Unsocial Media by CreativeWhisper

made by CreativeWhisper for LD 40 (COMPO)

A game about social media and their effects. You are an influencer trying to make a living with your image, but that has a high cost. The more followers you have the more pressure you will suffer and the harder it will be to maintain them. Try to stay sane while you win followers and live "influencer life".

IMPORTANT: The game works fine on 1366x768 but may be unplayable on other resolutions. Sorry!

UPDATE: I added a post-compo version with some visual fixes including resolution (i hope). If the compo version is unplayable for you, try the post-compo. THANK YOU!

Be a socializer!

Retain your followers, keep posting, keep sharing, keep updating. Match the mood of your posts with the Hashtag of the day. Don't worry, your followers will excuse your bad posts.

Until they don't.

Faking the mood and going personal/spicy will boost your followers. But everything has a cost.

Survive. This is the Social Media Age.

The more followers you got, the more difficult it will be to please them.

PS: The game is far from perfect, i had to cut a lot of features for my lack of programming knowledge. The game would have been getting darker and sinister when the number of followers rises, the camera would become a flamming eye, the font changes to a more creepy one, the messages become darker... but i hope that the message that i try to convey is clear.

Windows	https://creativwhisper.itch.io/unsocial-media
macOS	https://creativwhisper.itch.io/unsocial-media
Linux	https://creativwhisper.itch.io/unsocial-media
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/unsocial-media

Ratings

Overall	646^th	2.586⭐	37🧑‍⚖️
Fun	656^th	2.314⭐	37🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	360^th	3.114⭐	37🧑‍⚖️
Theme	436^th	3.214⭐	37🧑‍⚖️
Humor	322^th	2.729⭐	37🧑‍⚖️
Mood	590^th	2.343⭐	37🧑‍⚖️
Given		35🗳️	35🗨️

Feedback

Neowedge

04. Dec 2017 · 20:08 UTC

Great concept!

DiegoCTorguet

04. Dec 2017 · 21:58 UTC

It's a bit messy because of the rush of the jam, but once you get the concept it is nice. It is always cool to see this topics transformed into social criticism.

jfraser314

09. Dec 2017 · 18:24 UTC

I like the idea, and the UI is fun in concept, but there were definitely some bugs/lag that made it hard for me to play. Great job/start though!

Wesxdz

09. Dec 2017 · 18:26 UTC

I liked the idea, but it would have been much cooler with better graphics and sound effects!

🎤 CreativeWhisper

09. Dec 2017 · 18:30 UTC

Yeah @wesxdz i runned out of time and didn't have time to add sounds and make personalized buttons etc. Thanks for your feedback!

🎤 CreativeWhisper

09. Dec 2017 · 18:31 UTC

@jfraser314 the game required a lot of programming and i'm not a programmer myself, a lot of code is buggy or ineficient. Thanks for your feedback i appreciate it :-D

Sibi

09. Dec 2017 · 18:49 UTC

Awesome take on the theme!

I had to battle with Unity layouts this jam as well, so I can understand the resolution problems. It's really not designed for this kind of thing :D

I didn't quite understand the difference between the different kinds of media. So I always opted for writing a post because it had the shortest path to the next menu :D
Not entirely sure if it's intentionally becoming ridiculously fast but it certainly added to the experience. In the end I was struggling to post anything and stopped caring what I was posting.

🎤 CreativeWhisper

09. Dec 2017 · 19:03 UTC

Thanks for your feedback @Sibi !! Yeah, on the original design each type of media would take a different time to complete and your followers would react in different ways (also penalizing repetition), but i had to cut the feature for the lack of time. And the increasing speed is intentional, the reduction time between hashtags is directly proportional to the number of followers that you have when the game "ticks". So the more followers you have, the more demanding they become and you must react faster or use the wildcards.

sgadrat

09. Dec 2017 · 19:18 UTC

Interesting game with something to say. I definitely did not understood the mechanic of money. Is there a way to earn it or is is actually a timer? Anyway, putting the player in a rush to write anything that is trendy is well done.

🎤 CreativeWhisper

09. Dec 2017 · 19:24 UTC

Thanks @sgadrat that was my focus on the development :-). The money you got it's relative to the followers you got and also the money detracted in each tick, so you must increase your followers to survive in the very long run. But it's not well balanced nor properly explained so i understand your confusion.

RockhopperGames

10. Dec 2017 · 08:08 UTC

I like the idea here, but I don't think the timer was the best way to explore the theme. Even at the start of the game, I don't have enough time to consider what my choices mean or read any of the text, and later on I don't even have time to click on anything. I suspect a slower game more focused on increasingly hard decisions would have portrayed your message a bit stronger, since what I'm mainly focusing on when playing this game is how fast I can menu. Still, good work for attempting to put together a social commentary game in 48 hours!

feips

10. Dec 2017 · 10:47 UTC

Interesting concept, I just didn't really understand what effects what and the UI often blended out for no reason.

conk

10. Dec 2017 · 13:20 UTC

Decent concept but execution could be a lot better. Buttons occasionally stopped appearing and understanding why what I did was bad/good was difficult to figure out. As you mention, the resolution is a bit funky if not used at the resolution it was designed for, ideally it's best to account for all options when the engine you use offers them.

Sounds rather negative, but don't let that get to you, Ludum Dare is all about learning and improving your own games and less about competing with others, keep at it! The critique on social media is a valid route to go as long as the game is ultimately fun.

🎤 CreativeWhisper

10. Dec 2017 · 13:44 UTC

Thanks for all the feedback that you are sending guys, i really appreciate it. It's pretty obvious that the execution is the worst part of the game and i need to improve my programming skills for the next compo. Ludum Dare is a good tool to keep iterating your skills and i will keep doing so :-)

ursagames

10. Dec 2017 · 16:53 UTC

Nice take on the theme! I think it might have worked better if the menu stayed up and the trends just changed on a timer- that way if you mistime your post it would end up going against the new trend. The reactions were pretty funny though, and the animations associated with them looked great!

ACamara

12. Dec 2017 · 13:10 UTC

Cool idea. For some reason the menu always disappeared when I was about to say something. I suppose I miss the opportunities for social media. That'll explain why I'm that bad at it irl lol!

Dj Depressive

12. Dec 2017 · 13:46 UTC

It's a cool concept but the UI is a bit off-putting. I agree with @ursagames that the menu shouldn't go down, it should be upp at all times. I also think the passing of days should be clearer and points as well. I understand that as a creator it can be hard to make stuff easier to see / understand, since you already know where everything is at since you placed it there. But as a player who jumped in with no prior information of the game the experience was very confusing. However, besides all the flaws of this game, it's a solid concept and I think you should continue developing it. If you want to learn how to make better looking unity UI I would recommend watching this video from Brackeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc8ac_qUXQY

🎤 CreativeWhisper

12. Dec 2017 · 15:01 UTC

Thank you @dj-depressive, I'll check that out and try to learn all i can for the next try :-)

conrad123

12. Dec 2017 · 16:30 UTC

This might be the coolest take on the theme that I've seen. Unfortunately the implementation could use a lot of work. I understand that you are under a time crunch, but the mechanics really didn't make sense for me. What posts should I do to boost followers? How do I boost my mental health? And most importantly, how do I earn more money? I always ended up losing because I ran out of money. I didn't know how to make any! It became frustrating just to watch my money slowly run down, with nothing I could do about. And often, when I would try to post, the menu would go away! This seems like a small thing, but as a player, it's really really frustrating. It's like the game is trying to work against you. However, each of these things can be fixed, after the constraints of the jam. I trust that, if you had more time, you could make a really amazing game. I wouldn't give up on this idea!

🎤 CreativeWhisper

12. Dec 2017 · 16:49 UTC

Thanks for your feedback @conrad123 ! As i said, i'm a very bad programmer, some of the mechanics don't work because of that. You win money based on the followers you have and the money detrated by day increases by time and number of followers. The only method to gain enough money is keep increasing your followers, but that works against you. And yeah, the fact that the game works against you is intended and related to the theme of the LD, but obvously the execution on my part was very poor. Something to improve for the next ludum dare i guess :)

Thanks for your sincere feedback, i really apreciate it :D

AMastryukov

12. Dec 2017 · 17:17 UTC

**Pros:** Interesting concept & social commentary. UI design was cool.

**Cons:** Buggy. No explanation/tutorial.

This is an interesting idea with a somewhat unsuccessful execution. It is neither terrible nor great, but somewhere in between. It was a unclear how certain hashtags would relate to the moods and types of posts, perhaps because of a bug? I was also not sure how the game relates to the theme until I read your posts - in either case it wasn't explicit in the gameplay itself.

sunnray

12. Dec 2017 · 17:38 UTC

The idea is fun! And even if you didn't put there everything you planned, the gameplay seems pretty exciting too. I liked how the reactions changed when the mood was decreasing (or was it because of the amount of followers? hmmm).

Raphael

12. Dec 2017 · 18:05 UTC

I found the game to be kind of confusing. It often wasn't very clear what type of medium and mood I should chose.
An example would be "#SongWithDinosaur" I thought since its a song it should be a video (because audio and all, it's a song afterall), and as a mood I chose silly, since it's about a dinosaur after all. But my followers just disliked it.

Another thing is that the prompts are a bit too quick you often don't even have time to think(maybe this was intentional, because the game is criticizing the modern social media age).

But the idea of showing all the negative effects a social media life can bring is a really good one! (But just simply having a stat saying mental health seems like it's dumbing down mental health too much)
And it also fits the theme, the more followers you have the more problems you will have.

🎤 CreativeWhisper

12. Dec 2017 · 19:24 UTC

Thanks @sunnray ! In fact, both answers are correct. If your mood is low enough OR your followers are becoming a huge group of morons, the phrases change to show that and put more pressure on you :)

🎤 CreativeWhisper

12. Dec 2017 · 19:30 UTC

Thanks @raphael !
1) mmmm, that's strange. "Silly" was de correct mood for that hashtag, maybe you encountered a bug or push the button on the exact milisecond when the hashtag disappear.
2) Yeah, that's intended. The time between hashtags start at 4 seconds and is becoming more quick related with your number of followers and the time that has passed. It can even reach 1 second!
3) Yeah, putting something that important in only one numerical value is dumb it a lot. That was the only solution that occurs to me in so little time. If I work on a more advanced version that is something that would change for sure.

Ekilibr

12. Dec 2017 · 21:59 UTC

The idea is interesting, and having to guess which type of content could best fit the top trending hashtags may not be that far from a certain type of influencer's way of thinking oO

The game made me think about it twice, well done!

falak

18. Dec 2017 · 15:56 UTC

good idea, practice a little worse

picapica

21. Dec 2017 · 18:06 UTC

I can't get the Linux version to start, I only get a black screen. I've been having weird troubles lately so not sure if it's my fault or not...