Social Distancing Simulator

by ruoyu

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.40

Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.98

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.68

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.28

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.84

Play: https://fishpondstudio.com/ld46/

A new virus appeared in Utopia. The survival of the town depends on you, governer!

1. Your citizens will go to work, social places and home every day. They can get infected by contact

2. Each day, you will get one action point, you can use it to activate policies, take actions or close
down social places. Use your mousewheel to scroll

3. Infection has an incubation period and will develop into "asymptomatic", "mild" or "serious"

4. "Serious" infections needs to be hospitalized. Your goal is to make sure your hospital will not go
over its capacity, i.e. flatten the curve

5. You can pause/resume the simulation by pressing the button on the top bar or SPACE key

6. Reovered people will get immunity. You will win when there's no new infection and the hospital
has not been overloaded

Modding the Game

You can easily mod this game by tweaking in-game parameters. You can create a sharable URL and other people can play your modded version! Share your mod in the comment. The latest instructions can be found here: https://fishpondstudio.com/ld46/mod.txt

Tech

Cocos Creator (Rendering) + Mithril.js (UI). Font used: Josefin Sans.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/insraq

Comments25

Marston20 Apr 2020, 02:06

Was a little confusing as to how to get started. But overall cool concept.

mehrdadsh20 Apr 2020, 07:34

i kind of choose somthing with boids and social distancing too but very different from yours, congrats on the effort, you worked alot on this

sneakycocoon20 Apr 2020, 07:39

Even though i didn't get it at the start, watching the dots bobbing around is great fun!

scottthoo20 Apr 2020, 07:41

watching the dots fly here and there :eyes:

Jason Woerner20 Apr 2020, 07:49

Too soon? I don't know how accurate these conditions are, but this simulator was really cool and a great way to show just how fast a pathogen can spread. I was never able to beat it, but I had a lot of fun shutting everything down and trying to avoid the inevitable collapse of my entire health system. The swarming mechanics were especially cool.

VerttiXPertti20 Apr 2020, 08:01

It works well, but I felt like there weren't enough things to spend the points on. At the end I kept getting points and the amount of infected was going down, so I just kind of waited there and did nothing. There also weren't many choices to be made. I didn't ponder long on the things to spend points on. I was just checking boxes from a list. Except for the mild symptom people going to the hospital/home. That was an interesting choice which required some thinking and I wished there were more of those. Balancing this type of game must be hard, so props for taking the challenge.

Ruoyuauthor20 Apr 2020, 09:21

@verttixpertti Thanks for your feedback. The initial idea is to have some tech tree like "Policy Tree" (like Civ 5) but I couldn't finish it in 48h. That would require some more strategic thinking when activating policies.

This is a sandbox simulation which means depending on how lucky you are (and how early is your social distancing measure), the gameplay will have very different result.

zzox20 Apr 2020, 13:08

Made it to 14 days before my hospital was overloaded, but immediately after people starting getting better, cool concept and implementation

SteelySam20 Apr 2020, 13:19

Day 29 curve flattened, great job on the game

FussenKuh20 Apr 2020, 14:04

Cool concept! It's a simple game, but, it was quite satisfying to see the effects of my policy choices. Being thrown immediately into the game was a bit overwhelming at first, but, then again that's pretty much reality in a real outbreak situation. Great job!

Listonos20 Apr 2020, 16:30

I am little prejudiced against Covid games but this was very enjoyable. Good feedback to the player and nice to see people moving around.

itsarjunsinh20 Apr 2020, 19:30

Slick UI. The game has the right amount of difficulty. I lost twice before I won. The small critique that I have is that the game doesn't punish the player for letting the population get infected. Keeping the *cost* of victory (deaths) to minimum could also be an additional target.

BinaryPrinciple20 Apr 2020, 21:39

Love the UI, very simple but give you the info you need right away. Keep this idea and keep it growing.
I have a soft spot for simulator and builders so this hit rights in.

RNGames20 Apr 2020, 21:45

Very cleverly tied the theme to current events. Gameplay is fun and could be expanded in many ways. I would have loved to see some graphs of the data though.

IronyGames20 Apr 2020, 21:54

Cool idea and very topical! It shows you've put a lot of effort in the display, although I wish I could zoom out to see all of the households. And allowing game parameter configuration through queryParams is genius!

As feedback, I wish every night the day would pause waiting for my action to see how the people change their behavior clearlier.

LanaLux21 Apr 2020, 01:54

This is cool, is there a win condition?

NoobException21 Apr 2020, 09:42

I love how you have made game out of 3b1b spread visualisation!

Was really interesting to play it :)

bellatrion21 Apr 2020, 12:05

The simulation of people is very satisfying to watch :) It took me several tries to figure how to not overload the hospital.

Ruoyuauthor21 Apr 2020, 13:10

@lanalux The win condition is that all your citizen are recovered without overloading your hospital.

Ruoyuauthor21 Apr 2020, 13:12

@noobexception I wasn't aware of the 3b1b spread visualization but then I googled the video and realize it is quite similar indeed!

SSStormy21 Apr 2020, 18:35

Pretty neat interactable!

My only gripe was with the UI. I'm on a 1080p display and it was a bit awkward to know that there are various houses I should be looking at to get a feeling of how the spread works, but couldn't intuitively due that due to the fact that most of them were offscreen? I wonder how the UI would feel when all the information is presented to you at once. I think that at first the amount of information may be a bit much but you'd (at least me) quickly realize that the dynamics aren't that complicated.

Another problem was the cyan footer menu thingy. It too was contributing to the awkward UI experience I had.

Other than that, the visuals and the game are solid :).

games.spu.io21 Apr 2020, 19:01

This was surprisingly fun. Bit overwhelming on first try and a bit too easy the third time around, but well executed concept.

alferbayter22 Apr 2020, 19:39

I really enjoyed it! The game loop of take an action and see what happens on the town was very satisfying. Found it a bit annoying to have to scroll up and down though.

Sierpinski-Simon22 Apr 2020, 19:57

Great job on the game!