- 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.
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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