A very solid entry that definitely should be in some video essayist’s video, an exhibition or whatever, but it’s very good!!
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Centrist Simulator's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| ANTI-CAPITALIST POWER | #2 | 4.211 | 4.211 |
Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Hi! Thanks a lot for playing :) I'm very happy you enjoyed it. I wrote a little making off/essay kind of writeup if you're hungry for that https://yo252yo.wordpress.com/2024/06/05/centrist-simulator/ =) I'll try to bring it to exhibitions or museums or whatever
- I like the writing and the heavily political word usage, suffering, strain, signaling, grouping death together so it doesn’t bother you, "racing" a crisis
- Impressive stories about each death, very curious how these were generated especially given when they seemed related to the larger gameplay moments, death in a riot, etc
- I love that the game frames solving a crisis in the context of money, as if money fucking means anything if we all die.
- I love the side effect of the gameplay where if you’re clicking like crazy you’ll likely skip over reading about the people who died, like damn, oops, guess I didn't... I didn't need to read that...
- Liked the hardest difficulty where I could impose my new world order, and how well it was going! until it wasn't.
- Overall, I love how much it forces the player to become numb to death, the fact that it is shitting on centrists, and how insurmountably difficult it *seems* (within an economic context.) Truly fantastic game, so detailed, so simple, so perfectly executed, down to the tiniest detail. Other thoughts shown in attached picture.
thank you so much for your kind words! the "accidentally dismissing deaths" was an accident and i loved it so much xD
The "narrative engine" like the rest of the game is open source so you can see how it works: https://github.com/yo252yo/normalidle/blob/main/src/narrative.js my bet was that introducing a relatively high number of small lists could yield exponential number of combinations that feel fresh even if theyre not that complex (i.e. going "horizontal" instead of vertical). I did write a lot of causes of death that can be related to climate change with the help of an LLM but I feel like we missed a lot, to be honest. But whatever I originally didnt think i'd finish the narrative engine before the end of the jam. In fact, would you believe it, I planned to release it separately as part of a game called "divided attention" that I pitched to BRIEFS https://www.goldextra.com/en/briefs-2024-death-call-open-now if they select the pitch I'll work on the engine some more and add more diversity and procedurally generated portraits cause people care about pictures much more than words xD
A very elaborate and closed experience, I really liked that you were able to easily adapt your idea to an idle game :)
Liked a lot the idea, I think it fits very well the mechanic with the message of the game.
I started with the normal difficulty since it's mandatory (and lost, obviously), then following what you said to other players I tried the impossible one... Really cool!! Lots of nice ideas packed here (the clicking like crazy just to collect 1$ lmao, packing death so they don't mean anything anymore, "useless" decisions against the crisis in the normal difficulty). I loved writing my radical ideas, hahaha. Didn't expect that kind of game with the title. Good job!
Was it a solo submission or are you a team? Because it looks quite polished!
Minor remark: when I won, I couldn't remove the notification anymore to continue playing or return to the menu.
thanks for playing and thanks for your comment.
we're a team of 3, I did the programming/writing/game design. lxvitase did the graphics/visual design and OselkaSound the SFX/music and I tried my best to do justice to their work with HTML/js xD I know for instance that the sound quality could be better, i'm still looking for the best way to do that.
As for your remark, it's on my list on post-launch features i want to add, its actually a bit hard because some stuff in the game break if I let the player progress past the victory point so I need to do it properly XD
I feel like our projects ended up having a sort of similar thread between them, but your inclusion of a sort of opponent really makes the formula work so much better! Great job! I had a couple of nitpicky comments, but they've been addressed elsewhere and overall, I really enjoyed it.
thanks for playing! your project did grab my attention but I was saving it for last because it seems a bit complicated. One of the main difference is probably that in this project I've consistently tried to make it super dead simple (i.e. good number vs bad number) so that it's accessible to everyone in a few minutes but it does come at the cost of depth and your game looks more like something I'd spend a lot of time on XD
Very polished feel with a fresh take on the idle game... Where the game itself is a reflection on our idle behavior towards climate change. Really smart way to use game mechanics to engage with the issues the game brings up. As others have said, it's really difficult! But that definitely motivated me to keep playing. Really great game!
Hard and very interesting! I liked very much the "compassion slider". Thanks for the game!
Oh boy, this had me entertained for hours. Stubborn and fond of idle games as I am, I ran my head against the wall for hours - no success. Switched difficulty to easy - no success. Meticulously thought through strategy, tested which measures would scale the best, no success. Tried my absolute hardest to click like a madman to reach public transport as soon as possible - no success. Threw up my hands, saying to myself: "Okay, this seems to be unwinnable, but now I am curious if it's even theoretically possible" - activated an autoclicker, exploited lag from the clicks and holding space to make time flow as slowly as possible - still... yupp, no success.
... And, without spoiling exactly how it DOES work and how you can win and save mankind, when I discovered that one, I fully realised this was a 6/5 for me, personally. Genius, especially because there is additional messaging to how the solution might seem to a proper centrist.
Love it, the aesthetics and music also work really well and are polished. Amazing work!
My monkey brain loves incremental games! And I love the concept of making it a sort of race. Pretty hard though, I have been trying a bunch of different strats, but I always end up behind the $train by a huge margin. Any tips?









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