Show HN: Skyline Co-op is like SimTower, but built around democratic socialism
intergalacticrobots.appI've been rebuilding old games with Claude. While creating a modern take on SimTower and having election news on TV in the background, I had the idea to build the economy of the game around democratic socialism instead of capitalism.
Instead of a real estate tycoon, you are an elected steward of the building, held responsible by the Assembly. Homes are allocated off a waitlist, dues are set on a sliding scale, and you face outside pressures from neighboring capitalist landlords.
The crown jewel is attracting a large grant to establish an observatory at the top of your tower, attracting scientists. To get there, you must make sure the people are fed, housed, healthy, and entertained. If the Assembly doesn't have confidence in your abilities, you get voted out.
It kinda works, and the potential failures in the game are pretty unique. I'd be interested to hear HN's take. An entire SimCity clone based on a different economy like this could be fun. >An entire SimCity clone based on a different economy like this could be fun. There's this example of such a game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources... Is it the idea to build a lot of coop working spaces first? Building homes is nice, but they don't pay as much rent. Huh, flagged already. That seems just a bit unfair. It's a decent game! Maybe next round? One thing I wonder about is that it does need some playtesting yet. Early game is slow! I can't begin to picture how much AI slop they are having to filter out. I wonder if they are going to entertain some UX to save people disappointment. "The project should be non-trivial. Don't post quickly-generated one-offs; anybody can do that now. Share something that is deeply personal and interesting to you. Explain how and why." To me the whole HN website feels like a quickly-generated one-off lol. Guess they hope you can find the freshest ruleset for the thing you're trying to post. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html If it was generated pre-2020 by some slow meatballs (like news.ycombinator.com), it is okay to have edges; post-2020, it must be closed to perfection. I don't know what everybody is complaining about AI-generated content. In the past, nobody cared how the content was generated (ed, vim, emacs, VS Code, ...). It either was good or it was not. Personally, I don't care if the content is AI-generated as long as it is good. But maybe that is, because I think that it is possible to generate good content using AI. Just a couple of suggestions: - As I use more than one computer, it would be nice to have a Save (or Export?) feature, that just gives you the game state as a file that I can transfer between devices. It would also be useful for backups. - This could really be a Progressive Web App! I played it earlier. Quite enjoyed it (GitHub issues)... Reminded me of my childhood. Gameplay was a bit wonky, some issues. I saw the OP was posting here looking for comments, I wanted to give some feedback. Not sure why it was flagged? Nice, this has a cute feel to it. I smiled about some of the gossip at the bottom. Tiny suggestions: make the space bar pause/unpause, and for my ears the background music could be way quieter compared to the sound effects - with the default settings I thought the game had no sound yet.
Will definitely play more in the evening! Thanks for the feedback! If you hold the volume button it opens up sliders to adjust the music/ambient noise levels. I should make this more obvious, probably. A few friendly suggestions: - Building a floor and then the room/office is a bit annoying…. Should auto build the floor (like Sim Tower) - Stairs are difficult to build, it should be possible to build a vertical column, seems you always have to build horizontally? - It should be possible to have multiple elevator cars in 1 shaft. Of course this is not possible in real life, but we are looking at a 2D shape of a 3D building. Either that or reduce the demand on the elevators - In real life, Stairs and Elevators generally share a fire space away from residential, that should be encouraged Putting several elevators right next to each other seems to work nicely. No it's fine, I had no trouble finding the sound settings! My remark was just about the defaults (and probably is more of an individual preference anyway) Like the idea, but can't drag any element. Managed to build a lobby by double tapping. Elevator apparently needs to be dragged so I'm stuck. On Android & Waterfox. Hell yeah I got people to move in. Nice job getting it to walk me through those intro steps. Is there crime in the game? Not yet. There are fires, and a trained safety team (something you have to get funded and maintain) puts them out. SimTower didn't have crime either, so I didn't consider building that out. I recall SimTower had bomb threats for the security team to deal with. This is adorable and catches the original's vibe nicely, at least on first glance. Cute game! Very CPU-hungry (in Firefox on Linux), maybe you can get it a bit more optimized. There are some annoying AI-isms ("the X is the goal not the Y"-- just tell me the X please). Is there a way to build anything on the ground floor, or is it just a big empty lobby? Feels like wasting a lot of space. Thanks...I will work on optimizing that. There's also a Mac version you can download, but that wouldn't work in your case. As someone else said, the lobby is the lobby - eventually the Assembly starts to meet there once you make enough progress, but that is about it. Got it, fair enough, thanks! Simtower, which he modeled this after, only allowed lobby on the first floor… or a multi floored lobby. > attracting a large grant From whom? There's an incredible irony in using the most effective tool capitalism has produced to boost the power of capital, to make a game about socialism. But not that new, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them" is a quote attributed to Lenin, so >100 years old by now https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/02/22/rope/ This smells a bit closer to "We're capitalists, but we'd like to get some lift from the current socialist vibe". If that's the case, respect for skimming off the rubes. If not, it's giving "We're tying ourselves up with the rope the capitalists sold us". Well, it's a free game, and open source... I acknowledge the irony though.
...The earliest strong match located by QI appeared in 1955 within a periodical called “The Commonwealth: Official Journal of the Commonwealth Club of California”. The club is a non-profit public affairs organization. The quotation [by Major George Racey Jordan] appeared as a filler item.