Show HN: Skyline Co-op is like SimTower, but built around democratic socialism

Posted by geekamongus 19 hours ago

I'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.

Comments

Comment by goda90 17 hours ago

>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...

Comment by Kim_Bruning 17 hours ago

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!

Comment by jakswa 15 hours ago

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

Comment by arendtio 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by danielspace23 10 hours ago

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!

Comment by alamsterdam 11 hours ago

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?

Comment by BaseBaal 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by bildung 17 hours ago

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!

Comment by geekamongus 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by alamsterdam 11 hours ago

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

Comment by ceejayoz 10 hours ago

Putting several elevators right next to each other seems to work nicely.

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by bildung 17 hours ago

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)

Comment by jakswa 17 hours ago

Hell yeah I got people to move in. Nice job getting it to walk me through those intro steps.

Comment by ungreased0675 19 hours ago

Is there crime in the game?

Comment by geekamongus 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by ebolyen 18 hours ago

I recall SimTower had bomb threats for the security team to deal with.

Comment by ceejayoz 17 hours ago

This is adorable and catches the original's vibe nicely, at least on first glance.

Comment by derdi 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by geekamongus 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by derdi 16 hours ago

Got it, fair enough, thanks!

Comment by schumpeter 17 hours ago

Simtower, which he modeled this after, only allowed lobby on the first floor… or a multi floored lobby.

Comment by iso1631 18 hours ago

> attracting a large grant

From whom?

Comment by a2ff6eeb0 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by bildung 18 hours ago

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

Comment by ButlerianJihad 17 hours ago

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/02/22/rope/

  ...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.

Comment by a2ff6eeb0 17 hours ago

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".

Comment by geekamongus 17 hours ago

Well, it's a free game, and open source...

I acknowledge the irony though.

Comment by antiquark 18 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by 18 hours ago

Comment by bildung 17 hours ago

That cuts both ways - can people in the US vote for democratic socialism, or will the capitalists then create super PACs to influence elections, thus undermining the principle of one person, one vote?

Comment by bigfishrunning 17 hours ago

So the socialists don't influence elections? they don't have speeches and advertising? News to me -- are you sure the majority want socialism? seems like many many people don't. Or is the election only "influenced" if it doesn't go your way?

Comment by bildung 17 hours ago

I have no horse in that race as I don't live in the US. But reading today that in Michigan the democratic primary loser outspent the winner almost 10:1 truly baffled my mind. Stuff like this isn't even legal in most other democracies, i.e. in France all presidential candidates have to have equal TV time to present their respective positions.

Imagine how the political landscape in the US would look like if people's votes were actually equal.

Comment by bigfishrunning 16 hours ago

So the primary should have gone to the person who spent more? maybe infinite spending can't force through an unpopular platform?

Comment by ceejayoz 15 hours ago

I think you've misinterpreted the parent.

Someone almost bought that election. That it didn't quite work doesn't make it a good scenario.

Comment by elcritch 17 hours ago

This is nonsensical.

This PAC influence being putatively for buying advertising, to you know influence individual voters to their point of view? They can’t literally buy votes.

So votes only matter if they’re not influenced by PACs? Perhaps it’s more that if a voter agrees with a capitalist PAC then it’s no longer a valid individual vote? It smacks of anti-democratic value that the masses are too dumb to vote correctly.

Comment by bildung 17 hours ago

Of course they don't literally buy votes, but statistically they very much do. Stuff like not having votes only on sundays, votes taking hours, publicity just meaning outspending the opponent etc. are all things most other democracies don't have. I literally had a political science course in university were these were taught as cases of voter suppression (i.e. If you are a member of the working /middle /upper class, how likely is it that you can easily be off work for a full day on a tuesday, compared to a sunday?).

Comment by FeloniousHam 15 hours ago

> Of course they don't literally buy votes, but statistically they very much do.

Counterpoint: Haley Stevens Brad Daigle Jon Tester Sherrod Brown Tom Steyer Hillary Clinton Michael Bloomberg (the list is long)

You need "some amount of money" to compete in elections, but the "money correlates to votes" is canard.

Comment by kristianc 18 hours ago

Most democratic socialist societies are capitalist, capitalism just remains politically subordinate rather than able to govern society unchecked.

Comment by energy123 18 hours ago

Those would be social democracies.

Comment by numbers_guy 17 hours ago

No, social democracies are subservient to capital.

The whole modern democratic socialist movement as I understand it is primarily to fix exactly that issue.

Comment by energy123 12 hours ago

I don't have much to discuss about the movement (although I am sceptical due to the repeated historical pattern of Mensheviks making way for Bolsheviks), but the subject we are discussing are democratic socialist countries, not movements, which as far as I am aware, don't exist. There are social democracies like Finland, which is what I assume the poster was referring to.