Together Until The End

This is a game I made during the Berlin Mini Game Jam on June 2012. After some weeks reading worrying news about the financial crisis and how it’s affecting Europe, I had the idea to make a game that parodies the situation. I hope that no one will get offended by this joke, I always had the opinion that the best way to confront your problems and worries is to laugh at them.

I started the game on Stencyl, but I quickly realized that it was not the right tool for the job. I remember posting an angered update in my Facebook wall complaining about fighting with Stencyl instead of using it to get my game done, and some people asked me about this on the following days. To keep it short, the problem is basically that this tool is not designed for writing this kind of game.

So, I switched to QML, which is a scripting language that has been designed as part of the Qt project, which used to belong to Nokia at that time. Nowadays it has been transferred to Digia. Still, the audio was cumbersome to use in Qml, so I decided to use SDL mixer instead, and write a couple of wrapper classes around it to export the needed functionality to QML.

The goal of the game is to help Europe, one country at a time, the way governments are doing it: by injecting money to the falling economies. However, every time you lend money to a country it has to return the money to you plus interests, which makes you richer but the country poorer. Which in turn forces them to make cuts in their budgets, reducing the welfare state. Once a country cannot do any more cuts to return the money, you have the chance to rescue them from bankruptcy. The title of the game is a reference to some rumours, back at the time, about the possibility of some countries abandoning the Euro zone to prevent the collapse of the currency.

Keep in mind that this is not a realistic economic simulation, I did not use any real data at all. All the numbers and statistics are completely made up, with the only goal of making the gameplay more or less fluid. If you pay attention to the numbers, you will observe that they make no sense. Do not take any of this seriously!

Also, I’d like to thank Kirill for the player’s avatar portraits he drew.

Update 26 March 2013: Github has disabled downloads, and it seems that some of the files I uploaded last year are broken. Just in case, I mirrored the code and the downloads in Bitbucket. Use those links if the Github ones do not work.