Death and Taxes Windows, Mac, Linux, Switch game

Death and Taxes

Placeholder Gameworks | Released 2020

Hello everyone!

Death and Taxes is a Grim Reaper simulation game for PC and Switch!

So if you're keen on our project and want to support us, head on over to our Steam page to wishlist it!

PS: You can also download our Demo on Steam ;)

PPS: You can play our online WebGL demo in your browser on itch.io!

Summary

In this 2D, narrative-based game, you assume the role of the Grim Reaper... on an office job. Your job is to decide which people are going to live or die. The consequences of your choices are yours to bear, while the mystery of your incarnation awaits revelation!

Death and Taxes is a game in the vein of narrative-based indie titles, such as "Papers, Please", "Reigns", "Beholder" and "Animal Inspector", to name a few. Your choices will affect the world around you, and it's up to you as Grim Reaper of Cosmopolis City to keep the chaos away. Meet mysterious office ghosts, foil plots to destroy the world and rise through the ranks of Reapers all the way up to middle-management, if you dare!

Meet your Fate.

Coming February 2020.

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DevLog 2: Wake me up when September ends

Dec 20 2019 News

Hi everyone! It's Oak here.

I'm not sure if there's anyone reading any of the dev logs, *taps microphone*, but this is going to be a regular thing. Hopefully some of you find joy, amusement or solidarity in these tiny text adventures.

SO. What's been up with Death and Taxes since the last devlog? Well, a lot, apparently. This is all written in retrospect, but we apparently managed to kick up our viewcount quadruple-fold itch.io in our first week. We also broke 100 downloads for the demo. What. The. Hell. We were expecting a couple dozen at best, so this gave us quite a bit of motivation! A big, big heartfelt thank you to everyone who has taken their precious time to test our game and read our page ^_^ Many hugs and prosperity to you! Also, if you feel like keeping more up-to-date with our developments, follow our Twitter for regular updates, over yonder: Twitter.com

Like.. LOOK AT THIS. WHAT. WHAT HAPPENED.

In the first week of September we were sitting at more than 400 views and ~110 downloads, and counting. Well. Um. Hell yeah? We're currently recovering from another pretty high spike of late:

This was all originally happening well into September (what a damn throwback lol). Well, we were all coming back from some sort of a summer hiatus and trying to get our workflows going. This is when Leene and I relocated to Spelkollektivet in Sweden: Spelkollektivet.com

If you haven't heard of it yet: It's a really neat co-living/co-development space for gamedevs. We've been living here for 3 months now and we're staying for another year. GO FIGURE, RIGHT?

AND WE GOT OUR FIRST VO SAMPLES IN! If you want to check it out, we have a test of it on YouTube (click)!

We're also trying to ramp up marketing efforts, coming up with some sort of a content plan to try and roll ourselves into release.. we opened our Steam store page some time ago, but we still need to make some new trailers and other marketing materials... Fingers crossed for that.

In terms of coding efforts, we finished a "first final" implementation of our dialogue system and data model in September, relying on articy:draft3, which we integrated into our Unity project. That was a blast. Also fun to implement. The documentation is enough to get going with it, and then it's mostly using existing programming knowledge to make it all run. Luckily there are lots of people using this kind of toolkit already so it's been a breeze to look for help, too.

So that's pretty much it for now! We've already seen that people have enjoyed our devlogs on itch.io so maybe y'all here will like reading them too! Lets make thought-provoking games! ^__^

Love,

Death and Taxes