Here we are at last. Week 10! For this week, we have Billionaire’s Dilemma, a game where you have to spend your money or else be buried by it!
This week’s game was actually one of the most challenging, which I suppose is fitting for the final entry. It was largely inspired by sites such as https://neal.fun/spend/, which are an interesting way to get a better grasp on just how absurdly wealthy certain individuals are. I thought it would be fun to add more interactivity to it, and maybe a bit of catharsis as well.
One of the biggest challenges for this week was figuring out how to render all the bills without slowing down the game, which ended up taking up most of the first day. This slowed me down in general, and as a result a number of features that I had been planning were cut.
For example, I initially planned to have multiple rooms, each with different money limits. In the first room the player would be buried after just 100 million dollars, and then the next would be limited at 10 billion, and so on.
Another scrapped idea was having pre-requisites for certain purchases. For example, “Solve World Hunger” could have various infrastructure-related prerequisites that would need to be bought first. However, I quickly became daunted at how much research a mechanic like that would require.
In the end, there isn’t much actual gameplay here, but it’s still an interesting and entertaining thought experiment, so I’m pretty pleased with it.
It’s pretty crazy to think that I’m finally done with this challenge. It certainly had some surprises, and for the time being I’m going to take a little break. After that, I’ll be putting out a retrospective, and then most likely I’ll expand a couple of the games into full releases!
Until then, cheers.
Switchback Studio 