My favourite gamejam so far! At first I didn't like the theme at all, then I realised that I could take it to mean political power and an idea began to form (thanks shower!).

Since I'm a programmer I wanted to spend the majority of time programming. So I decided to make a 2D simulation of a totalitarian state with different actors who influence each other.

When I saw the first simulated citizens wandering around and having kids, I was really excited.

The art was to be as simple as possible, to allow me to focus on gameplay, but I think it turned out pretty nice as I limited the palette to just one color (red) and shades of grey.

I got stuck for quite a while on nice blood effect. Particle effects in Unity felt a bit out of style (or I don't know how to use them properly). I used 4 copies of the same sprite, rotated and scaled in code, layered over each other. To make the center part darker I had to use a custom shader, which seems like overkill for such a small effect. (maybe also why Unity keeps randomly crashing).

Saturday evening I had playable prototype and on Sunday I added the police and then spent a lot of time on a nice tutorial. I added soundtrack from my friend and brother-in-law CR Hougaard and some sound effects I found online. I tried to make everything fit the dark mood of the game.

Definitely recommend sticking to 2D, it really leaves more time for tuning and polishing.

Overall I'm glad I participated again!

Feedback is always appriciated.