Powerless

by ondrej-paska

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.84

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.47

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.90

Theme★★★★★★★★★★4.21

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.42

Mood★★★★★★★★★★4.00

Stay in power as long as you can.

Citizens of your state grow old and have kids. Some of them turn into dangerous radicals who want to overthrow you.
Their ideology can spread to others, so make sure to deal with them right away.

You can kill them, but that might make other citizens around reconsider their support for you.

Jailing them will remove their corrupting influence for as long as 20 years.

If there are enough conforming citizens around, the radicals will eventually lose their zeal.

If there are more unfaithful citizens near each other, they quickly become radicalized.

Any upstanding citizen can be made to join the police force. Police are always loyal to the state. Their presence makes dissenters become conforming citizens.

Clicking on any citizen shows you available actions and status.

Pro-tip: ctrl/cmd + click = kill, shift + click = jail

Gameplay video

Credits

Programming, Design: Ondrej Paška

Design Feedback: Veverka Novicka

Soundtrack: CR Hougaard SoundCloud

Other Sounds: https://freesound.org/, "Gate" sound: Tomlija

Thanks for inspiration Eric Liu (TED-Ed)

Comments17

Simple Ghost31 Jul 2017, 17:46

I enjoyed it! Visuals are simple, yet very well made. Note to myself: You cannot just kill people with different political opinions! :D

uzyfeo31 Jul 2017, 20:22

This is quite fun!

Saithir31 Jul 2017, 20:41

It's hard to call this "fun", cause it's not exactly the point here, but well done, well done indeed.

goncalomb31 Jul 2017, 21:05

I always love this type minimalist simulation games. Bonus points for combining it with a kind of dystopian state. Had to stop by year 500, didn't felt like radicals were going to win, they were just bunched up near the prison spawning more radical children while I was killing them.

yopox1 Aug 2017, 10:06

I loved it !
Found out that killing all dissidents is not always a preposterous idea… In this game of course :o

PavelSovushkin1 Aug 2017, 14:13

Realy intresting idea. I fust watch what happen.

MAT4DOR1 Aug 2017, 16:24

Liked the game! Using the police to separate the radicals, from the conforming is easy. And makes the game go for a long time.

ondrej.paskaauthor1 Aug 2017, 19:47

Thanks for the feedback everyone! After playtesting with my roommates, I thought it was gonna be too hard. But it seems that everyone found it very easy! Very competent dictators here :D I will maybe revisit this later and add some difficulty settings.

zgragselus1 Aug 2017, 22:03

I dont think this is too hard ("should I start building my own country?" ... nevermind!). I liked it.

I lacked some uprising event though. That could be interesting.

M-13 Aug 2017, 19:03

I lasted 269 years, which is more than I expect to live, so I think won the game. :smile:

I like the concept and the minimalist graphics. The game is well polished and the rules complexity is just perfect - they are not trivial, but simple, easy to learn and also very intuitive, which allows this game to be played *casually*.

In my opinion this game is perfectly suited tablets (after figuring out how to solve scrolling).

Byla rudá barva radikálů zvolená náhodou? :wink:

roguenoodle4 Aug 2017, 11:08

Very interesting idea and great execution. Would love to see this expanded with a layer of diplomatic decisions that need to be made, and even a simulation of various classes (rich/poor, etc) and how they react to the decisions made. Nice work!

Local Minimum5 Aug 2017, 14:32

First I tried to manage peoples opinion and that went rather poorly, so I spent fifty to a hundred years shooting everyone close to the center square and when the population had gotten more manageable I jailed people and killed them as soon as they got out. Really awful moral there! Interesting concept game and interesting in how hard it was to play it well and still remain human in any form. One minor detail. It would have been nice if the panning around was a bit more aggressive so that when mouse came close to edge the camera would move. Also the UI with stats seemed to capture the click events and block me from jailing people if I didn't re-pan the view first. In total: Really good and interesting game!

Archimagus9 Aug 2017, 00:37

Nice take on the theme. My team thought about doing political power as ours as well, but we didn't. The graphics were quite simple but worked for the game. My only complaint is that there didn't seem to be a win condition. Is it just a "See how long you can go" game? I found that by jailing all the dissenters I was able to keep people corralled pretty well to one section of the map with the police.

PBG9 Aug 2017, 04:04

Very very cool game. A great spin on the theme, and I like how much personality has been injected into the minimalist graphics (the red dots beating up the center is chilling). I could use a hotkey for making people into police. It might also be fun to have some alternate geometries or other factors at play in the field. Very cool game.

Jupiter_Hadley9 Aug 2017, 16:49

Very deep game. I included it in my Ludum Dare 39 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk50HLqX0cU