Designer Notes 1
This project started, as most of mine do, as a small, terrible, joke. Initially I thought "oh, a few days, we will whip this out, and then can move on to more serious things". Of course it took much longer than a few days (since it is programming) and then much longer than that (because I am lazy and distracted), and then longer still (because I grew uninterested in the project, as it looked dumber and dumber the longer it took). I am though trying to improve the skill of finishing things, so I did finish the thing, even if it was not a good idea to begin with and was a steadily worse idea as time went on. Oh, another way it has gotten worse is that my development speed has failed to keep up with the break-neck pace of 2020, so that what was in the news a few months ago (mass shooting!) is now a distant foot-note (mass plague!). Edit Wait, I waited long enough and things have come back around, we're now sending kids off to plague school this fall. Fortunately for my project, Republican's hatred of life is an evergreen issue.

Designer Notes 1.5
Oh right. Mom's Demand Action. In the initial plannning I was going to ask for people to donate to a decent gun control organization like Mom's Demand Action. Then it turns out that they are some sort of weird Bloomberg front organization, so that was another part of the project that was ruined by the passage of time. Instead I'm just donating 100% of proceeds to Itch.io, since they seem like decent people and they are kind enough to host my files.

Designer Notes 2
I don't even care about gun violence? Or I do care, but only moderately. Of all the progressive policies gun reform is one of the most easily compromisable. E.g. if you're going to throw someone or something under the bus, what do you pick? Women? PoC? LGBTs? Jewish people? Climate Change? None of these are really things that we can compromise on. Gun violence on the other hand A) kind of gets amortized over the entire population, and isn't so much a principle or an existential threat as it is a general health and safety thing and efficiency thing and B) doesn't have any really great solutions, it's not like legalizing marijuana where you could potentially just stop the dumb policy at the drop of a hat. The best we can do is move the slider over a tick, Victoria 2 style, and start the country moving in a more decent direction so that a decades or four from now the rate of gun violence has gone steadily down and is more in line with the rest of the developed world.

Designer Notes 3
One small positive: one of my goals with this project was to improve my production values a bit, which I think I have done (look at the icons! Look at the progress bars!). Also, I meant it as a way to dip my toes back into Unity and build some enthusiasm for larger next projects, which I also think I have done. I am *dying* to work on the next and more interesting projects on my list (sorry, a bit of COVID humor there).


Anyway! To try the game, please visit Itch.io
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