You might also notice on Itch that this is the first submission to my first attempt at hosting a Game Jam, the Working Through Some Stuff Jam. Now, I don't necessarily want to delve into all of the details, but I will say that I've been a very long time member of another gaming community (since 2002) which has been very near and dear to my heart. Sadly, that game lost official support and production earlier this year and then COVID hit, which hampered the ability of anyone to meet and play publicly. Then late this summer, the community elected organization to keep fan content churning collapsed in on itself. It's been a rough year for my hobbies.
That said, at one point earlier this fall, I started to realize that the collapse of an organized society could really be anything. It could be a hobby gaming community, it could be a parliamentary government, it could be the death throes of a monarchy. There are so many options that could be played with in different levels of scale and flavor, but that all really boiled down to the same types of human failures.
And of course, I became rather obsessed with Wretched and Alone about this same time.
So you can pretty quickly see how that realization and somewhat hopeless mindset plays very well with the near certain inevitability of collapse in Wretched & Alone. And thus, The Collapse was born.