Man, time flew this weekend. I added so much to the game. But it’s not enough! There’s no way I’m going to finish by the deadline, so I’m bowing out.

I added income and taxes. People’s income is based on their career. If someone doesn’t have enough money to survive (say, they are a starving artist), their relatives will help them out. If relatives can’t help them out, they could die.

At the start of the game, there are no taxes.  Here are some example stats before taxes:

You can have a flat income tax, a progressive income tax, or a negative income tax. After adding a negative income tax, it would look something like:

A negative income tax is a a progressive income tax with a basic income. So the number of rich and superrich shrink, and the number of poor disappear. Hey, it beats taking from the rich and giving to the poor the hard way. It doesn’t fix all problems though – middle class people could still be in poverty if they had several kids.

I also added some more awful, evil things you could do. You could exile all poor people from the island, for example.

But it all just wasn’t enough for a complete game.

It’s fun to watch the people interact over time and build their own personal stories. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, each person was simulated individually, and they had relationships and children.

And it was fun to try to fix poverty problems or exile people you didn’t like (you could exile all corrupt politicians for example). But there were no “win” condition, and “losing” was possible, but unlikely. You could make your own goals, but goals could be reached too easily. And there were no negative consequences for exiling an entire group of people. It needed a lot of gameplay work.

So, it was fun to work on, but I’m out. Maybe next time.