Assembly City

• Home • Edit

⚖️ Roguelike deck-building card game about facilitating a Citizens’ Assembly.

Play

Play in your browser:

Or download for desktop:

How To Play

  • Drag the card to the citizen.
  • Hover over the citizen name to see his or her next move.
  • Press End Turn when out of Moves.
  • Reach the Consensus goal (on the bottom-left).

Features

  • Turn-based assemblies against citizens with deterministic action loops. Hover over a name to see the next move.
  • Card play: build consensus, ration citizen energy, draw cards, gain extra moves/turns, or stun citizens.
  • Roguelike run across 10 levels. Earn money and rewards. Shop between battles to buy, upgrade, or remove cards.
  • Tight resources: reach the consensus goal before you run out of turns. Earn bonus cash for exceeding it.
  • Tutorial with good and bad endings.

Background

This game was made for the Citizens, Assemble! game jam. Read the Game Design Document.

Our initial idea was to create a narrative-driven game like the Ace Attorney series (see our brainstorming session). Hence, we chose Ren’Py as the visual novel engine.

The idea was that you play as a citizen who tries to help everyone reach a consensus in an assembly. We were thinking about interlacing comedic characters with emotional plots, like preventing the city from being overrun by cats to stopping a war.

However, our proof-of-concept didn’t feel that interesting and having to talk to multiple characters to unlock branches felt like a chore. As a result, we decided to pivot.

Recently, I’ve been into roguelike deck-building games so I did a quick prototype in Ren’Py. I pitched my vision to the team and we decided to commit to this genre.

The card mechanic was implemented using drag and drop screens. The other RPG mechanics were borrowed from renpy-rpg.

I removed the story dialogue and focused more on the card mechanics. I added a tutorial and 9 levels with increasing difficulty (as you progress, you need to reach a higher consensus goal with more citizens). After beating each level, you’re rewarded with a card or upgrade and you can buy/upgrade/sell cards in the shop. Finally, I added a good and bad ending.

The game is open sourced on GitHub. Let me know what you think!

Credits

Art

Audio

Development

Music

Resources