Casually Comitting Tax Evasion by Frizuo
There are two inevitable things in life, death and taxes. Logically delaying death will not be too practical so how about delaying taxes and angering the government? Sounds great to me too! Anyways this is my first game jam so the game isn't polished but I hope you like it!
Ludum Dare 50 342022 92206 pm.png
Changelog: Fixed UI stuff so you don't need to play in fullscreen anymore :)
IF YOU CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO PLAY Here is the general strategy: Subtract from either your sales or business expense until your taxable income turns green, after that add the values you subtracted back into the personal expenses value. Type the taxable income into the income section of the green tax slip and the total of donations+personal expense into the writeoff section. The property tax slip just needs you to write down what’s on the computer screen.
Try following this while in the tutorial because you will have unlimited time!
Couldn't make a proper tutorial because of irl stuff :p
| Link | https://github.com/frizuo/Ludum-Dare-50 |
| Link | https://frizuo.itch.io/casually-committing-tax-evasion |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/casually-comitting-tax-evasion |
Ratings
| Overall | 462th | 3.177⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 577th | 2.567⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 119th | 3.75⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 290th | 3.672⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 301th | 3.466⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 215th | 3.429⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 53th | 3.882⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 389th | 3.069⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 37🗨️ |
I had a really hard time figuring out what I was supposed to be doing. It felt weird that my papers kept sliding across my desk like it was ice, and the papers being in the foreground of the tutorial text really made it hard to learn the mechanics.
Once I realized there was a second game screen I was supposed to be looking at, I made some progress, but I still struggled with understanding the quota for a bit.
Cool game!
Here is the general strategy: Subtract from either your sales or business expense until your taxable income turns green, after that add the values you subtracted back into the personal expenses value. Type the taxable income into the income section of the green tax slip and the total of donations+personal expense into the writeoff section. The property tax slip just needs you to write down what's on the computer screen.
I meant for this to imitate how frustrating it is to do taxes in real life, guess I was a bit too accurate :p
Here is the general strategy: Subtract from either your sales or business expense until your taxable income turns green, after that add the values you subtracted back into the personal expenses value. Type the taxable income into the income section of the green tax slip and the total of donations+personal expense into the writeoff section. The property tax slip just needs you to write down what’s on the computer screen. Couldn’t make a proper tutorial because of irl stuff :p
Try following this while in the tutorial because you will have unlimited time!
- First of all, if you have long texts, don't give them a pixel art font. It is really hard to read and makes understanding it harder
- It was really hard to understand what you meant with the text since you had a lot of game specific words in it. Color coding things could have helped, as well as making sure that things are named the same in tutorial text and game itself (Never found where the grand total I was supposed to be under was)
It seemed like a cool idea, but I unfortunately didn't understand anything about it (was able to submit property tax without getting arrested)
I will say that it was extremely confusing to figure out what to do at first - the tutorial being a fat wall of text on the background made for a not-so-fun experience at the beginning.
But once I figured everything out I had a great time playing!
"How to play" was a bit hard to understand. Mainly because I didn't read there is a secondary screen ("Income view"). In addition to color-coding shortcut (as said by @bangthewall), you could maybe add a screenshot of "Income view" on this webpage.
It was a bit confusing to get going at first but I enjoyed it once I got going on it.
One critique was, there was a lot of text I was supposed to read in game but it wasn't the easiest font to read, while also you had other game objects covering the text.
The graphics were nice and reminded me of games of my childhood. I think the whole game including the premise felt very C64-ish, games like Oil Imperium come to mind. The music was interesting, it sounded a bit like a nod to The Godfather theme, was this intended?
I can't say all that much about the gameplay because to be honest, I found it a bit hard to grasp, but I would like to comment a little bit about accessibility.
The more complex a game's mechanics are, the more important it is to deliver an accessible explanation of those mechanics to ease the player into the game.
In this case, the introduction is done via a "wall of text", which can cause players to lose interest because they want to play instead of reading a manual, especially in a game jam.
For a game with complex rules, this can generally be achieved by different means:
* Introducing different parts of the game level by level
* A tutorial (interactive manual)
* An infographic that visually explains what to do and how to do it.
The third option is most suited for a game jam since it only requires a single image that is mostly made up of sprites you already have. The other two take more time to set up. And if you present the player with text, make sure to deliver is in digestible chunks.
When it comes to keyboard input, it is often advisable to pick keys that are next to each other. I think you used q, t and p for centering the corresponding letters, which is a good mnemonic, but players who want to use this feature more often would struggle accessing the keys fast because they are quite a bit spaced out.
Sometimes the simpler mechanic is the better one even though I imagine it is tempting to play around with all the features a game engine has to offer (and I fall into this trap quite often). So maybe instead of using "floaty" letters that run the danger of drifting off screen, it would have been a better choice to use normal objects that stay in place, which could have made the three centering keys obsolete which would have simplified the game's control scheme and helped the player focus more on the actual mechanics of how to avoid taxes.
Overall I think you realized a fresh concept and created something new. That in and of itself is very impressive, especially for a first entry. My criticism is mostly about the tools of the trade: What mechanics can I use to realize my idea in a way that makes the game fun to interact with? How can I make the player understand the game in an enjoyable manner? These things grow over time with each game you make. What is more important is to come up with clever ideas to create games that stand out among the crowd and I think you are on the right track there.
Nice one, keep up the great work!