This game (which I'm not actually calling "Untitled Law Firm Game" (unless?)) is an idle law firm management simulator game, inspired by games like
(the) Gnorp Apologue, a game which managed to eat what feels like a year of my life.
The protagonist starts the game as a solo legal practitioner but, once they have enough money, they start their own law firm, hire other attorneys, and invest in new legal technology,
all with the objective of making a trillion dollars, enabling them to buy out every other law firm on the planet and become the most powerful lawyer on Earth.
As with any idle game, the secondary objective is to hire staff and invest in new technology to automate the money-making process - at the beginning, the player has to generate this money themselves
manually. The player can also "prestige" by resigning at any time, which resets their progress but gives them Reputation Points, which they can spend on upgrades to make their next run more productive.
The project's game design document is now for the most part complete, with some achievements still to be named. The latest version of the document can be viewed at the link below. The project previously existed as
a game where the player would found and operate their own micronation, with a similar gameplay loop, but I found I was more interested in pursuing a legal setting. The previous version of the document, which covered
briefly what was intended for that project, can also be viewed below.
I came up with the idea for the game after playing about a million hours of (the) Gnorp Apologue and effectively thinking "what if someone did this but it was with lawyers"
I then spent a week or so workshopping various iterations of the game design document (including the brief flirtation with the idea of having it be about micronations, instead) before landing on a
set of systems and gameplay loops I liked.
I wrote the game design document to accommodate my later code needs, including granular information about the control scheme, what equations to use to calculate how aspects of the in-game economy work such as taxation,
and blocking out the different currencies in the game (Reputation Points, dollars, and employees).
I then implemented in C# a first pass of the systems in Unity, enabling the player to buy an office and name their law firm using an upgrade system which can be used to accommodate purchases made in any of the game's three currencies. It
also accommodates my tax requirements, and uses the Unity asset Rewired to implement my intended control scheme. It also has a parallax effect which I think is nice.
