Timeline is a minimalistic management game simulating a network economy through space and time. It has been developed  with Unity for the GMTK game jam 2021. The theme of the jam was "joined together". Its gameplay rely on joining different kind of worker, ressources and locations together in a big economic network to produce more and more advanced techonologies. It proposes to illustrate how any product is the result of the joint labor of a multitude of people.

How to play

• Drag the round anchor at the end of a wire on an empty place in the timeline to build a new location.
• Drag the round anchor at the end of a wire on an existing location to link two locations and create a new ressource.
• The anchor that has been placed can  be removed or moved only if no location depends on it.
• The wire has limited size and the number of anchor that can be linked to a location is limited so be careful to not be stucked. If you are stucked, remove the last anchors you placed to unlock the situation.
• Put the mouse cursor over a location to display the ressources the location produce and the ressources it can convert.

Inspiration

This game is inspired by the  woolen coat example written by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations :

The woolen-coat, for example… is the produce of the joint labor of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world! What a variety of labor too is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen! To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labor is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smeltinghouse, the brick-maker, the brick-layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill-wright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. 

If you enjoyed this and want to support my work, the best way to do so is by checking out my long term RPG project,  Jellyfish Egg — a deep, procedural fantasy world with full character freedom and dynamic storytelling.