Devlog #1 - Hello!

INTRODUCTION

Hello! We are Car With Two R's (CWTR)

A team on a mission to create an effective meta-commentary game experience that can still be fun and lighthearted. 

By respectfully leveraging irony, humor, and a little (lot) of cynicism, we want to dig deep into the nature of wealth inequality and the consequently wasteful pursuit of needless material gain.

We are a 5 person team - nice to meet you! Beyond game design, we all have specialties:

   ★ Justin: Programming, Excel

   ★ Sydney: Art, Narrative

   ★ Alben: SFX, Narrative

   ★ Max: Programming, Engine

   ★ Daniel: All-Rounder

GAME TOPIC & MESSAGE

Formally, we chose the topic of wealth inequality - we found this topic to be broad and have a lot of open doors for game mechanics. In part due to our own research and the times we live in, we wanted to emphasize how the sheer magnitude of wealth inequality and how those who are rich often spend staggering amounts of money on trivial, material matters.

Our message, summarized plainly, is "Wealth inequality is seen through the rich's pursuit of material gain - any charity or investment in the community is ultimately for a selfish purpose"

We played similar games to what we were trying to achieve, namely Exoptable Money - another idle type game that tells a narrative with a critical lens towards capitalism. We found inspiration from the way the narrative played into being part of the problem while still being comedic/ironic enough to emphasize their message.

MORE ABOUT OUR RESEARCH...

- From the Canada consumer & retail report  it was found that Non-essentials spending is still low and that essential spending is still taking up over half of Canadian household's monthly budgets. 

- Wage growth is expected to slow down. It is currently less than 5% per year.

- Wage growth from April 2021 to July 2023 was in the negatives reaching a peak of -5% in May 2022.

- Canadians in the top 10% of income earners held over 40% of the market income in 2017.

- The bottom 40% of Canada's earners hold just 1% of the country's wealth.

- Only half of capital gains are taxed.

Overall, we're not very happy with what these results imply - which is part of what inspired us to take on wealth inequality as our game topic. 

GAME CONCEPTS - WHERE ARE WE AT?

We're quickly narrowing down on what exactly we want to develop for this project - we think the topic of wealth inequality could be very well expressed by being the mayor of a town, where all the money goes to you. However, there are a million and one games that simulate capitalism through increasing numbers and buying upgrades. While we like this approach from a scope perspective, we all want to make something more novel. 

Right now, we're liking the idea of adding a spin to this concept. We'll get more into it in next week's pitch, but as a sneak peek..

Beyond just simulating a simple town, the mayor might have a bit of a gambling problem.... If you've seen the title for our game, you might have gotten that vibe from it already, but we're tossing around the idea of emphasizing our message (the rich's pursuit of material gain) through the mayor's crippling addiction to his favourite gacha game. Our plans involve allowing the player to build their collection of characters through spending the town's currency. Please look forward to our next devlog - we'll have more information about the game's specifics!

OKAY, SO WHAT'S NEXT?

We're currently in the thick of developing a decent pitch that can really encompass what this project will be about from a gameplay standpoint. This pitch (as a link or standalone image) will be included in our next devlog. For now, here's what our tagline's looking like:

We want to explore in depth our available options for emphasizing our message and how we can do this tastefully while still being funny. We would also like to look inwards at our team composition and make finalizations to which members would like final say over what aspects of the game/project. 

And then, of course, ideating on the game concept! This should show through our next pitch and devlog, but we will have clarified a lot more of the integral points/aspects of the game by the next time we speak. 

IN CONCLUSION:

We're all really excited to get cracking at this project for the duration of this year, we're confident that we can get far and make something that is not only engaging but conveys a meaningful and applicable real-world message.  We hope you'll keep updated with our project as development continues. We're also very open to ideas, so please shoot them our way!

-CWTR