Jack Boyd, beloved police chief of Freeburg, has 180 days before he’s forced to retire. But Jack won’t be going out quietly. Over the next six months, he’ll be going all out to fulfill a dream: earn half a million dollars, any way he can. That might be play money for a corrupt cop, but up until now, Jack has been playing by the book. Even with overtime, in six months he wouldn’t make fifty grand. But a police chief has access to all sorts of… informal income. Bribes, weapons and drug sales, deals with the Mafia, skimming off the budget, kickbacks – you name it. And Jack is tired of playing nice. He’s is ready for anything, but only you can decide how far he’ll go.

The next 180 days won’t be just a mad dash for money. Jack will need to keep up his police work too. He’ll send his cops out to handle situations, he’ll coordinate action on scene, monitor the progress of key investigations, oversee the budget, hire and fire – every day, it’s dozens of key decisions that affect countless lives. Even just regular cop business poses lots of problems: a drunken patrolman might gun down a bystander while he’s aiming for an unarmed bully. And it’s not just the staff, it’s the increasingly crazy orders from the mayor's office – not to mention the press and their uncomfortable questions. It’s all a part of life as a police chief.

Weappy Studio has just launched a Kickstarter campaign, looking for $25,000, to finish development of This Is The Police.

“We hope our Kickstarter backers will join us in celebrating our new partnership with Team17. Thanks to Team17’s Indie Label we can focus on developing the game that stays true to both our and our backer’s vision of the project; whilst knowing that the marketing, PR and community interaction will be handled with the same love and attention. Having seen what Team17 have already done for previous crowdfunded titles like The Escapists, Beyond Eyes and Sheltered they were an obvious partner,” said Ilya Yanovich, Co-Founder at Weappy Studio.

Debbie Bestwick, Team17’s Managing Director added, “As soon as I saw This is the Police on Kickstarter, I was a fan. It’s a fantastic looking game and the team at Weappy are obviously very talented. It’s a pleasure to welcome them to our growing Indie Label and we’re excited to help them realize their vision.”

The developers have declined to take any additional development funding from Team17 so please support This is the Police by checking out Weappy’s Kickstarter campaign.

Jack doesn’t always play it safe, and his actions affect all those around him. The corrupt mayor has been at his throat – and it’s him who sent the retirement memo as soon as Jack turned 60. Freeburg is a great town, but it has its crime problems. There’s major civil unrest brewing, people in conflict, struggling for power. There’s criminal gangs and cartels fighting for territory, businessmen, trade unions, and the church fighting for influence. And the authorities fight for the right to rob the rest of them with impunity.

You can love the police, you can hate the police, but you can’t argue that the police wield enormous power. Each major step Jack takes will shift the established order of things. On your words hang many of the city’s most powerful forces. You can’t win without compromise; you’ll have to find friends somewhere. But who you’re fighting can change every day. If you finish the game broke and out of work, don’t feel too bad – you might have ended the game in prison, or with a bullet in your guts.

Is This Is the Police similar to other games? Partly. To some extent it is a strategy game: you have an array of forces with various attributes, who you send on a variety of missions across the city map. But at the same time it’s an adventure game, and an interactive novel: you get to investigate the relationships between the characters, handle press conferences, and encounter various crimes across a wide range of scenarios. This is also partly a tycoon game, since a lot of the game is tied to money. You’ll want to keep an eye out for new avenues of income, and keep your books – the official and unofficial. 

There’s a variety of game mechanics, and which parts play the dominant role will depend on many factors: your style of play, the decisions you make, and sometimes on the particulars of the case you’re faced with. One day you'll be working the big cases, putting the real crooks behind bars. The next you might be outwitting a suspect, or breaking down a crime scene. There’s plenty of gameplay variation, but our chief task is to ensure that everything that happens on the screen is an important part of the overall story. You won’t get bogged down with the numbers and the attributes of your units, and it’s not just a set of puzzles to solve. As you move from one event to the next, the city of Freeburg will change around you, in response to your actions. The story is not constrained by a particular genre or narrative format, so you can truly take part in the life of a desperate man trying to regain his self-esteem – and you’ll never know how the story will evolve, just around the next turn.