How To Be A Super Successful Politician by Scott Baker

[raw]
made by Scott Baker for LD25 (JAM)
Make the tough decisions that politicians have to make. How to raise money, exploit the people you represent, crush your opponent in the polls, all while ignoring your actual duties.

How To Play:
The goal of the game is simple. By the time your campaign is over (12 months) gain more support at the polls than your opponent. If you gain more support than your opponent, then you move on to the next higher level of government.

To do this, choose from three categories of what to do, and choose an action from those categories. Each action will increase or decrease your and your opponent's support.

Each action will also increase or decrease the overall "health" of your district. But it doesn't matter; you can let it go to zero. All that matters is that you get re-elected! In-fact, if you actually do your job it's harder to get re-elected.

Which is the point of the game. Most politicians don't actually do their jobs, they just work to get re-elected. ;)

Note on the current build of the game:
This is a work in progress. I did not get as much time as I wanted to work on the game. I wanted different choices for each level, different map pictures per level, a profile of your politician in the upper right, and different win/lose screens and descriptions. But I ran out of time.

This is also a solo entry. But the submit was not working for me on Sunday night, so I had to enter this as a Jam entry on Monday morning. Doesn't matter. I don't want to win, I just had fun participating.

Feedback

joekinley
17. Dec 2012 路 13:01 UTC
Kinda buggy entry. First time playing I lost and the second time I couldn't hit any buttons. Then reloading the whole game crashed somehow.

Though I liked the game. It made me think what to do. Tried to be a good person with health and all, and were defeated really bad. I kissed babies and recited religious texts.

You really had to be the evil dude to win this thing I guess. Nicely done.

Nice game, really good work. Reminded me a bit of this Jones game.
Catmoo
17. Dec 2012 路 13:02 UTC
I quite enjoyed playing it :) Although I thought it was a shame that I'm too much of a nice person to do the evil things!

I didn't get re-elected so I pretty much lost? Would have been nice to have a results screen at the end, showing how badly you did and a little image of the population hating you etc.

Otherwise great way to use the theme!
Princess Buccaneer
17. Dec 2012 路 13:04 UTC
You say that this should have been a compo entry, but it feels a lot more complete than most LD48 games. In particular, the visual style is very coherent.

It's a shame that you essentially only ever need to use a small amount of the options (until it gets hard), but obviously it would be a lot of work to make all the different options worthwhile in different situations.

I had a lot of fun playing this!
馃帳 Scott Baker
17. Dec 2012 路 13:04 UTC
Thanks for the comments guys. You are right, the only way to really win is to be evil.
blackmagic
17. Dec 2012 路 19:36 UTC
Pretty fun ! Cannot resume after a defeat. Game is interesting but difficulty is a bit high.
Atomic
17. Dec 2012 路 20:18 UTC
Doesn't run in FF, only in Chrome. I like the basic idea and know this is supposed to be a parody but why would funding education or reducing corruption decrease support? IMHO it should be more realistic (politicians would still be the villains)
Houly
23. Dec 2012 路 15:40 UTC
I always waited that something happens on the map. But nice use of theme and now I know how to be a successfully politician :)
fishbrain
30. Dec 2012 路 14:36 UTC
Interesting idea, well done!