liz truss the game

Update: You can now read about Liz Truss The Game in The Metro.

Whether you support the Conservatives, or you don’t support the Conservatives, or even if you’re not really sure; there’s no getting around the fact that Liz Truss wasn’t the best prime minister.

It’s hard to think of a national leader who’s caused more chaos in such a short period of time.

The headline act, of course, was her taking a wrecking ball to the British economy with her infamous ‘mini-budget’; but it barely seemed like a day went by without some sort of misstep or controversy arising out of 10 Downing Street.

part 1: tiktok

The more I thought about it, the more it felt like she was playing some sort of video game. It was like a bizarre Grand Theft Auto mission, except the goal was bringing down the government, rather than driving haphazardly into innocent members of the public.

So, I decided to bring that vision to life.

The video raced to almost a million views, and there were enough people in the comments asking me to actually make the game that I decided to give it a go.

part 2: the game

A week or so later, LizTrussGame.com was born.

You are the Prime Minister, and your challenge is to try and remain in office for longer than 45 days – the record for the shortest-ever stint in 10 Downing Street set by Liz.

By issuing laws, and responding to some extraordinary political goings-on in Westminster, you can boost your confidence rating and save yourself from the sack. Or at the very least you can try.

I had loads of fun making this, and had heaps of comments from people who enjoyed playing the game.

If you’ve had a chance to give it a go I’d love to hear how you got on.

the technical bit

A few years ago I taught myself to build websites, and this is one of the biggest projects I’ve taken on so far.

I designed and coded everything myself, building the site in Node.js/Express, using a MySql database. It was also the first time I’ve used Sass for a project, and I cannot believe I hadn’t tried it before.

The content was also written by me; but of course it was (mostly) inspired by real-world events.

As a few people noticed on TikTok, I made the original video in Adobe After Effects.