Monster Need Friend Too

Monster Need Friend Too allows you to take on the role of a genteel beast who has only one friend. Through the magical powers of rhetoric, you can send your friend out to the village to turn the undecided townsfolk to your side. But watch out! Every turn, there's a chance a villager will join an angry mob.

The game ends when all villagers are affiliated, either as your friends, or with the mob. If you managed to build up a group of friends larger than the quickly-growing mob, you win!​​

Instructions:
Input: mouse only.

Once you start, you're taken to a character select screen. Your friends are in blue on the left. Unaffiliated villagers are in red on the right. If you mouse over a character, you'll see a little blurb about what they enjoy doing.

Click and drag one of your friends to the blue box at the bottom to select them to go into the village and try to recruit someone.

Next, pick a villager you want your friend to talk to, and click and drag them to the red box on the bottom. You will have more success if you try to match the friend and villager you choose based on their hobbies.

Now you'll be taken to the scene where your friend will try to talk to the villager. You have 3 options to try to convince the villager, or you can learn about them instead.

For those who aren't familiar with rhetoric, generally there are three components to making a convincing argument:

-Appeals to Ethos: Explain what it is about you as a speaker that should make the listener want to believe you. Politicians appeal to ethos when they eat fast food or drive an affordable car: they're saying "we can be trusted because we're just like you!"
-Appeals to Pathos: Make an emotional plea. This is anything that tugs at the heartstrings (or the fear-strings or the hate-strings). Politicians do this when they say, "We need to clean up this country/city/state!" It's not about facts, it's about inspiring you to feel like there's a problem and you should do something to solve it (i.e. vote for them).
-Appeals to Logos: Teach them something they didn't know. This is where you use facts, figures, statistics, or any extrapolation from hard data that will help convince people of something. Politicians do this when they say, "Crime has risen 10% in the last decade in major metropolitan areas!"

Good arguments have all 3 components, but for the sake of brevity, you can make only one appeal per turn. If you succeed in winning over the villager, they'll join your list of friends! The idea is to make more blue people!

Each time you end up at the character select screen, there's a chance someone will join the angry mob who is against you. This means you're on a race against the "clock" so to speak. So you may not want to ask questions! But maybe you should?

When all villagers have left (meaning there's no "red" people in the selection screen), the game is over. There is a tally in the lower right of the selection screen that shows the total number of friends and mobsters. If you have more friends than mobsters, you win! If there are more mobsters, you lose.

Make your own strategy to make sure you gain the most villagers in the shortest amount of turns and see if you win! You'll need everything you can get (so match those hobbies), and some luck!

Ben Gemmel @paracatgames - Code
John Benman @johntheperson - Art
Fonts and music from open-licensed sources (attribution on my itch.io page), but all other assets, including sound effects, were original.