Top
Best
New

Posted by geekamongus 1 day ago

Show HN: Skyline Co-op is like SimTower, but built around democratic socialism(intergalacticrobots.app)
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.

41 points | 41 comments
goda90 1 day 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...

Kim_Bruning 1 day 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!

jakswa 1 day 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
arendtio 1 day 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.

danielspace23 1 day 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!

alamsterdam 1 day 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?

bildung 1 day 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!
geekamongus 1 day 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.
alamsterdam 1 day 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

ceejayoz 1 day ago||
Putting several elevators right next to each other seems to work nicely.
bildung 1 day 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)
jakswa 1 day ago||
Hell yeah I got people to move in. Nice job getting it to walk me through those intro steps.
BaseBaal 1 day 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.
ungreased0675 1 day ago||
Is there crime in the game?
geekamongus 1 day 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.
ebolyen 1 day ago||
I recall SimTower had bomb threats for the security team to deal with.
ceejayoz 1 day ago||
This is adorable and catches the original's vibe nicely, at least on first glance.
derdi 1 day 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.

geekamongus 1 day 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.

derdi 1 day ago||
Got it, fair enough, thanks!
schumpeter 1 day ago||
Simtower, which he modeled this after, only allowed lobby on the first floor… or a multi floored lobby.
More comments...