Sitting behind the Resolute Desk, posting Screeches, occasionally meeting international guests, and signing some insignificant bills… If only the presidency was like that all the time. Unfortunately, this job is far more stressful and complicated than you could possibly imagine!

Your country is susceptible to all kinds of threats, both foreign and domestic, and it is both your highest honor and duty to protect the land and the people of the United States of America. Any number of random events could compound into an enormous crisis requiring your personal attention. Natural disasters, social unrest, riots, epidemics, and many more issues can give even the best president a run for his money.



A crisis can continuously bring down the statistics you worked so hard to improve. The crises can affect everything and everyone around you – your public image, your citizens’ well-being, your cabinet, and the overall condition of the country. The longer a crisis lasts, the more your ratings suffer. And if you allow for that to happen… The Oval Office may soon change its occupant. To make sure you keep your spot in the White House, you better make sure to employ proper counteractions, either by funding specific projects or making sure to never neglect the signing of appropriate legislations.



However, it is never possible to completely avoid the repercussions of a crisis. The counteractions are divided into four separate categories relating to questions ranging from enforcement of law to flexible social and economic policies - and the available legislations reinforcing each approach are dependent on the placement on the Political Compass! After all, it’s only natural for a president with anarchistic leanings to struggle with maintaining order.



The US presidency comes with great power and even greater responsibility. Events like the Wall Street Crash, the Cuban Missile Crisis, 9/11, and the Coronavirus Pandemic are mere drops in the bucket of never-ending emergencies the US have had to deal with. In this matter, your presidency will not be different from your predecessors’. And just like them, you will have to do your best to protect the USA.

“Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.” Cornel West

From the very first day in the Oval Office, one specific matter hangs over any President’s head - the reelection. It is no different in ‘I Am Your President’.

Though fate has placed your President behind the Resolute desk and blessed him with the power that comes with the role of the leader of the Free World, it is not up to luck whether this honor stays with your President beyond the four-year mark.

Every decision the President makes and every bill he signs affects the attitudes and opinions of the whole Nation. In ‘I Am Your President’ your voters will take into consideration whether you managed to fulfill your promises, in what ways your decisions have advanced the country, and judge how you have dealt with the crises that befell you. And the verdict? Well, you just have to wait until Election Day.



Thus, the statistics you worked so hard to improve not only affect the gameplay but also reflect the Nation’s opinion about your President. A failure to maintain the US’ position as the greatest country on Earth might prove an insurmountable obstacle on your road to reelection. Either way, one thing is for sure - every step you make is followed closely by the Nation and if you want to remain in office, you have to remind yourself of that fact each day.

A good president is one who tries to take care of everyone and everything, which might be demanding, but not impossible. The better you govern the country, the better results you may expect on Election Day. And who knows - maybe you even manage to unite the Nation and beat Ronald Reagan’s result from 1984?



All in all, the job might be yours for now, but your future lies in the hands of the Nation. And if you want to sit in the presidential chair a little longer, you must appeal to all kinds of voters; limiting yourself to just a few pet issues might prove to be your final mistake as President!

Do you think you have what it takes, Mr. President?

You might be familiar with the concept of the Political Compass – a coordinate system that visually places your social and economic views between the two axes: economic (left-right, x-axis) and social (authoritarian–libertarian, y-axis). Well, this time this system will not only help you to establish your views but also define what your President’s policy will look like!
Once you start the game, your President’s views will be placed randomly somewhere in the middle grey square called ‘Mainstream Centrism’. And this is where the fun begins.



As the President, you’ll have to manage several projects around specific issues. These projects will define your presidency and also outline your President’s path on the Political Compass. The projects will reveal your political aspirations, and with every subsequent day, they will move your president towards the desired political ideology.



Of course, there’s more to that! Your President’s position on the Political Compass will have an impact on the kinds of bills he will be able to sign. Depending on the ideology you find yourself subscribing to, you’ll get the bills that will correspond to your political views. Universal Basic Income for a communist President? There you go! Complete free-market deregulation for an anarcho-capitalist President? Be my guest!



That’s still not everything, though! The types of bills your President decides to support will eventually help him solve various political and economic crises that will be appearing throughout the presidency. What are the crises? Well, that’s a different big subject for another Devblog!

Give us your feedback about the whole system and tell us which political ideology is going to be the most appealing to your President!

We hope you’ve had good Christmas holidays and are ready to bid farewell to 2020. Well, I mean… who isn’t?

This is a perfect moment to share with you what we’ve been up to these couple of weeks. That’s because – aside from the “new year, new me” shenanigans – we’ve finished gathering and analyzing all the feedback you’ve given us on IAYP: Prologue. And we’re ready to make some bold design decisions!

First and foremost: we’re incredibly thankful to everybody who played our game! Double points if you cared enough to share your experiences with us – both negative and positive. And while it feels great to receive praise, we’ve still got a game to finish, so we cannot afford to overlook the common criticisms, i.e. stability & optimization issues, confusing gameplay and railroading.

Although the main game is going to immensely improve on all of those, your feedback has highlighted your expectations of IAYP. We’d really like to make IAYP unforgettable for you – not just in a singular choose-your-own-adventure type of way, but also in a more randomized and uncontrolled setting. We want our game to be a bit bolder and more unhinged than other political simulators, without dropping the charade all the way – after all, as this past decade has shown us, politics really is all about appearances!

• We’re going to make IAYP more dynamic and roguelite-ish, by, for example:
  
  1. Making each playthrough denser. Less waiting, more choices!
     
  2. Getting rid of $ altogether and instead using the economy stat as currency
     
  3. Introducing some small persistent progression systems (e.g. project/tech trees start of hidden, but once researched, remain uncovered in subsequent playthroughs)
     
  4. Including some form of point/evaluation system at the end of each playthrough
     
  5. much, much more…
• We’re going to put more emphasis on protagonist’s political self-identification, introducing a new feature – political compass, complete with 19 political affiliations that will affect the type of legislation that the president signs on a near-daily basis!
  
• We’re going to focus on two distinct gameplay pillars:
  
  1. Largely randomized dialogues and events: the meat of the story and the spice of life!
     
  2. Robust secondary features to give the players (including those looking for a more serious experience) numerous opportunities for min-maxing and strategizing. This means that we’ll be interlinking all features closely and giving them enough depth to turn e.g. the map or project management into an optional mini-game
• We’re expanding the importance of Action Points – no need to worry about all these features right away, given the limitations!

Okay, that’s enough for now, before I get too excited… Of course, it’s not all good news: as some of you might have already been suspecting, this means that we still have some things to do, pushing back the publishing of the product a few extra months. Realistically – I do not think this could have been avoided, especially in light of the optimization issues present in the prologue. We hate to do it to you again, but we have to get our cyber playground in order, else everyone could just end up getting punked.

And meanwhile, why don’t you share your thoughts in #president-chat? Are we moving in the right direction? Or am I just rambling like a madman? Are those mutually exclusive?

Thank you for your continuous trust and support! We’ll do our best to not betray your expectations & keep you up to date with our affairs! Tons of love from the team, we wish you all best of luck in 2021!

We continue to implement your ideas into the game. For now, we want to release a small patch that should improve loading times on HDD drives. We're adding a few other things as well, hopefully it will improve your prologue experience;).

• Game Settings: Run In Background switch added. While loading, the app has Run In Background active on default, so it's still loading when minimized. You can change this option whenever you want.
  
• Better loading times - we've found out what caused the game to load so slowly and we've fixed it. Our work is not yet done here, but the improvements are big. In the nearest future the loading times will get even quicker.
  
• Items description now shown in each turn - this is our experimental feature, to deepen the immersion. Tell us what you think about it.
  
• Fixed some bugs
  
• Probably added more bugs than before

We are in touch. Remember that you can write to us on Discord. We also read all your opinions sent via the form available in the game :). Your opinion is very important to us. It helps us improve our game.

Cheers!


I Am Your President: Prologue - Patch Notes #2

Loading time improvements!

• Language & typo corrections
  
• Numerous optimization tweaks
  
• Fixed incorrect stat change prompts in some of the dialogue choices
  
• Improved plot flags
  
• Added credits! The last one is pretty important, as we’ve included the nicknames of our Discord supporters – yes, you! You’ve really fueled our creative flames and given us some great ideas, some of which you’ll be able to see in the main game.

Huge thank you for those of you that took a moment to share their feedback on our game on Steam. We cannot overstate how helpful that is to us! Talk to you soon & sit tight while we’re uploading the patch! And remember what your devs say: do not click on the loading screen while the game is loading, cause Windows might incorrectly interpret it as a freeze (picture related)! We're working on fixing the issue ASAP - thank you for your patience!



https://store.steampowered.com/app/1201330/I_Am_Your_President_Prologue/

We are proud to announce that I Am Your President: Prologue is finally out! Moreover, it is – now and forever – free to play!

You can find it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1201330/

Experience the events leading up to the presidency of Your President – from the perspective of his predecessor! Try to finish this self-contained story to get a taste of what it means to occupy the oval office and know whose shoes you will be filling in the main game. Just keep in mind the fact that being the leader of the free world is no easy task and the outcome of this grand balancing act will be – in the best case scenario – bittersweet.

The prologue is also a great way to familiarize yourself with the core game mechanics and features, most of which are included, albeit in a much more straightforward form. Sign legislation, post on social media, tackle international crises as they unfold, survive the barrage of questions at a press conference and much, much more… Overall, completing the prologue should take you approximately 40 minutes, though that can vary depending on the path you choose. And if you are a completionist – there’s a bunch of Steam achievements for you to unlock!

A huge “thank you” goes out to everyone that has been supporting IAYP project and – as always – if you have any questions or feedback to us, feel free to drop us a message on our Discord – we read all of them and continuously improve based on your input!

Talk to you soon!
~IAYP team

Tis the time for some more news regarding IAYP!

The biggest of which is: We are about to publish the prologue to I Am Your President – scheduled for release on Dec 2nd @ 9:00 AM PST! And once published, it’s going to be here to stay: for free & forever!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1201330/I_Am_Your_President_Prologue/

Those of you that had a chance to play our demo will recognize the story of the prologue – albeit slightly tweaked and expanded so that we could showcase a few previously unseen features (such as the map and another location outside of the White House)! Oh, and this time around, your successes (and failures) will be immortalized via Steam achievements. Overall we are hoping to give you a smoother and more complete experience that will eventually serve as a proper teaser for the main game.

Speaking of which, from the moment we release the prologue, our entire team’s main focus is going to shift entirely to polishing and testing the main plotline – a huge milestone we’re really excited about! Hopefully, the next time we break the silence we will have something cool to tell you!

And of course, once again, thank you guys for your ongoing love and support! We're doing our best to answer all of your questions at #ask-us-anything (Discord) – and the closer the game is to the finished product, the easier they are to answer.

So feel free to share your thoughts & head down to Steam to check out I Am Your President: Prologue once it comes out! :)

Join our Discord here:

We wanted to thank all of you for playing the demo and remind – those of you that still haven’t found the time to do so – that it will only be available until:


Do not despair though, we’ve been working like crazy and are getting closer and closer to completing the next thing on our radar: the prologue! And yes – it’s going to be expanded & polished according to your feedback and available for free and forever!

Speaking of feedback, huge “thank you” goes to everybody that’s been giving us pointers on our discord server; I know some of you saw your suggestions patched into the game & you can be sure there’s more to come in the final version of the prologue. On that note, we’re trying to gather some standardized intel, so if you feel like sharing your opinion on some of the more specific aspects of IAYP, you can do it through this form we’ve prepared:

https://forms.gle/3rBAoFtc8qXXMk2u8

Okay, that’ll be it (for now), we hope you had some fun with our demo & we will keep you posted – as soon as there’s anything to announce!

Cheers :)

Demo update!

First of all, thank you all so much for your feedback and all the kind words! We’ve been working hard on improving the demo as much as possible & we’re happy to say that we’re launching an update that should both make the game easier to run and improve the overall playing experience.

Here’s the full changelog:
• The lighting effects have been optimized, which should help with the FPS on older PCs
• Lowered the overall difficulty of the game & introduced some balance changes
• Save system bugfix – it should be functional now
• Tooltips have been made more visible
• In order to help with the confusion, we’ve added a few tutorial boxes that explain how the game’s basics work
• Rich text tags for documents that require signing have been fixed
• Fixed the cabinet member summary screen
• Fixed the industry icon in the cabinet member menu
• Added an option to skip the intro if the player finished it in the previous playthroughs
• Added an animated indicator for development strategies that are being researched
• Fixed the problem with the player being transported back to the oval office after the endgame cutscene
• Fixed the bug that made it possible to accept the statements without filling in all the boxes
• Improved the display of the closing credits
• Fixed Life of the Party and Savoir-Fair quests; they should work fine now
• Various text corrections
• Various fixes to hidden plot hooks
• Various email, article and Screecher QoL improvements and fixes (e.g. bigger database of Screecher commentators)
• Visual improvements to the development strategies and projects to make them more user-friendly
• Longer answer times for the press conference
• The default resolutions of the textures has been lowered to improve performance on older machines
• Better scaling of statistic change tooltips
• Sound effects added to the email interface
• The game supports some other screen proportions now