Centrist Simulator
Can you save humanity from itself by idling?
This innovative minigame puts a twist on the genre by introducing an element of competition: if you want any hope for a future, you'll have to out-race the damages of the climate crisis.
Winning will require all your management skills and out-of-the-box thinking, so be a smart investor and build the right portfolio to survive the most dangerous century of the history of mankind!
Developped as part of the Fuck Capitalism Jam 2024, also available at https://www.yo252yo.com/centristsimulator/
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Centrist Simulator v1.1Aug 09, 2024
- Notes/analysis on the gameJun 08, 2024
- Still more hints for the true endJun 05, 2024
- Tiny changeJun 04, 2024
- Little mid-game-jam patchJun 03, 2024
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
This game feels impossible. I'm playing the lowest difficulty, and I don't understand what I'm doing wrong.
thanks for trying out the game! I think you're underestimating yourself, I recommend you try harder difficulties to see what they look like
Hi Love the game! The difficulty selection dosnt seem to work in the indiepocalypse version, the other difficulties are locked no matter many how many times I play. Played it here in browser and it worked great!
wow thank you so much for flagging, i was not aware of this issue, it's quite game breaking ^^ I'll investigate but I think it depends on the player OS, web browser, and so many other things that come into play when playing locally, I can only hope not everyone experiences that issue.
that's awesome :3
thanks for playing, im glad you liked it!
Testing if string length correlates to $. For science!
(could not get a screenshot quick enough before the victory screen popped up, so uh. spoilers below?)
Hi, thanks for playing the game but most importantly thanks for advancing science! I think we can conclude that the Bee movie was indeed a positive contribution to the progress of mankind, but we should be careful about generalizing this result XD
(let me know if you want an actual serious answer to how this works)
I would love a serious answer, yeah!
so the string length isnt correlated actually whatever you put in the result is random between different types of outcomes (very good, good, mediocre, I think). This was a tough decision that I thought a LOT about because idk this seems important but these are the main reasons behind:
- it would be quite technically complex to judge the proposals meaningfully, best I could do would probably be an HTTP call to a LLM but that would prevent offline play.
- that way I can balance the experience for everyone, i.e. make a run where you do politics "relatively easy but not guaranteed", i.e. make sure you can win without too much effort but you do need a sustained investment, its not just a one-click thing. Creating that vibe is what I focused on.
- finally, and perhaps most importantly, I didnt want to bias the game with my own political thoughts, I wanna be open to every radical proposals. for instance i dont believe personally that anarchism would work well, but i do wnat to encourage people to think in that direction and maybe try it out even. It's in a spirit of "no bad idea except doing nothing", though ofc you can enter bad ideas and still get points as a side result xD but maybe someone has an amazing idea that nobody has ever seen, and it would be the opposite of the game spirit to discourage that.
XD looks like I ain't good at strategizing, ended humanity at quick phase... Overall, nice game, it was fun and really innovating...
hi! thanks for playing! What difficulty levels did you try?
The fact that banning conservatives gives a gazillion signaling are just so astonishing XD
Overall, that's a pretty good game and a pretty good message about climate change
thanks for playing! to be fair it is a pretty strong signal xDD it does feel 4 orders of magnitude bigger than discovering magic XD
I'm glad my reprehensible completionism drove me to attack Impossible difficulty immediately. I'd comment on how heavy-handed the narrative is but people are still missing it so idk get heavier hands gg 5/5
thanks a lot for playing ^^ you made me wish I had kept a copy of all the different versions cause it was pretty subtle at first and i increased the heavy handedness with every playtest XDD
Just when I thought I had gotten through all the metacommentary of this game, I opened the settings to see "Confirmation Bias" and "Normalize Status Quo." Beyond being a great commentary, this game is absolutely hilarious.
yeah not a lot of people are going to stumble on these options and ultimately they dont have much impact but they werent very hard to do so when i had the idea I absolutely went for it xDD
Thanks for playing!
Is it actually possible to save everyone?
yes, but it's not easy. if you managed to win, the perfect win is not much harder you just have to be fast and lucky. if you didn't manage to win, it's very ok (i'm still working on making this a bit more discoverable). You need to think outside the box and to not be afraid to tackle challenging difficulty settings even if they seem impossible.
can you help me like idk...... i don't know how to blance this
hello! first of all, thank you for giving this game a chance! I can try to help you if you tell me more about the troubles you're facing.
but i think that the most important tip I can give you is "dont be afraid to try the impossible difficulty"
I don't know how to balance the red and the green, because the red grow faster then the green ever will be and even if I'm in normal, it feels impossible.
yes, it is impossible to win in normal difficulty, you'll remain stuck in neoliberal capitalism which is a doomed system. If you want to win, you'll have to chose the impossible difficulty which gives you access to more options. You can't win if you don't chose to face things that seem impossible.
DAMN.....Damn.....damn....... wow
You meta son of a b**ch. XD
That was amazing - point taken - and I hope you win the Jam.
Hi, thanks for playing! I hope you had a good time
I did! Getting to the endgame was the most aggravating experience I've had on itch.io - but that ending, man. It really did give me something to think about!
I disabled the CRT flicker effects but the main menu "S becomes $" flashing effect and the alerts are very jarring in a way that makes the game unplayable for me.
thanks for the feedback, I'm sorry you experienced that, I can definitely add an option to deactivate the visual effect (though right now im a bit swamped). The hope was that this effect wouldn't be too annoying because people don't spend much time on the title screen, I was anticipating they'd move to the main part of the game within seconds.
Agreed… the sound artifacts (scratching/popping) are very annoying too.
I'm still trying to get those under control :( I'm so frustrated cause I want to do justice to the work of the composer who worked with me on this but im running into the limits of html I think. Anyway I haven't given up yet it's just that things have been a bit chaotic for me lately
I have saved humanity with: Opening up our dimensional borders, legalizing communion with our patron deities, and acceleration of the heat-death of the universe.
hmmm thats a pretty unique strategy but it does check out, I cant prove it wouldnt work xDD
thanks for playing!!
Congrats! I'm happy that your contribution is one of the top entries! I am looking forward to seeing your future projects!
thank you! I'll definitely keep an eye on your future projects too! The Observer gave me tons of food for thoughts I hope I can make a project around this themes someday!
Not at all surprised that you finished in the top 5 of the FxxK Capitalism 2024 Jam, well earned!
Thank you for your kind words, congrats on your ranking too! There's so many great contributions it's hard to have to rank them xD
A bit late but I feel obligated to dedicate this game to the memory of the Centre party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_Party_(Netherlands)
Truly great job! You nailed everything, from the way you use these mechanics to say something to the heavy music used.
I’m a little bit sad now that I realize the the world won’t be saved thanks to the amazing powers of food waste ads though.
dont worry we still need stuff like food waste ads to save the world :) in the "true end" path you still need a few technologies of your choice!
thanks a lot for playing
Might be a bug, or I might be missing something. If you plan your investments right, (i.e. Refrigeration) you can break the game, to the point that the Win state doesn't trigger once the game reaches the year 2150, and goes on forever.
thanks a lot for playing and flagging this, it is indeed a bug, I'll investigate! Sorry you had to go through this. Congrats for finding this though it looks like it took quite a bit of skils to reach this point :)
the constant pop up of alert makes it hard to play
thank you for playing! it's actually a point I spent a lot of time wondering aboutand trying to fine tune it so that it's annoying at early game but can be quickly moved past. in total there should be around 15 alerts if you move the compassion slider every time, do you think it's too much? i've removed some so that it's around 10 now. thanks for the feedback
I was somehow able to beat impossible mode
thanks for playing! I guess some things only seem impossible until you try them ^^
i can't even beat the easiest difficulty, is there something i'm doing wrong?
edit:nevermind just had to become socialist
xD that's the kind of edit i like to see :) i'm happy you figured out the solution to the meta-puzzle XD sorry for the slow answer and thanks a lot for playing
I really liked the atmosphere of this game but I honestly dont liked the fact that there are coins
centrists do love their coins ^^ but there are only coins until the point where you get past them :)
oh I didnt know that. the reason why I don't love coins is because grinding for coins is addictive and I dont want to become addicted. thats why I joined this jam. but still good that they are not in your entire game.
believe it or not that's something i kept in mind! My approach was to set a hard limit of time on the game experience, every run is lost or won in less than 5 minutes to have hard stops that manage addiction to grind. I'd be surprised if anyone manages to spend more than 1h on this game there's just not that much in it. Though ofc if I discover that the counter measures arent working i'll work on new ones, we don't want the experience to be negative. In a way "coin addiciton is dangerous" is more or less the message of the game so your concern is definitely warranted!
fantastic! keep it going like this!
I'm over an hour in and I still can't beat it. I am doing carpooling, family planning, and universal education but I cannot get them upgraded to 75m in time before everything falls apart. :(
try to play in other difficulties, some will give you more actions:)
The pain I felt with the evolution of death's portrait from knowing the cause to it being just dots representing each person, jezz. Great job.
I hope you managed to save everyone in the end ^^' thanks for playing!
Hellz yeah climate change is awesome
thanks for your comment xD and don't forget that you too can profit from climate change by making the smartest investments!