While all of those themes worked, and offered the chance for an interesting theme, they all had the same problem: they created expectations that the game was never going to match. Finding Atlantis made players want to cooperate over the discovery, no matter how much I told them they had to compete; Mutiny made people want to raid and pillage, no matter how much I wanted to focus on the mutiny itself; Et tu Brute made some people want to support Caesar, instead of assassinate him.

I tried to meet some of those expectations, but every time, they took away from the core experience, which benefitted from being simple and straightforward. The only theme that promised exactly what it delivered was the organized crime.

There was another theme that worked, but I ended up deciding not to dive into. For a while, the game was named A Vote For Me, and was about two low-level politicians getting their hands dirty while trying to get elected. It worked, surprisingly well – who knew that gangsters and politicians are so similar!--, but I decided to stay away from it. As a queer trans woman, a lot of people see everything I do as political: how I raise my kids, how I talk, how I dress, how I live my day-to-day life, and feel like that justifies bullying, insulting, and threatening me and others like me. The idea of making a game about actual politics felt like an invitation for more of that, and I really didn’t want to deal with that amount of flack in my inbox. Who has the time?