Yes, we've definitely played Papers Please :D
It may take a bit of learning and practice to get good at dealing the appropriate sentence to each person. Everything a person did has an effect on how they should be sentenced. There's a lot going on under the hood - the game is built around this algorithm. It's definitely possible to give a perfect sentence consistently! I'm glad you had fun!
Maybe subjective is the better word instead of arbitrary. Take this one for example: I had a guy that gave half of his money to charity which is extremely kind! But he also stole money from an old person (I imagined a mean old rich person). So to me, he sounded a little like Robin Hood and should go to heaven. But your game said that was incorrect and he should go to hell. Does this mean Robin Hood is going to hell?? :)
You are dead right about that! Morality is very subjective, which made designing this an interesting challenge!
About your example though, if that guy only did those two things, he definitely would have gone to The Good Place. He probably did some other bad things to make him worthy of The Bad Place.
There are definitely tricky situations that arise!
Ah the subjectivity of morality… that’s a deep topic right there. I’ll have to leave that for future conversations.
And you’re right, the only other thing that the “Peter Pan” guy did is play prank calls on an elderly person, which is pretty harmless and probably tied to his plan to steal from the rich old person and give to the poor. So I stand firm in that Robin Hood should have gone to heaven :)
This is a brilliant comment because it entirely captures what we were going for in the games design! Originally, we had planned for a five day, story based experience closer to the Papers Please format with scripted characters, performance reviews and different endings (“badges”) depending on your play style in the game - time didn’t allow for this unfortunately so we scaled down to a challenge style minigame in the last few hours before submission but these moral puzzles and weird subjective judgements are the core that would have made that kind of loop super interesting :D I could definitely say that a good inspiration on this for me personally was the netflix show “The Good Place” if you’ve ever seen that - really appreciate the high praise and feedback, thanks!
Ah that’s really interesting that you planned for this moral ambiguity. Very clever.
And I definitely know first hand what it’s like to run out of time in the game jam. Sadly I was only able to finish a prototype and will have to add all my fun story ideas later. But your team should be proud of what you were able to accomplish in the short 2 day jam. Moral subjectivity aside, you made an interesting and thought provoking game! (Plus, I love Shiba dogs)
