Diem

Diem: A cozy democracy sim created by Polyvale Studios for the Citizens, Assemble! jam

You are the co-chair of a day-long Citizens' Assembly; choose your owl-inspired citizens and guide them through an agenda that you devise. Your goal is to build shared understanding and cross-cultural connection, with the aim of passing as many propositions as possible.

You may need to intervene when a long talker strays from the topic at hand, or an owl talks over their fellow citizens. The citizens can get excited or angry, sad or tired. Make sure to give them breaks and snacks.

See how the choices you make shift beliefs. Can you be bold and pass stronger propositions?

Once the citizens have had their fill of solving big global problems through participatory decision-making, they celebrate with a dance party. (Hint: Pass 5 or more propositions to party!) Create your own custom dance moves!

Our prototype is about climate action, but we’ve also designed the game to make it easy to adapt scenarios to particular themes or hot topics in different places. Dialogue is handled with open-source Inkscript. Belief systems are designed using an intuitive node-based tool we created for this project.

Design, writing, & programming by Aric McBay. Owl voices, copyediting, QA & playtest management by Leslie McBay. Original music & sound effects by Winnie Liu.

Best played at an aspect ratio of 16:9 or wider.