itch.io

Thanks for taking the time to play it! I agree that it'd benefit from cleaner interfaces and a few explanations about how things work - we're trying to add a bit more of the protagonists inner monologue to accomplish this.

In terms of the companies economy, we've tried to do a bit of a bait and switch, where the protagonist expects to have an empowering role keeping a green project economically viable, but instead has to confront the reality of what the project is doing (and, hopefully, understand the processes that make that harm inevitable) while the project spins out of their control. Fundamentally, we don't want managing the finances to be a big part of the game mechanics because we don't want the player coming away thinking it could/should be possible to save the project. In the final game, we want player choices to be centred around feeling helpless within the company machinery while grappling with the info trickling in from on the ground, rather than from actually being empowered to manage the company. To create an arc where the player can "right" the course of the project, either balancing finances to turn a profit or pivoting spending to address the social wrongs of the company, would, in my view, be serving only to legitimise a false view of reality that excuses immense harm. Companies like this will never be concerned with climate justice, and are currently involved in land theft, neo-colonialism, and ethnic cleansing all around the world (our game is based on the real life example of Oaxaca, but we could easily have picked countless other examples), all while successfully laundering their reputations in the west by pretending to care about the environment. That is the realisation that I want our pixel protagonist to undergo. 

Sorry if that comes across as a rather polemic answer to your quick comment! My intention is just to answer earnestly why we're developing in the direction we are, and I thought that was an interesting idea to expand on 😊