Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator's ruthlessly greedy world

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with a goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Billionaires are, despite outsized economic, environmental, cultural, and political influence, still fundamentally human beings. They feel sadness, and joy, and rage, and jealousy. They go to the bathroom. They scroll through too much social media (or have an assistant do it for them). They break their New Year's resolutions. They lie. They are bags of gristle and bone, driven by electrical signals and pulsing meat! Just like you! And like any false god, they can bleed.

...But I digress.

I'm Xalavier Nelson Jr., the head of a multi-project indie studio called Strange Scaffold. Our ethos is to find ways to make games better, faster, cheaper, and more sustainably than is currently thought possible. On December 7, 2021, we released our newest game, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator (SWOTS), on Xbox Game Pass and Steam. It's a sci-fi body horror market tycoon with mod support and a distinct focus on narrative. We infamously feature, among other things, full support to play the game from beginning to end using the Microsoft Kinect V2 (on PC). Game Pass doesn't share numbers publicly, but by all indications, including our sales data on other platforms, the game has been played by tens of thousands of people. It's something I continually find both surprising and immensely relieving.

Of the many things in and around the game that make me proud to have worked on it, including our all-star team, the design of the endgame scenario stands out as an encapsulation of the perspective of the