For the Compo, I'm going to make a game that pays homage to the classic dark ride by Disney, "It's a Small World". You play engineers tapped to create a new, family-friendly attraction for the 1964 World's Fair, trying to iterate your design until it is sufficiently delightful for the test families you put through your designs.

The gameplay will involve an "all-at-once" deck building game, where all your cards are dealt at the start of each hand to form a panorama. Each card has a power that you can activate by clicking on it, and the order you click on them will be the key to maximizing your "delight" score for the audience. In addition to the wonderful facades that you will be constructing, you'll also have to manage the lighting, motors, and water pumps behind the scenes to make it all work.

At least, that's the idea. We'll see how things go over the next 30-some-odd hours. I'm starting late!

So, I got quite a bit done on my "1964 World's Fair Imagineering Sim Panoramic Deckbuilder" game. Here's a screenshot:

Basically, it's a deck builder game, where you are creating a deck of cards that represent the proposed elements for an attraction you're pitching to Walt Disney for the 1964 World's Fair (which is what the famous attraction was originally created for).

Your entire deck is shuffled and dealt out in a line, creating a panorama representing the entire ride experience as it stands. This creates a "pitch" for the ride. You can then go over the "pitch", approving and rejecting design elements to pare down the ride to something good.

By managing the design elements, power, water flow, and lighting, you try to generate two currencies in the game: "delight", which represents the general charm and innovation of the attraction, and "research", which represents the drive and creativity of the engineers iterating on the design.

You get "delight" by approving design elements, with bonuses for doing things like having animated characters, well-lit characters, and cohesive themes. You get "research" by rejecting design elements, sending them back to the engineering team for more brainstorming.

Once you've completed a pitch, you are awarded money depending on how much more delightful your pitch is this time than last time, because Walt is impressed with your progress. If you fail to make your ride more delightful than last time, it's game over, and the ride is frozen at your last pitch. Otherwise, you can spend your dollars on building items, and you can spend your research points on making new items available to build.

Right now, I have art for about 10 cards, and the UI is largely working for going over the cards and approving or rejecting them. I've got the card effects for many of the cards working, but not all, and I don't have the buying/selling UI working yet. We'll see how far I get tomorrow.

My game where you design an attraction for the 1964 World's Fair (where the popular Disney ride "It's a Small World" originally premiered before it was moved to the parks) is coming along!

All the mechanics are working. You can accept and reject design elements, you can combine backdrops with foreground elements, you can drive power and water pressure around, you can illuminate areas, and you can drive a forklift to move cards along the tableau. You earn the research and delight currencies of the game properly, and you can spend them to buy new cards. I've got a rudimentary splash screen and on boarding process working, too.

Still to do:

• Endgame detection.
• Interstitial scene where you convert delight to money. so that you have your budget for the following pitch.
• MORE CARDS!
• Balance.

Okay, there's a fully playable version of the game done:

http://barkingdoginteractive.com/1964/

This is not going to be the final revision. I've got a few hours left, during which time, I'll add some more cards, tweak the balance a little, and bug hunt. As I write this, I have about three hours left to get the final tweaks in, but the link above is where the final game will live.

Right now, there are only two playsets: Holland and Japan. In a more fleshed-out version, there would be several playsets for the attraction, but working alone, there's just no way to add a lot of art content and have any hope to balance it all, so I'm going to focus on trying to make the balance a little better and add the currently-missing water pressure driven cards.

Well, in the last few minutes, I uploaded a final version that has several new playsets, new water features, and tweaked difficulty levels. I managed to get in what is hopefully a critical mass of content to make it fun to build your attractions. I hope people like it.

You can play it here:

http://barkingdoginteractive.com/1964/

What I can't figure out is how to actually enter the game into the compo. I have a game page, but I'm not seeing the buttons shown in the video for the Compo or Jam selection. Hopefully, this will get ironed out before judging begins!