selected in the official Tokyo Games Show line-up. We're super excited to see so much interest from overseas!
That's all for now! All hands are on deck, and we are cruising forward! We thank for your patience and support.
Vectern sis da!
See you next time in September!
JULY 2021 BROADCAST
Citizens of Sordland! Another month has passed and we can share a little bit of what we've been working on.
Our team has been diligently continuing working on several different product pipelines throughout July. We made solid progress on the design of two of them. One is being led by Daniel while the other is being led by Ilke. Our new programming intern Juan’s integration to the pipeline with Daniel has been smooth and we have seen a picked-up speed which we will reap the progress benefits of already this month. In that specific one we are looking at finishing design and setup in August to be able to enter the implementation phase.
Ilke has been working hard on game design for the pre-production and figuring out how best to place certain gameplay elements with their bespoke characteristics and traits in our upcoming prototype phase. This is for the project we received funding for, so we are super excited to attempt something different.
Ozgun and Ata have concluded the development and testing of the pipeline that we had shared screenshots from in June. Our publisher has given us some solid feedback and some QA support. We also had some quality assurance and feedback support from a professional developer for a week. Urzsula Kunarska provided valuable user experience feedback and bug reports to help us achieve a good amount of polish. We are satisfied with the quality of what we developed after spending more than half a year on this product. Very excited of what the user reception will be!
We made a graph of all the different pipelines for a better overview:
We will start revealing some of these products very soon - the next announcement for Project 1 will be at the end of this month! So, sign up to our newsletters and our other socials to get our latest news.
A few weeks ago we welcomed Juan Franco Lagar as the new Programming and QA intern. Juan was born in Argentina and moved to Spain at an early age, and already as a teenager he discovered he wanted to work in games. After finishing high school he moved to Germany where he is studying Game Design at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences and is interning at Torpor as part of his studies. Welcome Juan!
On the 23rd and 24th of July we organised a community event, the Hearts of Iron IV multiplayer lobby with the Suzerain devs. We had a lot of fun with the campaign thanks to our great community.
We want to highlight that there were so many players who role-played and took the rules to heart ensuring it was a more social game with lots of negotiations and exciting developments.
All in all we call the community event a success and might consider more in the distant future. Many thanks to all players who joined and provided some good entertainment.
A special thanks to Kay for organising the event.
A few weeks ago, we did an interview with Kevin Fox from Paste Magazine last week about the development of Suzerain. You can read the full interview here.
Finally, we are extremely proud to have won the People's Choice Award at the Games for Change Awards.
This would not have been possible without all your votes and support. We thank you deeply!
Finally, we are back in Berlin from spending six weeks at the indie game dev collective Spelkollektivet in Sweden. It was an amazing experience and we can't thank all their members enough for their hospitality, love, comedy and the experiences we shared.
All hands are on deck, and we are cruising forward! We thank for your patience and support.
Vectern sis da!
See you next time in August!
JUNE 2021 BROADCAST
Citizens of Sordland! June has been a productive month for us and we've had some exciting internal developments at Torpor Games! Our design and development sprints on the product pipeline which we shared screenshots about previously has concluded, and we have entered the final polishing phase.
Cheers to Ozgun Kilit our lead programmer who is leading the charge on this front. The quality we have strived for will hopefully be appreciated when we finally reveal more information in the upcoming months!
In other news, Daniel Emig has joined the team as a Programmer. Daniel studied Game Programming for 2 years, where he gained valuable experiences in multiple student projects on cross-functional teams. Afterwards he worked one year at a motion capture company and helped them create their own first (VR) game, for multiple platforms. Welcome Daniel!
With Daniel joining us we are picking up speed on another separate product pipeline. Design work has begun, it is a bit too early to tell how the implementation will proceed since this one is just starting fresh but benefits a lot from the knowledge gained from the previous pipeline. Additional support is on the way with our new team member Juan, who will be joining Torpor in July and will push forward this pipeline with Daniel. More on the new team member on the next broadcast.
On the 10th of June we broadcast a live Q&A where we announced our biggest discount ever at -25% in conjunction with our Publisher Fellow Travellers' Steam Sale. Today 8th of July is the last day to get Suzerain is still discounted at -25% as part of the Steam Summer Sale.
Another announcement we made during the live Q&A was that we have partnered up with The Life and Suffering of Sir Bronte and Yes, Your Grace to bring the Fateful Hour Bundle, which will have a base discount of -15%.
You can check out the recording of the Q&A here if you missed it.
As we enter July, we are organising a community event, the Hearts of Iron IV multiplayer lobby with the Suzerain devs. There is still time until the end of this week to let us know if you'd like to participate. The event will take place on the 23rd and 24th of July between 5pm and 10pm CEST. For more info, join the Suzerain Discord Server.
Finally, our brand-new project has gotten greenlight for prototyping in our local state which means we can experiment on something new without financially putting the company in a high-risk situation. Most importantly it also allows us to hire new talent to push forward what we can do as Torpor Games and be more ambitious.
Ata and Ilke have arrived at Spelkollektivet in Sweden, where they have been working hard on researching detailed concepts and making sure that our core knowledge regarding the overarching subject and themes about this project are sound before the real experimentation begins in the upcoming months.
All hands are on deck, and we are cruising forward! We thank for your patience and support.
Thank you for being there, stay safe and healthy.
Vectern sis da!
See you next time in July!
MAY 2021 BROADCAST
Citizens of Sordland! We are currently busy working on a few new things we'll announce soon, nevertheless May has brought some news we want to share with you.
First of all: Suzerain has reached 2000 reviews on Steam. Thanks to everyone who has made it possible!
To celebrate the 2 year anniversary, we have launched Suzerain on the Epic Store and it is currently at a 20% discount through the Epic MEGA Sale, including the OST and the Presidential Edition. You can check it out here.
This week we announced our nomination at the Game For Change awards, in the Most Innovative category, as well as the People Choice's Award, for which you can cast your vote for Suzerain here. It is a great honour to be considered for such an important award among great company. The awards ceremony will be held on the 12th of July.
And another milestone: Torpor Games has turned 2. We sadly couldn't celebrate in person but managed to find a picture of the three founders from when Torpor and Suzerain were just ideas. Thanks to everyone who has been part of this journey.
In other news, we have a new addition to the team: Irene Preuss has joined Torpor Games as Marketing Manager. Originally from Barcelona, she has been working in the games industry for the last 4 years in business development, event organisation and marketing roles. She's also Marketing Manager of the Berlin-based indie studio Happy Broccoli Games.
We are very glad to have her work with us. Our experience with Irene has been amazing even before this. She has opened many doors for our game and company in the past before the launch, with her wide network and experience in indie-games as well as the Berlin games ecosystem.
The Torpor Games team will be travelling to Sweden this month to spend 6 weeks at Spelkollektivet, a community for indie game developers in the middle of Sweden, where we are hoping to meet other fellow devs, exchange ideas and find inspiration for future plans.
Finally, a brief update on development. We have been working hard on our yet to be announced Suzerain-related project. Our team has moved forward to finalizing the implementation with only a few design tasks left.
Current estimates expect this work to be completed by the end of June after final polish and bug-fixing concludes. So far, two rounds of testing have occurred with positive results. Our initial performance and optimization challenges have also been mostly solved. Here are a few teaser images:
We are very satisfied with the overall experience and hope to reveal it soon to the masses!
On the other hand we have just finalized the concept phase of our second unannounced project. Currently we are seeking new funding resources to be able to achieve a high standard of quality and to alleviate other pipelines in the company. In June we will be starting the actual design phase which will take many months to conclude. We will share more news and updates regarding this in the upcoming months.
Thank you for being there, stay safe and healthy.
Vectern sis da!
See you next time in June!
Citizens of Sordland! Another month has passed and it’s been quite eventful for us. Here’s an overview of our activities during the month of April:
Suzerain won Best Expert Game at the German Game Awards 2021. This is the highest award recognition a video game developer can be honoured with in Germany and we’re extremely proud. Thanks to everyone for making this possible.
This is what the award looks like. Incredible.
Suzerain is also nominated in 2 categories at the Unfold Awards: Best Narrative and Audience Award, for which we will need your vote: (Vote here) - winners will be announced on the 20th of May!
Last week we participated in LudoNarraCon, the festival organised by our publisher Fellow Traveller, with several activities, including a developer interview and Q&A, the Sordland Documentary by the Templin Institute, as well as the reveal of the fanart contest results:
@Dy with the drawing of the 4 Presidents
@IngsocDmnt with the Wikipedia page of Sordland
and @Pyrde with the website Sordish.org about the official language of Sordland
The winners have received the high recognition of Artist of Sordland in our Discord Server. Congratulations! Vectern Sis Da!
During the festival, Ata also led the panel ‘Good Stories Must Die’, with renowned speakers Annie VanderMeer (Guild Wars 2), George Ziets (Fallout: New Vegas, Wasteland 3) and Märten Rattasepp (Disco Elysium, Death & Taxes). You can watch it here if you missed it.
LNC Panel Good Stories Must Die
Last week, Ata also spoke about Suzerain, Torpor Games and indie game development during the Instagram Takeover of Factory, the co-working space and innovative community our team is part of.
On another hand, PC Gamer wrote a great article about Suzerain and the Novel Not New crew discussed Suzerain during an Abnormal Mapping podcast episode.
More reviews also from Movies and Game Tech and the German online magazine Spielbar. It’s an honour to have Suzerain mentioned by so many media outlets, thank you!
Finally a reminder to fill out our merch survey - we’ve started the research for the feasibility of ordering merch so don’t miss your chance to share your thoughts with us!
We are looking forward to sharing more news with you soon! Hope you have a great May ahead. Stay safe and healthy. Vectern Sis Da!
See you next time in May!
Hope you all had a good March behind you, we certainly had a good time! Torpor has been active on many fronts so let’s get to our recap and a glimpse to what awaits us in April.
Let’s kick it off with the big news! We got nominated to the the Best Expert Game category at the German Game Awards 2021. This is a major milestone in the local market where our company is based. We stand next to established titles like Desperados and Port Royale.
The winner will be determined mid-April but with such recognition at the national level, we feel like winners already as a new indie studio!
Link to the news in German: https://deutscher-computerspielpreis.de/die-nominierten-fuer-den-deutschen-computerspielpreis-2021-stehen-fest/
Podcasts podcasts and more podcasts! We had a very good chat with Seorsie from the Adventure Games Podcast about the adventure that was Suzerain. We tackled many subjects like the creative process, the artistic vision, and the challenges of development.
Rob Zacyn from VICE Waypoint and Freelance Writer Sin Vega (Previously at RPS) went on the Three Moves Ahead podcast to talk about Suzerain for an entire two hours! It feels great to have created something that is worth talking hours over!
We also took part at the Developer Dialogue podcast to talk with Youtuber Historical Gamer and StrategyWarGamer about the game. Thank you Matt and Jean for the opportunity to shed more light to the development of the game.
Torpor Games also took part in the Hamburg Games Conference under the BMVI (German Ministry of Transportation and Digital Infrastructure) banner and we even won the XSOLLA Secret Nominee Award! The event allowed us to network with other developers and businesses.
We also began a survey to determine the feasibility of merchandising. If you are interested in buying merch related to Suzerain please make sure to contribute with your opinion and votes. This will help us gauge true interest!
Link to survey: https://forms.gle/bSB9q7vu7ogHepiTA
The first Art Contest began with the initiative of our moderation team. If you have any artistic skills please contribute to the ministry-of-art channel on our Discord! http://discord.gg/H2F6xxg
The details of the contes are as follows. We chose the theme: "Sordland". We would love to see the fans interpretation of Sordlands culture, landscapes, values, history, potential, its new president Rayne and his family, anywhere you mind may take you. Contest will last for another week. Ending on the 12th of April 13:00 CET.
Oh and our wonderful April fools joke with that amazing jam from James Spence is right here!
Benfi, 2099
Let’s move on to what our team has been up to. We can’t precisely share what we are working on because there is still a lot to do but we can tell you a bit about the processes we are doing. As you might have seen, Suzerain’s release is continuously being supported with bug fixes and additions to increase the quality bar even further.
The team is focusing on designing UI/UX and control elements on a Suzerain related project. At the same time we are concepting new things for another project as well so lots happening behind the scenes! We are very early on in the process and it will take many many more months until we can share anything about these initiatives.
Let’s talk about what April holds in store for us! On the 13th of April we will be part of the German Game Awards 2021 followed by the LudoNarraCon festival which will take place between the 23rd and 26th of April. There will be a live Q&A livestream with two developers from Torpor Games so we will collect all questions at the dev-question-and-answer thread on Discord prior to the livestream. However, we will also take a few live questions during the event.
Additionally Ata will be on a interesting panel at LNC 2021! More on this once the festival details will be released soon.
We are looking forward to seeing you partake to any of the mentioned activities! Hope you have a wonderful April yourself. Stay safe and healthy. Vectern Sis Da!
See you next time in April!
Glad to have you here for the February Broadcast! Let’s recap on the developments and what’s been happening at Torpor Games!
Our 1.1 patch has been released on the 11th and was received very positively by everyone! We broke our 350 concurrent player count from January with 460+ players on the 13th of February. The game also surpassed 1.5k reviews on Steam as of today! This big patch was a massive effort for our studio and the ideal core improvement post-launch. We have followed up on the big update with smaller improvement patches to consolidate the balancing further and fix the remaining issues.
We are very happy with the current state of the game and will continue to push smaller updates like the upcoming 1.1.4 to polish the experience further. It’s not easy to maintain a game like Suzerain which has so many branches and backend value changes so supporting the game does take considerable effort and time.
If you do have improvement suggestions please send them over at our Discord server. We are particularly keen on improving typos, grammar issues and other smaller writing problems.
Also a big thanks and shoutout to Tung Thanh Cao (Khassian) who completed his internship with us and helped the release and the post-release period significantly. It’s been a wild 5 months of game development together. Good luck on the path. Some good news!
The German federal government has accepted our grant application and we are looking forward to what we can achieve with this. There will be a future announcement regarding the developments related to this grant.
Additionally, we have seen the requests to localize Suzerain into other languages. Due to the massive wordcount (450k+) of the game and our current financial situation we can’t afford localisations as of now. We are very sorry and will let you all know if this situation changes.
Suzerain is -20 off for the next two hours on Steam!
Ata from Torpor has also attended two podcasts which will soon release their episodes. The first one is Developer Dialogue and the second one is the Adventure Games Podcast. Tune in to these once they are out!
Thank you all for your continued support and the awesome reviews everywhere! If you want to support us further please drop a positive review on Steam if you haven’t and advocate for the game and its message. That’s how indies survive after all.
See you next time in the March broadcast!
Welcome back to another Suzerain broadcast and get ready for this is a juicy one!
January saw the implementation and the beginning of the first testing runs of our major 1.1 content patch. We are doing some final testing, bugfixing and balancing runs on the build to ensure that the player experience is the best it can be.
Special thank you to our volunteer community testers for helping us out! The support really warms our hearts. Let’s get to what we have in store for you.
Features
End Game Summary Screen
Based on the feedback we received, we decided to update the conclusion in a more visual way, outside of the Epilogue. We’ve built a summary screen, featuring three sections that display how your Anton government and the results of your choices. It displays data about the first term and displays interesting details. Images speak louder than words so here you go!
We hope that this gives a better overview of what you achieved or not. We also made the decision to focus the compass to the in-lore version of ideologies and use the spectrum to display Sordland’s political compass only and how these other characters are positioned in it. This addition should strengthen the ending and we hope you share your results with everyone!
Anton Customisation
After playing Suzerain for more hours than you can imagine, the portrait of Anton at the bottom left corner began to stare deep into our soul. So, we’ve decided to give everyone the option to change it up, and have built an Anton customization system. You can change his hairstyle, facial hair, accessories and background image.
We felt that adding character customisation gave another roleplaying element for you all to enjoy. Here are some images to show you potential variation! Special thanks to İpek Ünal, our talented character artist for creating these assets.
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
New Content
The Election
We added a brand new election debate at turn 10 to strengthen the election ending. This scene also introduces Denis Stahler of the Communist Party as a character, who can be a potential rival for the election debate. Denis also gets a brand new portrait!
A new election calculation with more detailed voter groups has been added, Early polling have also been included at the political overview scene to show how your election prospects are. These additions come with some new newspapers and reports as well!
The War
The war plans scene has been expanded with new choices. We’ve also added new win and lose calculations for the war, which are affected by several of these choices in the scene and the ones the player has previously made that could relate to the war.
Several minor additions and changes were added to the war win and lose scenes as well. A dozen or more reports made their way into turn 10 to give a more accurate indication of how the war is going to players.
New music design and new tracks!
Our sound designer / composer James Spence has made changes to improve the music implementation and make the audioscape more dynamic. We’ve also added two brand new tracks to improve the audio experience. These will also be released for free to OST owners along with the hidden suspense track.
Here is a teaser from the new Diplomacy track!
42 new Steam achievements!
Yes you heard it right. Suzerain now will have a total of 86 achievements. The new achievements are public for testing runs, but you won’t be able to unlock them until the patch update. Whatever you do, don't try to kill Orso please.
Improvements and Bug Fixes
Bug fixes:
We fixed a couple of remaining broken links that were super rare but would have stopped player progression nonetheless
Economy balancing was improved and is more in sync with the narrative
Fixed issue that caused people with a good economy to fall to depression instead of stagnation due to high debt
Fixed wrong impeachment variable for owning Sordland Today being mistaken with having a media deal with Marcel Koronti Made Assembly impeachment very very difficult
Wrong conditions for trialling Tusk after he had fled the country were corrected
Fixed misleading public opinion and war reports
Fixed halfway cut gavel tapping sounds for Epilogue
Fixed escape to menu crash during Epilogue to Credits transition Other wrong database implementations on several news and reports were mended
And many many more that will be included in the official patch log on release
Improvements:
Added more details to "convince Gloria" scene
Corrected several conditions and improved flow for "convince Albin" scene
Added nuance explaining the women's rights situation better
Small content addition to Monica
The assembly vote is slightly more difficult - this was intended to be hard
The economic recovery should be slightly more difficult now General proofreading and editing on a dozen scenes
Closed some small narrative gaps like congress cancellation during future war
Gave limited vetoes new content
Added ACP and SSP codex entries and logos
Fixed several typos and improved English consistency
Dozens of more minor additions and improvements
So what are the next steps from here?
The second testing run this weekend will solidify our confidence in the build and allow us to make the final polishing. Once we are happy with where we are we will announce the release date to the public. Stay tuned!
Hope you enjoyed this lengthy update. Please drop a positive review if you liked Suzerain! Many many thanks from Torpor Games.
See you next time in the February broadcast!