Opportunities (Patreon)

Hey all!This month I want to share the details of the game I'm working on.

The working title is “Opportunities” and it is about the resilience needed to survive as an artist in a severely underfunded ecosystem. The idea spawned itself as a somewhat salty reaction to not receiving arts council funding despite having a strong application and other factors that seemed particularly in my favour this time round. I needed to channel the frustration of knowing how competitive things become when the arts are as undervalued and underfunded as they are into something useful, something creative.

I’m generally in a more positive place than I was when starting this project but I still really enjoy the idea and want to keep making the game. I also haven’t decided on how it ends yet so there may still be room for it to not be 100% bleak and cynical but we’ll see, either way I am making all of the game assets (characters, sets, UI) physically and I'm pretty excited about that.

OPPORTUNITIES

The game opens on a tutorial level that walks you through the simple steps it takes to receive funding as an artist 1.Make work 2.Write application 3.Send application. These actions are performed by collecting corresponding icons in either your workspace, home, or the main room where applications are sent off. You achieve these tasks easily and are rewarded with a sticker to show how successful you’ve become. The game then announces that now it’s time to play for real… with friends.

The sticker you won in the tutorial is stripped away and the landscape that was previously empty and easy to navigate is bustling with other artists, all applying for the same limited funding resources that you are. Any time you apply for something from this point on you do not receive it.

Each time you complete an unsuccessful funding cycle things change in the game. Your workspace and your home are on opposite sides of the large main room connected by corridors. As time goes on these corridors get longer and your move speed decreases. Your workspace and home start out decent sizes but get increasingly smaller and more rundown, quickly becoming the same room but you still have to travel the long corridors and move through the continually growing crowds of artists to perform the relevant actions in each room.

Stickers appear on some other artists as they successfully gain funding. Over time they start to accumulate on those who already have them.