About
This game was made for Fuck Capitalism Jam 2025, a very fun jam that encourages satire and parody, which I’m all for. I spent a total of 190 hours on the game over 20 days and made all of the visuals, music and sound effects myself, which has become standard for me. The game was made in GameMaker Studio 2, visuals in Aseprite, music in Waveform 11, and the sound effects in a tool called Chiptone.
Gameplay
The game is a Shmup (Shoot ’em up) that has you navigate through different levels, each representing an aspect of capitalism. I had 7 levels and bosses selected and chose to do at least 3. In the end I managed to get a fully interactive tutorial in, as well as 3 levels, though the final level is just a boss fight.
I found the boss fights the most fun to make, though each one took 2-3 days to make the artwork and script. They also required the most testing and bug fixing. By the final boss I had learned a lot and was able to code it much more efficiently and accurately.
The political nature of the game was interesting too, I thought trying to balance a deeper message with goofy enemy designs would be tricky but it came very naturally to me.
The only Shmup I had really experienced was Jamestown+ which was the only game I played during the jam, to see how that game answered some of my design questions. Now that I can get back to playing games I’m going to explore the genre more as making this game has given me some insight and a lot of curiosity to see more.
Further Development
If I were to extend this into a full game, I would first start by expanding it up to 7 levels, refine the existing systems such as the scoring, and add some ideas that would have taken too long to implement. Things like:
- Narrative slides between missions.
- Reworked enemy movement for more elaborate patterns.
- A hard difficulty with more projectiles and limited lives.
- Level medals for reaching score goals or having 0 deaths.
- A good and bad ending based on the medals earned.
- Controller and touchscreen support.
- Short challenge levels.
- Back to back full game playthrough.
I haven’t decided if I will or not, but I can see it taking another 300 to 400 hours. I’ll wait and see what feedback I receive from the game jam and its results.