Stop the Press!

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• Announcements·20 Jul 2026Official

  Stop the Press! SimFest Public Playtest

  Stop the Press! will be taking part in SimFest on Steam from 20–27 July, and I’m using the occasion to open the game’s first public playtest.The playtest will offer an early look at the opening portion of the game. This is the first time Stop the Press! has been tested outside a small group of friends and family, so I’m particularly interested in feedback on how easy you find it to get to grips with the mechanics.Please be aware that this is an early pre-alpha version of the upcoming demo. Some content is still placeholder, features may change substantially, and bugs should be expected.If you would prefer to experience the game in a more polished and complete state, I recommend waiting for the public demo. However, if you are comfortable testing an unfinished build and sharing feedback, your help would be enormously valuable.You can request access to the playtest now through the Stop the Press! Steam page. The exact launch date will be announced during SimFest.For all the latest info on the playtest, and to take part in the discussions, head over to the Discord.Thank you to everyone who signs up and helps shape the game’s development.
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• Announcements·20 Jul 2026Official

  Dev Diary #13: Trust & Favours

  It's been a busy couple of months in Guadelique, with a lot of big changes and upgrades to the game.One of those is the fonts - the placeholder fonts I was using had drawbacks with readability and localisation. Given this is a text heavy game, and the setting is all about printing presses and typography, that was not acceptable!So I've been working with a brilliant font designer on a suite of bespoke fonts - there's a sneak preview of those here: But in this dev diary, I'm going to show off two new in-game currencies that are going to be vital to building a successful newspaper. The eagle-eyed might have already spotted this little readout on the toolbar:This shows your current stock of faction Favours (the coloured bars) and Trust (the white bar). Trust is a measure of your reputation among the people of New Lyon. Are you a bastion of integrity, dedicated to pursuing the truth at all costs? Or a lying rag that'll say anything to get ahead? Or rather - which of those do people *think* you are?You can think of Trust a little like the health bar of your newspaper. When it's high, everything is going to be that little bit easier. When it's low, you'll face extra challenges. You gain trust by printing truthful headlines, or by picking honourable options in dialogue.But you can lose it too. Many headlines can be twisted so far they become lies. Lies are often the most powerful headlines - extremely popular or persuasive. But every lie you tell is a gamble - if you get found out, your trust will collapse. At the end of the day you'll have to wait as your headline runs the gauntlet of this lie detector to see if you're reaping the rewards or suffering reputational damage. The other currencies are Favours. You have a stockpile of favours with each faction in game, and you earn or lose them by printing headlines that support or oppose that faction.There are going to be more ways to cash in your favours, but the most important one is unlocking new regions in the map.Here you ...
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• Announcements·11 Apr 2026Official

  Dev Diary #12: Story Design Part II

  In Dev Diary #9 I went into some detail about the way the story for the game would be laid out, and how I'd been trying to find the right balance between a story that's dynamic and one that's got a real immersive depth (whilst also not taking a million years to write).This was the result - thinking about the story at different "resolutions". You'd have your main plot - a predetermined branching path that the player moves through. Then you'd experience a selection of slightly less major events that would relate to that main plot but could happen anywhere in a small local "area" around where you are in the main plot (and were therefore somewhat dynamic but still rooted in the specifics of the main plot). And finally you'd have minor events that could happen anywhere in a much larger area - things that aren't that involved with the main plot but which bring the world to life. Little scandals, Human interest stories, culture, sports, adverts. This creates a reasonably good balance between dynamism and depth. But I want to aim higher than reasonably good! After some insightful feedback and some more thinking, I've got an improved version of that model to share. The main issue with the existing plan is that main plot. At the end of the day, even if it's got lots of branches and potential paths you could take through it, it's fixed. That makes it harder to organically respond to the player's input and to the simulation. I really want the player to feel like they're in an organically changing world that responds to what they do, not that they're on railroad tracks with only the occasional opportunity to flip a lever to go onto a different tracks. Part of the excitement for me of these stories about revolutions is the unpredictability and chaos of them, and this predetermined main plot just didn't quite cut it. So, how can you make that main plot truly dynamic without losing all that juicy depth? The answer actually partially existed in game already. In the game, there are t...
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• Patch Notes·6 Feb 2026Official

  Dev Update #11: The world of Stop the Press

  A number of people have asked for the next dev diary to delve into the backstory of Stop the Press, and given that the past few weeks were spent doing code refactoring, performance improvements, and tackling tech debt, that seems like a much more interesting thing to be talking about. As you'll have seen before, the game takes place in the country of Guadelique. It's a Caribbean island nation, which shares its island with the Spanish-speaking Guatelica to the East (more on them later).In 1933, Guadelique is ruled by King Louis and his wife Maria Antonia. Here's a photo of them in fancy dress pretending it's the 1790s: Louis is the latest in a long line of Kings descended from the Kings of France, who colonised the island in the late 1600s. They're stuck firmly in the past, determined to hold onto the traditional system where the King has absolute authority over the whole country, ruling with the help of an elite class of land owning aristocrats. They rule from the Palais district of New Lyon, Guadelique's bustling capital. Your printing press is not far away, right in the heart of New Lyon's old town, the Ville Coloniale. New Lyon is where most of the country's immigrant population live, including a lot of Guatelicans. Remember Guatelica? Ever since the founding of Guadelique, Guatelica has been its rival. Both nations have gone through periods of prosperity and poverty, and several bloody wars. That means there's a lot of distrust of Guatelicans in Guadelique, both on the street - but also in the palace. Maria Antonia is herself a Guatelican, and for that reason many people suspect her of secretly working to undermine Guadelique. The most recent conflict, 50 years ago, set the borders where they are today, but tension on the border has been rising in recent times. That's why soldier Corporal Jean Reed has (along with many other Guadeliquan troops) been sent to the border barracks town of Saint Philippe. He's lost trust with the military leadership, so he'll offer u...
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• Patch Notes·30 Dec 2025Official

  Dev Update #10: Crime & Punishment

  It's been a wild month in the newsroom at Stop the Press! When the last dev diary went to print, the Steam page had only just rolled off the presses. I had no idea that less than a month later I'd be making in-game headlines to announce that the game had already blown past 10,000 wishlists. But there's been no time to celebrate as this month I've been drilling down into the system of crime and punishment, so this dev diary is a great opportunity to share a little more about that side of the game.The Censorship Bureau has authorised the release of the following previously restricted information...Even though I haven't gone into detail on this in previous dev diaries, many of you will have seen in the trailer a little hint of the censorship system.There are 4 different levels of censorship in the game, from low (where most headlines are permitted as long as you're not directly inciting violence) up to Draconian, where anything less than full-throated support of the regime is against the law.The level of censorship will change up and down over the course of the game, depending on who's in power and how tightly they feel the need to control the press. It starts at Low censorship, but as the crisis engulfs King Louis and his Royalist regime, his Secret Police and Censorship Bureau will rapidly crack down. That means that headlines that might be perfectly legal one day could be illegal the next. As you're editing headlines, you can see whether or not they're illegal (the colour indicates the severity of the violation):Every time you break the law, the Censorship Bureau who read all newspapers in Guadelique will issue you with a penalty notice. You can ignore the fine, but that doesn't mean it'll go away...If your crimes mount up, your case will get referred by the Censorship Bureau to the feared Secret Police. Whether or not they take immediate action will depend on a number of things including the number and severity of your crimes, but also your readership numbers. Afte...
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