I love the premise of playing as the town and the art direction really nails that well! I'm not too sure how the mechanics lined up with said premise since it seems to be more of an RTS? nice job being able to split and delegate units to different tasks
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It is sort of an RTS.
So when my buddy and I were brainstorming I noticed a lot of ideas we'd come up with were already games in and of themselves. Because the idea of reversing a role in a game honestly isn't that wild of an idea and is a good way to come up with new game mechanics. So instead we decided to just lean into that.
Cause at the end of the day, a game is going to feel like... a game.
So where we landed was one of our fave genres, Survival-Horror. One of our fave games, Silent Hill. And were like "Silent Hill, but you're the town." That's the role reversal.
And if you were the town... what would you do? Well, it might very well play like an RTS. (we originally went in with a pikmin idea, but landed more on C&C red alert, cause time crunch)
What is Tetris but you move the screen? It's still just a puzzle game. The genre didn't shift, but the role did. Where as a mario style action platformer where you move the ground, the role reversed and the genre shifted to a autoscroll platform puzzler. We didn't really think the genre was really the important part, but rather the role which was reversed.
[edit] it also helps that we usually do take liberties with game jam ideas. We once did a jam years ago where the prompt was just a few words you had to choose from. The only 2 words I remember were "beguile", and "deceit". So we made a game called "Be Guile, sit in Da Seat" where you were Guile from Street Fighter going on a date and you show up at a restaurant and have to get out to the balcony and sit in a seat.
Our philosophy is generally... it's a game jam, have fun with it.