Thanks for the thoughtful and useful feedback! I agree with all points. I ended up going a bit broader on the game than I probably should have when a smaller slice of this idea with more time to polish and rework the UI would have been more pleasant to play. Oh well, live and learn.
Viewing post in Utopia Simulator jam comments
Heh, it's not as complex as it may look. Probably 70% of the development time went to writing parsers and their logic so I can just feed dictionaries of mostly text into the game and have it spit out, organize and load all the policies and events that occur. After that, I just wrote and wrote and wrote...
Not the funnest programming exercise, but it did make it easy for me to get content into the game once it was built.