Finally Done

Well I am finally done with The Social Contract, at least for now.

I did not get to everything I wanted to in the engine or the game

The idea was that it would be a narrative driven game with mini puzzles and a trust system. Much of that had to be cut due to a tight game jam deadline and real life getting in the way.

That said I am very pleased where it ended up. I was able to get a proof of concept submitted to the game Jam. The only reason I am not going to continue to work on this, is I have some other projects I really want to get started on. 

I have released the engine under the MIT license here in case anyone is crazy enough to want to play with it.

So lets break this own.

What Went Well

Go and Ebiteengine are both great technologies to use and a lot of fun to work with.

The mapping system turned out great and was much simpler to implement than I initially thought it would be.

I love how the camera turned out, you can only see it on the final map but it works great.

What went wrong

The dialog system proved to be trickier than I first thought it would be and I spent a lot of hours debugging it.

The mini-games were overly ambitious as I was on a limited schedule and building an entire engine from scratch using just a library.

The trust system got put off to long and should have been one of the first things I worked on.

Wish List

Given more time I would have...

• Abstracted this out to be more of a generic engine. Right now it is more of a framework
  
• Implemented the trust system
  
• Allowed text input on puzzles
  
• Flushed out the puzzles I had planned like ID creation and tailgating
  
• Added the full 10 levels.
  
• NPC movement
  

Maybe I will come back to this in the future and flush it out more for another game jam. It is an engine after all and it is designed to be reused.