Peace Council by guoboism

Welcome to PEACE COUNCIL!
This is a game about keeping the balance of aggressive coutries of the world, where a country will start a war instantly once he sees a neighbour vulnerable.
You play cards to affect the POPULATION or INDUSTRY value of zones, which will inventually affect the relative strength between the countries.
Every country only considers for himself, and only the concil considers peace. Also there will be random incidents that stir up the situation even further...


| Link | https://guoboism.itch.io/peace-council |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/peace-council |
Ratings
| Overall | 662th | 3.55⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 889th | 3.2⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 54th | 4.105⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 525th | 3.8⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 730th | 3.6⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 673th | 3.184⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1105th | 2.029⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 898th | 3.289⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 38🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
1. better UI to make me understand the situation and all ongoing events easier.
2. more strategic card play that allows me to reserve or foresee incoming cards.
If you make it easier to read what is going on I think this could become a really nice little game.
Nice work!
I had just updated the game on itch.io, please do try again. I have done a lot of improvements.
It seems the optimal strategy for a random game is to hurry up and destroy any adjacent cells as soon as possible, so that the countries can never wage war on each other. I wonder how they perform their global economical business and avoid starvation later on though :thinking:
As part of feedback, I'd really suggest to introduce any random end-game mechanic where we can spend large sums of money & influence, because right now there is a certain point (e.g. 200M+, 200+) beyond which these currencies have no use, and it is almost impossible to lose. And of course, it gets annoying when you have to read all the events after each turn, just to make sure you don't miss anything of importance, but I guess this would work as expected if you continued the development and many new events eventually got added, making it unreasonable for us to automate hiding "only some of them" :) Well, at least the "Locate" zoom-in could be replaced by a brief overview that doesn't do any zoom (which is especially annoying to constantly un-zoom when we use a touchpad).
A few more points: some cards are very non-intuitive, as players aren't certain if the effect is just temporary or permanent, maybe some symbol could be used to mark permanent effects. The "advisor vs. population" icons also look very similar, they could at least use a different color. (I also didn't see a number of remaining advisors for the current turn anywhere, this could be a resolution compatibility issue, here is a screenshot.)

\+ I'm quite curious about the difficulty of development of a card-based strategy with so many options, do you have any tips for other developers from implementation standpoint, at least when it comes to high-level design? :) Were there some kind of bugs you've underestimated, and was it straightforward to cover everything on UI? (I'm hoping today's Unity development is becoming more standardized in regards to following some patterns, rather than having the expectation of making basic structure of strategy games ad-hoc without proper planning, which was sadly my experience last time.) Last but not least: are you open-sourcing the project in a future? :)
Thanks for your feedback about actual playing experience and suggestion. I will take into account for next update. Some actions will change zone status permenently and some will just cast "temporary effect", which always leaves a icon on the zone with "X turns" in zone hover panel, but the description on card should be more clearified.
For tips on the development side, I really can't say such game require any specific technology rather than a lot of basic coding utilities, like Excel importer, dynamic value (a value wrapped with modifiers to allow temporary modifications) and simple grid algorithms(finding nerighbours etc).
As a turns based game, compared to action game, in fact, is a lot more easy to code, as everything is predictable. Most of the time I was designing to make the econimic model in game to be simpler and easier to understand. And how to present the data, as it seems is still has room for improve.
Unity doesnt offer too much, but you sure can find solutions in the asset store. I had been using Unity for job for more than 5 years now, I have many wishes for Unity as well. But I really dont expect too much for it.
Lastly, this wont be opensourced, and I plan to work on it to be a real commercial game later, hopefully.
Yeah it makes sense to keep the source closed if you have a vision like this, though just a side note to consider in a far future: I could still imagine maintaining some generic strategy framework as a separate open source project, while keeping only the game (with all the current assets and fine-tuned game logic) behind the closed doors. In a long term, once project's complexity grows, the benefits of being able to collaborate with other strategy developers and offload some work to voluntary maintainers may quickly outweigh the risks of concepts being stolen by parties who don't intend to add anything new anyway. Especially in an open ecosystem like Unity, integration of some mechanics between different types of games (or even inserting one game into another) can get interesting and complex very fast (e.g. you may introduce multiplayer yet still prefer to keep it easily extendable), and there has always been a lack of high quality libraries, especially on Asset Store (with their weird incentive structure of paywall and nonsense licensing that only benefits solo devs, which also harms their collaboration). Keeping any reusable common functionality fully open-source on GitHub and installing it via Unity Package Manager feels like a better option tbh :) But it's often a challenge to find even one library that fits your needs (and isn't neglected).
Regarding the implementation, you've mentioned some good examples: I'm sure some jam visitors would be interested in seeing the Excel data and some of its first iterations right in the project description, along with the process of how or why these choices were made. We all improvise when we have our creative moments, and yet when we're asked to replicate someone else's creative effort, we often can't decide for the life of us even on the starting point :sweat_smile: and what's worse, if something doesn't get standardized, it even gets easy to eventually forget our own solutions. The matter of OOP design patterns also gains on importance at some point, especially for a solo dev who doesn't receive any feedback on simplifying code architecture, often not even after project has been finished. Sustaining a simple yet robust economical model won't get easier later on either. There is also a difference between making Grid/Tiles from scratch vs. using Tilemap, and either you try a first thing that comes to mind, or you build up something that's more time-tested (at least you didn't need A* pathfinding yet :P). Last but not least, as you've noticed with the UI, making it responsive to support various resolutions is something Unity has always neglected helping us with (at least few years ago I've often spent majority of time just tweaking it and wishing to find some HUD library to make it more reasonable to finish a game prototype in 3 days without bugs). In any case, maybe I'm just reading into this too much; it's just that I feel like there is a lot of potential to build upon the concept you've just started, and I'm already worried about how it'll scale :) Have fun with your continued improvements!