"Above Your Clearance" - a #1GAM game

A text-based "choose your own path" game, made in Java LibGDX.

For my May #1GAM entry, I have created a short humorous "choose your own path" style adventure game called "Above Your Clearance", using Java LibGDX.

In the game, you play as a Citizen in an oppressive society, who are unlucky enough to be selected for an important mission. You then have to navigate through a series of decisions. And you need to do so, without running out of credits or clones (extra "lives").

The setting is loosely based on a tabletop roleplaying game called Paranoia. I intend to use it as an introduction to new players of this game, as a sort of "primer" on the tone of such games.

My focus this time was to build a "data-driven" game: Every game location is displayed using a single reusable UI. The content of this UI is then changed dynamically, as the player progresses through the game. The game objects are implemented as objects with data, but without game logic. An example of this is the Effect object, i.e. what happens when the user chooses a specific choice. It has a type (which is the kind of effect it has on the world). It also has a corresponding magnitude. But it contains no logic about how to apply itself to the world. This means that Effect objects can be defined as data, e.g. in an external data file, or through an external editor. The game logic is instead handled by the core game logic. Here, specific functionality is excecuted, depending on the type and magnitude of a given effect.

Additionally, I made a few more experiments with the Scene2D GUI-api, including building some custom Actor components, that are easier to change dynamically during the game. This ended up working rather well. As I did for my latest LD-game, I also made a HTML-version of the game. The game should scale for both high-DPI and normal-sized screens as well, which also took some experimentation.

Play the game!

Try "Above Your Clearance" now!