Taxcellent by negdo
Taxcellent is an economy management game where you take control of a region and steer its development direction in order to collect as much taxes as possible.

How To Play
WASD to move camera, mouse for everything else.
Every month you'll be presented with three tax policy options. You need to inspect your villages, take into account their finances and decide on which of the options to pick. You can also influence how regions develop by setting their redevelopment directions and order construction of upgrades from your own pocket.
Once all that is done, click the "Next Month" button and the game will simulate the changes in the region in that month.
You've been ordered to collect at least 15k gold in 12 months.


Credits
- negdo: 3D Art, UI Design, Game Design
- PickyDogFish: Game Design, UI Design, UI Implementation
- TheRedDevil: Programming, UI Implementation, Game Design
- grizeldi: Programming, Game Design, Graphics Optimization, UI Implementation
| Link | https://grizeldi.itch.io/taxcellent |
| Link | https://grizeldi.itch.io/taxcellent |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/taxcellent |
Ratings
| Overall | 209th | 3.75⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 276th | 3.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 78th | 3.905⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 37th | 4.333⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 116th | 4.318⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 444th | 2.861⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 224th | 3.81⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 13🗨️ |
I was a bit irritated about how exactly the game mechanics work and how taxes are calculated and collected. I've given it 4 runs, where after each I was maybe at 2k max after 12 months. Yet it was very satisfying to see tiles plopping up and seeing some positive effects on the cities.
I think I will give it a try later again, my brain is a bit fried at the moment.
Ended up with about 10k (tried several times).
I will admit I was pretty overwhelmed at the start with how much information I was looking at. It wasn't until a bit later in the game that some things started to click. My 2nd playthrough went a lot better than my first, but I still ran into the issue of two of my cities losing their entire population so I only made it to 12k at the end :slight_frown:
Overall though really awesome entry! Props to your team for making something with so many moving parts and having it all work. Major kudos.
What I didn't like to much was the UI: I think some colored text during the rounds would have given a better visual feedback if an effect is good or bad or for you.
Unfortunately also, your game hard crashed for me on the third or fourth month when selected City break tax. It would lock up and crash out, no idea why.
Overall though, even the crash, what I did not like is far overshadowed by what I did like. You have a very polished game on your hands there and with some polish and enhancements I can definitely see this as a commercial product. Incredibly cool work!
@b0guslaw That crash is a known bug, but unfortunately we never managed to find how to reproduce it so we'd be able to fix it. We'll continue trying to hunt it down, but I don't expect much success there.
I somehow managed to win on my first attempt in 10 months, though I still have no idea what I was doing.
There seems to be a lot of complexity there but I really wasn't following most if it.
Still, it's been a bit of a struggle fitting this amount of complexity into a game jam game, but mostly from a game design perspective. We tried to make the game short (only 12 turns) to allow people to play the whole thing for the jam rating, but that means that all the systems have to respond to players actions pretty fast. And with the region income, tax, basic upkeep, population and happiness stats being quite closely related to each other, it's a pain in the ass to balance. Also the map is randomly generated, which adds replayability, but also means that sometimes you get amazing income right off the bat, and sometimes it's pretty bad, making it harder to balance once again.
Maybe we bit off a bit more than we could chew, game design and UI/UX wise.
But honestly, it's been a lot of fun trying to balance the systems. I usually don't enjoy the number tweaking part all that much, but I didn't hate it this time. We already released a small rebalanced version (the one you probably played), and we might do one more.
And thanks for all the feedback guys! Much appreciated!
I think some sort of an interactive tutorial would be needed to explain everything, as there is just too much going on.
I'd love to hear people's opinions about the UI. What are you checking after a turn? Are the graphs useful? When you click on a region, is the top table of information useful? Are the per tile type values helpful? Is there something else you'd like to see there?
In case anyone actually answers these questions, thank you in advance :)