Haha yeah!Valve emailed me yesterday asking if it was ok to show Papers Please in the demo vid. I appreciate them letting me know but this is a question that needn't be asked :DAt the moment I'm working on adding localization support to the game. This is much harder than it should be, mostly due to the large number of tiny pixel fonts in use (12) and the precise document layouts. Anyway, this is proceeding slowly.My goal is to do professional translations for French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and possibly Russian. I've gotten a lot of offers for help here but I think there's a general underestimation of how much work a translation will be. There's over 10,000 words in the game; much of it is gameplay-critical with common terms that have to be cross-referenced.Instead of loading up on every possible language from the start, I'll release the localization tool publicly. That will make it easy (easier) to create a fan translation for the game, package it up into a single file, and distribute it for others to use.When this localization work gets done I want to write up a full post-mortem on the game. Before I forget everything. The bulk of the development is already outlined in the thread here but there's a lot of shit that happened in the weeks before and after launch that might make a good read. Also sales figures.

God I adore this game. Honestly, it has struck such a chord with me. The aesthetics, the gameplay, it's amazing. Thank you, and I really hope you don't abandon future development on it. I'd love to see more scripted events, and more moral choices. Those are honestly the best parts. I just with the story mode was longer, maybe 1-2 days of normal work days in between the big story events. Additionally, a 3DS port would be perfect for this game. The booth and line screens combined at the top screen, the desk on the bottom screen. Any thoughts? I bet a iOS port would work too, and I believe you have some iOS game experience too right? Also a minor thing to ask for (which has probably been mentioned), if you ever get a citation on the last person of the day, the screen fades to black before you get a chance to see it, so you don't know what you did wrong. Can this just stay on the screen for a bit then have the option to "see stats"? after you've reviewed it? How about a scripted event editor? Where you can choose a particular character to say something who can give you a moral choice, then it is just slipped in to a random day on the story mode. That would be great. But overall more events, more scenarios, perhaps a port or an event editor would make this amazing game even better.

Gonna start posting some postmortem stuff here now.The last beta (0.5.13) was released in April (?) and had 8 days of gameplay. It feels like a solid demo but nothing beyond that had been implemented. In the time between April and July, I worked to fill out the mechanics and story.Of all the things that went into the game, the hardest part for me to do, by far, was arranging the overall progression and narrative. During the entire development I collected and implemented small encounters or mechanics. Coming up with these was really fun; spy document handoff, nosy reporter, time bomb defusing, corrupt guard, etc. The task of tying all that together with a logical progression and interesting story was not as fun. I wanted the gameplay to evolve at a good pace but also to motivate each new mechanic with a story element. And with lots of these things to lay out, it's also important to avoid having too many things happen at once that can misdirect or confuse the player.As an example, there's a secret document hand-off encounter early in the game. You get handed two identical documents and need to keep them straight:Implementing this was easy but there was no clear place to put it in the game. The event involves a bulletin callout, 2 travelers (the spy and his follower), and 2 documents. It's a pretty heavy event actually because once you read the bulletin, you're on the lookout for the first spy and his follower; it somewhat consumes the player's headspace. This meant that I didn't want it to overlap with any other days where you have an important bulletin message, when you're expecting someone specific, or when you have another document handoff. It finally wound up on the same day you meet Calensk. Now the problem is that as soon as you read the bulletin about a spy coming, this military-looking guy walks up. Naturally you'd think he was the spy. If I had any other choice I would've moved this encounter or Calensk's intro but out of the 31 days there was no other place. I ended up just letting these events overlap but made one small dialog addition to clear up any confusion. When Calensk walks in for the first time, the inspector asks "Are you the spy?", to which he responds "What? No".This is one example but there were lots of cases like this where I had to be very careful with the arrangement. Each event, encounter, mechanic, introduction, etc required coordination with everything else. I started by layings things out on paper but that didn't last long. Eventually I do what I normally do and wrote a tool to help:This is the basic story layout tool. Each column is a day and the boxes represent mechanics, rules, news stories, travelers, bulletins, etc. I define the dependencies in a simple text format then load it up here and slide the boxes around to visualize how everything will play out. Some events have multiple boxes spanning several rows and several days. Once everything was set up I could quickly see empty or crowded spaces and tweak things accordingly.For the beta release, the game had a very simple economy. I didn't put much thought into it at the time and there were lame ways to exploit your income. For the final game I knew I'd need better planning to put the average player under constant money pressure. Again, this is something I tackled with a custom tool.The days are listed from top to bottom this time. Each row represents one day and has the news stories, processing (T=traveler, P=penalty, D=detain), special encounters (bribes, story events), nighttime messages, and expenses. Each element is a button and allows quickly testing different scenarios by toggling each effect on and off. For example, clicking the [P2] on the first line will simulate getting 2 penalties on day one. That effect will propagate through the entire game to show nighttime earnings, adjusted events, and even when the family would start dying.This economy simulator was one of my more useful tools made for the game. The stuff I learned with it fed back into the story layout to let me know when it would be good to add a bribery or other money-affecting event. The niece event was laid out this way. I saw a dip below zero on one day and came up with the story for her to appear with her mom's savings as relief.Coming soon...