The Mayor of Monsterville (Working Title)

Concept: It's Oct 1st and Monsterville has 31 days to prepare for another great Halloween.  The ghouls and spooks go to school and work to prepare for the holiday, but a stranger has come to town carrying an infectious virus.  As the Mayor of the city, use your persuasive powers to keep your citizens safe but still productive to bring a successful Halloween.

Visual:  Cute. Inspired by "Nightmare Before Christmas".  Monsters that aren't too scary.  Crooked and interesting buildings. UI with curly letters, etc.

Plan:

Game
  Spawn population (3d rigibodies with 6" trigger collider) - Done
  Population wandering and travel to workplace/school - Done
  Navmesh terrain - Done
  Blocking navmesh (buildings) - Done
  Social Distancing (using model) - Done
  UI - Choose ways to engage with population and make decrees (ex "No restaurants open", "All citizens must wear masks")
  UI - Daily Update - Population, % infected, etc
  Halloween prep - Population has to "work" to move this forward
  Day timer - Done
  14 day sick time (Just a simple model)
  Fatality model based on age risks (Turn to ghost who floats around, but cannot work)
  Citizen willfulness stat tracked to defy decrees

Assets
  Terrain/land
  Houses (at least 3 designs for interest)
  School
  Work buildings (Candy, Scares)
  Props - Pumpkins, trees, fences
  Citizens - Right now capsules, maybe something similar to Fall Guys look with different monsters from popular genres
  Mask

Wishlist (if time)
  Day/night cycle - not necessary
  Different houses for type of monster
  Nuclear families (2 adults, 2 kids and variations)
  "Pox News" with ability to raise Willfullness
  Variances to day (parties, rallies, ?) to provide interesting things to react to as Mayor
  Ground fog
  Follow random Citizen (3rd person camera)

Done!  14 day sick time (Just a simple model)

I wonder if there is a model for change of getting Covid again if already infected.

This is just all my personal log of developing something for this game jam...

+ Created nuclear families (had to for spawning though it was on the wishlist).  Families size is 1-6 citizens, with  1-3 adults (3rd might be a grandparent or some other relationship) and remainder are children.  Age is randomly generated with adults 4-9 decades old and children 1-3.  Families start with the same Willfullness statistic (which affects whether they follow decrees like wearing a mask), but individuals will go up and down on their own and make their own decisions after initial setting.

+ Enhanced sick model - Citizen must be sick for 2 days before showing symptoms and affecting others, giving incubation time.  Has a chance of dying (becoming a ghost...this is supposed to be a cute game) based on age.  Still need to refine this further, probably should go to hospital first if sick and then become ghost from there.  Model progression of sickness.

+ Created schoolhouse asset in Blender.  Way too long to make this.  Will likely try to complete the game before working on any further assets.

My current simulation model:

Infection Model 

• Target Rigidbody's trigger collides with Other rigidbody 
• if Target is already sick, they won't catch it again 
• If Other rigidbody is sick & has been sick over 2 days, then test for infection for Target 
• if Other rigidbody is wearing a mask, use 2% infection chance, otherwise 5%

Sickness Model 

• Sick citizen stays sick for 14 days 
• Sick citizen is infectious after 2 days of being sick
• Sick citizen infects other models using the Infection Model 
• Once well again, citizen is immune and can no longer infect others

Hospitalization/Fatality Model 

• Assuming 5 days before symptoms fully appear and sicken  (4-5 from CDC) 
• When sick, citizen has a chance of death (becoming ghost) based on their age, if they do not die, they become well and are immune 
• Age Grp    Death 
• 1                0.1
•  2                0.1 
• 3                0.5 
• 4                1.3 
• 5                3.2 
• 6                15.6 
• 7                21,1
•  8                26.4 
• 9                31.7

Today, I've implemented ghosts and recovery.  I've found a new love...simulation modelling.  Never tried it before and I'm getting such a kick out of it! 

Ran through 31 days, no masks, no decrees (like curfew, staying home), everyone free to wander around and infect anyone.  Really neat to watch almost all of the population get sick and then start recovering.  9 become ghosts, so might need to review the fatality model, but maybe that's right. 

And interestingly if you force everyone to wear a mask it looks like this.  Still a lot of people get sick over time, but it takes way longer.  Interesting since I'm only going to simulate 31 days.  But at least it gives your population more time to work towards the Halloween and you also can put decrees in to help as well.

Now to add some willful people who refuse to wear masks!  

This morning I've implemented "wandering with purpose".  Adults wake up and go to the work factory that is closest to their home, while kids go to the closest school.  They spend a part of their day there and then at the end of their school or job they wander around the town a bit before going back home.  All in 90 secs...per day.  This will put people very close together to catch Covid, but as the mayor you can shut down the schools and have kids do remote learning and you can close or limit the amount of people going to their job, but of course you aren't going to make any progress towards Halloween that way.

I'm starting to worry that the 31 day construct is going to make the model less effective because that second graph from yesterday.  Everyone's could be sick at the end of the month and that won't be exciting for the player.  The decrees should help, but jamming everyone into work and school will counter those too.  We'll see...I guess that's the fun of this.

Had a bit more time today, so continued to refine the wandering.  Still a bit of work to do there, but I like the way it's working so far.

Made it so it appears people are entering buildings (when they reach the point, I turn off their MeshRenderer so they are invisible, then turn it back on when they leave).  

Started on a simple UI (the Mayor's desk).

Tracking the work via Trello: https://trello.com/b/07La0RxL/game-jam-monsterville-covid-sim

So much left to do, just to make it interesting...

Added a couple of monster types.  Won't have time to make any character assets, so I'm wrapping those capsules in some cutesy monster love.  Vamps and Franks go to school and work...

Implemented the decrees system!  You can now tell your population that they must wear masks.  Of course, there's some willful monsters in our town, so some will refuse to wear them.  In the last test, 353 put them on, while 57 didn't.  Seems close to real life, what I observe locally.

Had some excellent feedback from the mentors over on Discord.  I'm working on implementing some of those ideas in my game.

No way I'm going to be 100% in 8 more days...still too much to do.  Graphics will be one of the biggest areas to suffer.  I just don't have time to make all the buildings and props that I wanted.  So, I'm focused on minimum viable product at this point.   In hindsight, I should have asked for graphics help.

Implemented the visuals for masks.  Still a bit funky, but will keep working on that when I can.  Would like to have more types of monsters (Mummies...swamp things...skeletons, etc) but will likely implement after the jam is over.

Here's some of our citizens, styling masks and not.  

Long conference call this afternoon got me through finishing the Curfew decree...once done with work or school they go home instead of milling about the city.  Also fixed that problem with the masks in the screenshot above.  It was a quad trying to do some funny things, so I reduced down to triangles and it looks much better.  Added a bit of clarity in the UI so that you know what you have set as a decree (notary style stamps from the Mayor's office).

Started on the work/business model today.  This is going to be more complex than I thought initially to implement, but important for the minimum, so I'll likely be programmatically doodling on this for the next couple of days...leaving me with only a few days to clean up the UI, write up a tutorial and create at least basic assets for buildings and props (they might look dreadful...and not in a good way).

In an interesting turn of events, my college age son just tested positive for Covid yesterday (he's doing well, thankfully) so now I want to complete this project even more and maybe give some bit of perspective through a silly game.

Ugh...just to continue the daily updates, today was rough from a “real” job perspective.  Hoping to catch up this weekend, to submit something exciting.

Ack!  Only 4 days left!  I've really bitten off way more than I can chew, but pushing forward...

This weekend I got the daily news system implemented.  I wanted to have competing newspapers, but have settled for 1 newspaper with the left column usually more factual and the right hand side more editorial and negative.

And, I implemented the business UI.  Here  you can see the progress of each Factory (Candy, Screams and Scares).  You can also purchase upgrades (which costs work units).  It's a super simplified tech tree, but I've left it open so that each business can have it's own tree with each upgrade having a different effect.  Right now the upgrades just improve the efficiency of the work being done.

With only 4 days left, I'm going to be leaving a LOT undone, which is unfortunate.  Still learning this fun hobby and enjoying the heck out of it!  The next four days I'll focus on:

1. News articles.  Short articles based on what is going on to put on the daily newspaper.

2. Titles and some kind of music/sound.  It will be quite sparse from an audio perspective...running out of time and I don't have a lot of skills there.

3. 3d Houses and Factory.  Super simple...won't be at all how I imagine them in my head, but need something there.

4. Final polish/clean up before submitting.

What a great learning experience this has been!

Lots of work meetings today, so not a lot of progress.  Made some really simple houses and 3d assets, which is probably as good as it will get for the jam, but hope to come back to it and really focus on the look and feel of the game after.

Well, I've got a lot to get done at work for the rest of this week so I've submitted my game.  It's so far from complete, really a sketch of what I had in mind.  Truly enjoyed the process and thanks to the organizers and mentors for their great suggestions and insight.  If I've learned anything from working on my third game ever it's to start with a small, achievable scope.  I'm pretty sure I'll forget that lesson for the next game jam.

Good luck to all participants!  I look forward to playing your submissions.