I’m a member of Team JMCJ, and this is our Ludum Dare Jam 50 entry!

Appeasing The Board is a strategy simulation game. In the game, you play as a recently-appointed CEO of a major company. Each quarter, you are presented with four scenarios, and you have to decide how to act upon each of them. Each scenario has varying effects on 4 key areas of company performance: Cash, Morale, Productivity, and Reputation. Your goal is to maximize all of them, which can challenging at times. At the end of each year, your Board of Directors will determine if you should remain in your position, or be let go. Keep them happy, and keep your job!

How did we apply the theme? Sometimes, the four scenarios you are given in a quarter are not ideal, and you will have to sacrifice something. Because of that (and also maybe because this game has little to no balance), it is inevitable that you will be fired at some point. But your goal is to stick around as long as possible.

Appeasing The Board was written in Python. Pre-built versions for Windows and macOS exist so you do not need to install Python if you use those version. Otherwise, or if you run a different OS, you should install Python 3.10 and PyGame 2.1.2, and run the game from source (entry point is src/main.py).

This is our third Ludum Dare game, but our first one in Python/PyGame. We decided to switch from Java/JavaFX to give ourselves a new challenge. Since we changed languages, it took some time to learn the new frameworks and such, but we feel it was a good learning experience. We still felt like we were able to deliver a complete experience, even with these new challenges. While this definitely won't be as polished as some other games made with real game engines, we use these events more for the programming challenge, and so we enjoyed having to problem solve things we might have just gotten for free from other game engines.

Enjoy!

Credits

• Cam: Art
• David: Music/Sounds
• Jack: Development
• Parker: Development
• Trevor: Development