How, Why and What's next?

How was this game made?

• Bootstrap 5, HTML5, JavaScript, ChatGPT, watching the news, drinking a few shots of adult beverages...
• There are two files, a master list and the index.html. You could modify the game text for each department, the number of employees, etc all from the master list. This is a concept similar to a strings.xml, but with JSON and usable as a js object.
• How accurate is the current master list for the departments and number of employees? With a few obvious exceptions, all are based on real numbers I could find online, or from *gasp* government distributed reports... And while it's hard to have down to the minute numbers (especially lately) I tried my best. If there are any departments missed please add then in the comments of the game or to this post.

Why did I make this game?

Where to begin. When I was first learning HTML programming as a HS senior, if you had asked me if 2025 would be the year of Ron Swanson's wet dream, I'd say it would never happen. Past me would be wrong and confused and unable to vote technically... So how would someone with the tools of a basic web developer express their voice and frustration as they watch the world around them burn.

When I ask people of this age what their opinions are, it's been chaos, confusion and it's too much to even grasp the enormity of it all. So how do you help people understand what's at stake, what's being lost and why it matters? Make it a clicker game. Make it fun, but underscore the seriousness of what could (and hopefully won't) happen...

Programming can be a cathartic activity, help you think things through and in many cases add humor to otherwise dark moments. Even if they never leave your own computer, phone, VR headset, use coding in your personal time as a way to deal with life when you don't have other ways to cope.

What's next for the game?

I want to add more to the Consequences sections with links to the good things these departments accomplish and resources to support those employees who may have been fired already. I also want to include information about where the numbers came from for the master list. 

This will be open sourced on github, and I believe the ZIP is downloadable here, so if you want to improve the game, add more information and help make this more of a valuable tool to fight back, you can do so!

As far as the story of the game, I didn't initially plan to add more content to the game, but this is a current topic and the news keeps rolling in adding more fodder to the jokes. I left out everyone's 'favorite' cryptomeme/turned job killer, direct hits below the belt for many of the more popular characters in this drama. The story kind of is writing itself so I feel there will be expansions to the game in the future, but I may wait til things are clearer for me to gather more recent data.