A stressful game about making impossible choices as a nation in the middle of a civil war.

Overview

A non-linear text adventure about governing a planet of horses with thousands of typos and crappy jokes? Yup.
In Horsepower you play as Choclate, the President of Pony Planet, during a civil war.

A note on theme...

For this project I have opted out of theme, for the first time I completely and totally forgot about it after I became engrossed in my poorly written narrative :sweat:

But I really enjoyed making this and am really happy with how it came out. It was a lot of fun for me to get out of my comfort zone and use some new technologies. I hope my in-adherence to the theme does not affect your enjoyment of it, but if you believe theme to be integral to every LD game, I won't judge.

Please note: All this text is for reference only, do not feel like you have to read all of this :sweat_smile:

Guide

There are also instructions in game.
You can reference those if needed and skip this. The game is pretty self explanatory, but in case you get stuck...

You have two inputs: yes and no. To make your choices tap/click on the card in the center of the screen. You can choose between yes or no by click on different sides of the card, left or right.

Selecting an option by tapping/clicking on the card will bring up a 'confirm' button. It will also show you the impact of this choice on your stats. Green text means a stat will increase, red means it will decrease. Similarly, the coloured portion of the bar that appears displays how much each stat will be affected.

After hitting confirm, your stats will be update and you will be given your next choice. Do note that the total impact of each choice is shown, your stats may not immediately change - this is not a bug (most of the time) - some events will continue to impact your stats in future turns.

Purpose

The immediate goal of the game is to survive for as long as possible. That means keeping enough money in the bank (finances), ensuring your military is strong enough to protect your nation, keeping your world habitable for its citizens (nature), and remaining in the good graces of your public (popularity)

The overarching goal of the game is to win the war. In order to do that you have to get incredibly lucky, or make friends with the right people ;)

A quick note on this though... It is really difficult to win and really easy to soft-lock yourself. No, that's not because I didn't leave enough time for playtesting, whatever are you talking about?!? The point is, when the game is running correctly you should see almost no repeated cards. If you get to a point where you are seeing the same cards over and over again, you are probably soft-locked :sweat_smile:. At that point just go until you feel you've seen enough of the game, you don't have to get a win/lose state.

Media

Thanks

For this project I used snowpack, svelte-js, typescript.
Horsepower was designed, protoyped, and written by Owen Silva with illustrations from Fiona Thornton.

Playing

Horsepower can be played on anything with an up to date browser, but is designed for mobile - mobile is something I've always wanted to do in an LD and this was the perfect opportunity!

Despite it being designed for mobile, that does not mean the experience on desktop is sacrificed. You can still play the game perfectly fine on whatever device you use. If you want the intended experience you can open your browsers' devtools and enable its mobile emulator, but that is absolutely your choice.

Note, I have to date made one little post-jam update. I like to think I am a purist when it comes to LD and I can assure that this update was QoL only and did not affect the gameplay in any major way, however I have not provided a pre-patch edition of the game. (Cus' I'm lazy) You can see the full extent of the changes in this commit.. The non-bugfixes summary is, typos, QoL statbars go bold when a choice would deplete them, number of rounds you survived is displayed at the end, and I did tweak the rarity/effects of one single card, and by a small margin.