The five stages of grief don't exist.
About the game, I didn't find it particularly enjoyable but this was a worthwhile gamification experiment.
Reviews for "In the Time of Pandemia"
kikill responds:
Thank you for your feedback, Unknow0059.
Okay I get what you're going for. Money doesn't matter as much as as people getting sick, people getting sick but recovering doesn't matter as much as deaths. In addition, you want to somewhat realistically model the difficulties of people ignoring isolation or quarantine as well as limited hospital and governmental resources.
As a pure simulator of those things, this is great, and a good education tool, and I want to stress I commend you for that, especially since I'm going to go on a math rant in a second and get pretty critical on the game aspect of this. So just like, remember that I *really* appreciate that and the work that went into it before the rant starts XD
As a game the design is pretty bad. You're telling me to get below a score that will be RNG determined 90% of the time. It's infuriating and bad design for a game. My only options as a player are tests, isolation, lockdown, and hospitlization. Let's take Zone 4 as an example. It has 40% compliance and only 10% observance of things to keep infectivity down. You start the level with 5 out of 25 people infected (says 24 total on intro screen but that's apparently a mislabel). Even assuming I immediately started the level by testing everyone and telling everyone to isloate and locking down *everything* with no regard for money (so making it hard to avoid going over par already), statistically 2 people who are infected will continue running around with another 8 healthy people, with a decent chance of getting them sick. Par is set at 5004, so if a *single healthy person* gets sick, I have to restart. To not get fudged, I'd need either every sick person to listen or the surrounding people to listen, and while the math on the second is harder to get, the first is ever so slightly over a 1% chance. So even being super generous with the second situation and going up to 5%, that means that only 1/10 times am I even going to have a *chance* to beat par on zone 4. While this might be a realistic model that's very useful for teaching us, it's a *terrible* playing experience, and it's only the third real level of the game.
Basically what I'm saying is, if you want to keep the realistic simulation there (which I know I'd prefer as well), you need to relax par a bit or it's just nightmarish to play. And its easier to teach people through things like this if they don't rage quit after a few levels.
kikill responds:
I appreciate your giving the game some thought and for acknowledging our labors in making the game a vehicle for players to understand the difficulties and dilemmas of pandemic management.
You're right, deciding on the par scores was a struggle. On the one hand, I wanted to make the players feel a sliver of how it's like to battle the current crisis, on the other hand, I also wanted to keep them in the game long enough to absorb its message. It's a design risk I took to lean more towards the former than the latter. The frustration, desperation, even rage that running after the par scores could evoke in the player I believed was part of the message. The pandemic is a maelstrom of disparate variables and random happenstance can overturn the most studied of strategies.
However, your saying that the score is 90% random is a bit of an exaggeration. Certainly, there is randomness, but you are given access to tools and can strategize with these to cope.
In Zone 4, you don't need everyone to comply with isolation to succeed. In the scenario you described, you have 2 infected and 8 vulnerable individuals who won't isolate. That means you have 15 who are compliant. The game becomes something of a physics/geometric puzzle at this point. You can strategize with how you isolate the compliant people such that they'd shield the vulnerable ones. This is roughly similar to cordoning certain sections of town to contain the virus.
Having said that, this game design is a living document which I continue to iterate on in response to feedback such as yours. The par scores were just taken from my best scores. Although I can see that several players have already beaten those and some even messaged me that the early levels are too easy, I'll try pushing back the par scores a notch for each zone.
Thanks again for sharing your observations.
P.S.
Good catch on the "24" mislabel. It's from an earlier iteration.
good, but basically quarantino with more lag and deproved graphics. it doesn't really do anything to make itself special.
kikill responds:
Thanks for your candid feedback. Thank you too for pointing Quarantino (www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/753674) to us. In the Time of Pandemia (ITOP) however has been playable at Itch.io with all its core features since April 17, ten days before Quarantino was published here. I would say, Quarantino is a simplification of ITOP's rule set which in turn was inspired by a game design sketch by Raph Koster linked to above. We share the concepts of viral transmission and disease progression but that's about it. In terms of player actions, Quarantino only implements one which partitions a field in two--something similar to isolating a line of townsfolk in ITOP except the former is harder to correspond with pandemic management in the real world. Perhaps more important, we took some pains in anchoring our COVID-19 model in published sources and consulted with an epidemiologist to check it's plausibility. It won't replace professional epidemiological models but the basic math is there. As a puzzle, Quarantino attains a certain elegance in combining viral transmission with the partitioning mechanic. That's its innovation. The mechanic of dividing a field to optimize a certain condition though has been around here at least from 2009 onwards in Fat Slice (www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/499007). Following your reasoning, Quarantino then is basically Fat Slice with the balls infecting each other. As for the lag, it's been reported in older machines which I'll now look into because you confirmed it. But I'm quite happy with how our artists did their work.
You are missing mechanic for people who are recovered with lifelong decreased function. Making individuals travel around to work, banking, food will show interactions and difficulties better.
kikill responds:
That's a splended idea actually. We have to carefully select the details to include in this attempt considering the limited time and resources (the team was made up of volunteers). But thanks for suggesting this. We'll discuss it for Version 2 of the game!
This game is fun but it calls for improvements. For me, there are some complex words that i would prefer to be much simpler so as to be quick in playing the game and there are also quite a few symbols in one page that got me confused for a minute. This makes the game a tiny bit complicated. This is just how "I" see the game and pleaseeee don't let this affect your opinion. Still check this game out and give your honest reviews!