When I posted my final presentation [ru] (slides) for World Builders 2023 (my posts, site), I promised to tell how I made a roadmap and a financial model for the game. So, here they are.
At the end of this post, we will have:
All the final documents can be found here.
It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.
But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.
I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.
ATTENTION: SPOILERS!
If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.
This is the second book by Ha-Joon Chang that I've read. The first one, Bad Samaritans [ru], left a good impression, and it was also positively reviewed by Tim O'Reilly in his book WTF? [ru]. So, "Economics: The User's Guide" took its place on my reading list, and finally, I have read it.
Here and further, all quotes point to the Russian edition of the book and are translated into English by me (I have only the Russian edition) => inconsistencies are possible because of double translation English->Russian->English.
According to Chang, the book was conceived as an "introduction to economic theory for the widest possible audience" (page 299), and this reflects its essence well. I would only add, from the perspective of my post-Soviet education, that the book looks more like an "overview of the diversity and complexity of economics, supplemented with an introduction to the theory" rather than an "introduction to the theory".
The book contains no mathematical formulas or jaw-dropping statistics, just concrete facts. What makes it valuable, however, is a set of prisms through which you can — and should — view the economy to gain a basic understanding of what's happening around you.
Chan provides a set of points of view through which you can examine economic processes; describes their advantages and disadvantages; accompanies all this with examples, historical references, and facts.
Since the book serves as a sort of textbook, I won't attempt to retell it in full — this would lead to an attempt to repeat the book in a couple of pages, and I definitely can't do that. I will limit myself to describing the author's view of the economy as a whole as I understood it.