Dystopia Inc. is a deckbuilding roguelike city builder created for the 2023 GMTK Game Jam. Every game of Dystopia Inc. is a race against the clock to consume the city and rebuild it under your own control. Inspired by real world sinister real estate practices, players draft a deck of "opportunities" as they play, allowing them to ruin existing buildings and replace them with their own profitable alternatives. As the game progresses, maintenance costs increase, forcing players to act greedier and greedier until they've swallowed the city whole or gone bankrupt trying.
Despite Dystopia Inc. being my first time participating in a game jam and working alone, I was able to apply my past experience prototyping projects to create something substantial in the amount of time allotted. The theme of the jam was "roles reversed," and I was inspired by my research into modern real estate development practices to create a city building game where your objective is to destroy a city. In order to help with design and scope, I decided on making the game a deckbuilder since it is a genre I was familiar with designing for and developing. Dystopia Inc. placed in the top 10% of overall participants, and in the top 6% under the creativity category.
Dystopia Inc. was created as a solo project in less than 48 hours using the Unity engine.
Play Dystopia Inc. here or in the embed below.
Controls: Click and drag to pan, click on cards and green outlined locations to play.
All buildings lose 1 Upkeep each turn and give you money equal to their Revenue if you own them.
Own every building on the board to win. Game ends if your money goes below zero.