This year I was a late addition via the (quite excellent) Women in Games org to a wonderful IGDA Foundation Jam team putting together a really exciting concept: A Tower Defense game where in addition to having the usual tower defense mechanics and a rockin' "protect wildlife" theme, you could also use digital currencies via an API to help donate to local environmental causes.
Here's a link to the game on itch!
The team was albe to get the game in to submission for consideration on time, which is an achievement in and of istelf, but in the time crunch playability took precidence over the (to me, most technically interesting) aspect of having a game that didn't just have a social good chrome/theme but also had some real world impact through the usually more negative to both gameplay and user experience aspects of microtransaction design.
This isn't a full postmortem post (we're still recovering from a busy final week push to get the android and iPhone versions playable!) but you can use the link above to check out the version from last week. As time permits I'll be helping the team provide some standalone and webgl versions that will hopefully integrate with the correct APIs by the winter holidays in December.
More to come on this later in November!
