Your Life Counts

Hey, this was a neat way of using the "make it count" theme! Good work on your project, and best of luck.

Hey foodius

Thank you for playing my game, and I am super happy you liked it.

I agree that the consequences in the game could have been higher, but for the jam I kept them really low. I chose to do this because I would make sure that the players in the jam get a feeling of the whole game, and they did not only play the beginning of the game. I believe for a lot of players this is a really weird game, and if I a had made it too difficult, I believe that a lot of players would have stopped playing the game really fast. But if you plays the newest version of the game, I have made it harder and the life choices has higher consequences.

How this game is programmed is a bit complex, but you can say that the game is hard coded. For example do you have to learn the basic knowledge before you can have a social life. This actually gives the player an option to try to live a life were you never learns to talk, walk... and this means that you never will get a social life, you will never be able to go to school, you will never get an adult life, and you will also have a hard time surviving.  

I have tried to make the story line depend on what you chooses to do in your life. So you can keep living a super simple life and never get a wife or kids, or you can get 10 kids and then leave your wife. But some choices is a bit more hard coded,  for example is the jobs you can get a simple list of better and better paid jobs, and the only thing stopping you from getting a job is if your knowledge level is too low.

I have sadly never played Firewatch, but I do know what it is. And another fun fact is that I hated the music I made for the game, and have changed it in the newest version of the game. But perhaps I just have heard the music too much under the development of the game. 

And one more weird fact about the development of this game was that I actually started making a completely different game for the jam, but it did not really worked, so I decided to make something different.  And it meant that I the last 3 days worked really hard to make this game. But okay I can sleep when I get even older.

Hey,

just played through your game and really enjoyed it!
I really liked how keeping up with all things in life got more difficult the older you got, it felt quite authentic and the music was really good to set the mood as well!
The soundtrack reminded me of Firewatch quite a bit (if you played that).

I also got some good laughs out of it and I guess I lived quite the interesting live, a 2 times homeless professor with 3 kids and his wive, living in a small apartment but becoming a rockstar in the end at age 59.

Overall a simple but effective idea and I´m impressed at how you got so much into it for a rather short game jam.
I´d love a bit more consequences - maybe you get ill faster or your wive leaves you when you get homeless? But it´s obvious that you only have so much time during a jam so that´s no problem at all.

Did you "hardcode" all the choices or how did you control what appeared when and under what conditions?
I wanted to get into walking simulators/storytelling games (like Firewatch) soon, so I´d be quite interested on how you approached the problem of multiple story "branches" depending on the players choices and keeping control over it.