Hey comrades,
I'm an enthusiast hobbyist game dev, i mostly handle the programming part in games. I also do more general coding.
'Nuff saif, i was wondering if this forum was interested in collaborating to make a semi-official (or even official if mods are down) /leftypol/ game? There's much ideologically motivated obscure alt right games so why not do our own? Could also make us known more among leftist and leftists gamers circles, and mostly be a fun experience for everyone.
I've made a document with a bunch of game ideas that fit it in the /leftypol/ theme, if some of you guys are interested, i can share them and we could build something great. Also share your ideas if interested.
If you posted it on github or something you could get people to contribute. There is already a project like that up
>>14035 an over the shoulder shooting game. That might be a good place to start because there's less work to do adding to something that already exists.
> There is already a project like that up >>14035 an over the shoulder shooting game.Thanks for showing it, unfortunately i do not like it that much, i'd like to make something a bit more parodic
> Where is it lolBehold the text wall of ideas, some better, some worse:
KZ Manager gulag edition
Involves playing as Alunya and killing chinlets (doom style ?)
You play as /leftypol/ user raiding /pol/, it scales up quickly and goes very far kinda like cookie clicker.
You play as IDF commander aiming bombs: maximize civilizan losses while minimizing Hamas losses
You play as a schizo anarchist Alunya and must destroy the state. Top down shooter
You play as an extremist left wing group and must destroy the state / do a revolution. Strategy game
You’re the russian parliament during 1993 and you must win the siege, the good ending involves restoring the USSR. Strategy, tower defense or FPS
> Huh? Why not make the game online first and then worry about the rest? What are you trying to do?
As i've said, speaking from experience, just like most collaborative work, it's wiser to go with a design already in mind, and already a team, or the game becomes bad, with no real goal or design, and there's very few work done on it and the few being done is in all the wrong places
So what i'm trying to do is create a thread where, if comrades are interested, share our ideas for this game, organize it's creation, form the team, and keep people updated on the devleopment process.
>>35477I keep thinking recently about how cool it would be to make a kind of framework for story-telling games in the style of disco elysium.
By framework i mean; skill check system, a system for building dialogues, characters, checks, and so on that allows aspiring story tellers to create their own kind of similar novel-games with only art work and writing ability.
Hit me with what is wrong with this idea. :)
>>35486ALL of tem área good. I like RTS and tower defende a Lot.
>>35489Yea Thais too is good
>>35493Well i was thinking that if it is an LCS spinoff it would be easy to add leftypol themed references.
And it is all relatively simple code, accessible for people to join in, and can easily be compiled for both linux and windows, basically only needing ncurses and a couple of other things iirc.
https://github.com/Kamal-Sadek/Liberal-Crime-Squad/tree/master/src >>35498Thats the problem with a lot of these projects. In the beginning, everyone has the vigor and vitality to work work work. But as time goes on, life happens, stuff happens, and then blamo, it usually sizzles off. I wonder how the people who made Katawa Shoujo managed.
Do you still have any assets left to share?
>>35497Because
>>35498 and other similar things will happen to most contributes before you're even at something usable. I really don't want to be pessimistic about your project, so apologies, but the question was asked. The sad fact is that these things rarely get off the ground. At least starting with something as a base to work from means you're very quickly creating something usable and like i said adds a layer of simplicity which means any project is less likely to hinge on a single person or two.
>>35528Okay here are some of my ideas:
>Idle/clicker game based on the "Billions Must Die" meme where you're Poljak and you're trying to kill as many people as possible<Not sure if it should end once you kill everyone on Earth (8 billion people or so I think is the current population) or if you can go to other planets via Nazi space shit or even other universes with Nazi occult bullshit to keep playing<Base game would be very similar to say Cookie Clicker but I'm not sure yet how to make it more unique in terms of gameplay>RPG where you play as a party consisting of stereotypical /leftypol/ posters (Such as "Tankie," Anarchist, Stirnerite, etc.) trying to stop /pol/ from destroying the world with meme magic<Kind of split into 2 separate ideas, one focusing more on fighting /pol/ with the other more about left unity and class unity in he face of capitalist exploitation and oppression<Very old idea I've toyed with for some time but never got around to making because I'm lazy, have minimal gamedev experience, and currently can't make my own art<Probably culturally irrelevant now and even more cringe than it might have beenThose are probably the game ideas I have that are most specifically related to /leftypol/, though I do have some ideas that are just kind of leaning left thematically.
Aight so i see there's a good deal of enthusiasm and ideas, thanks everyone!
For people willing to commit to the project (artists, programmers, designers, sound people etc…), where should we link up to actually pick a design, start working on it, take decisions etc…? Stay in this thread, use a telegram, IRC, 'cord… ?
Also a i've said i can personally do programming
>>35489I've been toying with similar ideas before. On the opposite end of the complexity spectrum as DE but with a similar core gameplay loop, there is a slew of stat based text adventure games, most of which are nowadays written in twine. Twine is horrible from a distribution standpoint and the usual UIs are very much RSI inducing, so i very much want there to be another viable standard.
Incidentally there is such a thing called glulx, an extension of the Z-Machine format. As for why it fell out of favor, aside from the traction twine has by using html/css/js, the glulx runtime is heavy and not as readily available as a web browser. A new format should ideally be concise and embeddeable, while still being runnable by an arbitrary runtime.
The obvious question would be how the DE map screen with point&click interactions would work on what is essentially a terminal with some lackluster graphic decorations. The only viable solution would be completely decoupling the presentation from the game logic. The result could be an api for accessing stats and traversing dialogue tree in a given resource file.
Why bother abstracting something so banal that is usually completely baked inside a game? First, pure interactive fiction games would be a standalone game format. Second, any written dialogue and even complex stat or disposition calculations would be accessible in a form ideally more accessible than plain code or opaque resource formats.
For a more concrete idea on how something like this might look, a game would consist of a series of states that dynamically generate a list of available actions. The frontend handles their display and selection. Taking an action may always have stat-based side effects and may yield game text. A dialogue tree would be a chain of actions yielding text, which the frontend displays as a conversation.
>>35529>>Idle/clicker game based on the "Billions Must Die" meme where you're Poljak and you're trying to kill as many people as possible><Not sure if it should end once you kill everyone on Earth (8 billion people or so I think is the current population) or if you can go to other planets via Nazi space shit or even other universes with Nazi occult bullshit to keep playing><Base game would be very similar to say Cookie Clicker but I'm not sure yet how to make it more unique in terms of gameplayThis sounds funny and maybe the best idea since it is easy to make browser based.
I think tgat should be a criteria. The game needs to be browser based with no dl neccesary.
>>35480>>35529A game based on inter-chan political board bickering would without a doubt result in Marxist Matey tier cringe, so I vote a firm no on it. Although a billions must die simulator would be the closest thing that would be actually good and funny.
>>35483These premises are more like the ones that typically do well, see: CITK series, that SPD socdem game that was posted here a while back. Generally if you're going to do something political themed you should just make it a straight politics game like that, can't think of any successes that break this rule.
>>35561>>35562This would also be funny
Could also just remake Hidden Agenda the MS-DOS game
>>35565hidden agenda 2025 would be sick.
>>35566urgh but I hate the meme, oh well I guess it might be popular
has anyone not played the half earth socialism game yet? that's v cool
>>35567>has anyone not played the half earth socialism game yet? that's v coolYes but my strategy is so good I get an integer overflow lmao
<research synthmeat<remove the fetters on the forces of production<respec into synthmeat, biomass and windfarms<rush for spaceI actually had one run where I did the space stuff first and almost got it but got thrown out of office because I integer overflowed
>>35568You don't have to advertise leftypol on it, or can hide it away in the About section
>>35575Apparently the dev still updates it? Maybe we are just the only people good at the game and they've never found out haha, nobody is even mentioning it on their itch page
https://frnsys.itch.io/half-earth-socialismIt's also not listed as an issue on github
https://github.com/frnsys/half_earth/issuesMust be our MASSIVE brains setting us apart, nobody else realized sending the children down the biomass mines would save the planet.
> A billions must die game would probably do numbers. It's a real popular meme that breached our sphere. It would probably also bait people who think the chvd is hecking based and prompt some controversy that would get a lot of attention.How do you see it implemented?
Also remember to vote and rank your opinions, would help us get somewhere:
https://strawpoll.com/kogjk0brKZ6 >>35595>I think it would make the most sense for it to work like a stealth game to get close to them and a beat-em-up to take them down once you get close. Kind of but that becomes a bit to close to a power fantasy i think if the win-condition is ONLY to beat the shooter physically. I envisioned multiple win conditions, with the easiest being simply hiding and luck, by interacting with your enviroment i was imagining things like, moving room to room, opening and closing doors, using items such as chairs or desks to barricade a room, things that can be used as weapons both when in close and like you say to throw at them. IF it comes to a fight with their always being a chance you can die regardless to chance if you decide to take him on.
I was imagining it to be relatively small, so either death or resolution of the shooting (survival until cops show up or he leaves or incapacitating the shooter) with the variability in both different school map layouts and the shooter's skills and as you say, armor, ammo, weapons.
<Giving the player their own gun would have to be off the table for making it too easy. Easter egg: you incapacitate/disarm him and take his gun, only for the cops to barge in and shoot you.
>>35597You could have a spectrum between like a horror game where you just hide (like Amnesia I guess) and a game where you can actually fight back. I think rather than "win conditions" you can just choose how you want to approach it. Any "win" kind of sends the wrong message. But depending on the scenario it's more or less viable to try to resist. You also might struggle to find a place to hide, so the choice is more whether you at least try resisting. IMO it makes more sense for the scenarios to have a "roguelike" set up so you can't just retry the same thing over and over.
>variability in both different school map layoutsThere's been mass shooters in all sorts of places. Schools would definitely be more on the horror game end of the spectrum where fighting back is next to impossible.
>Easter egg: you incapacitate/disarm him and take his gun, only for the cops to barge in and shoot you.oof
Honestly just give the cops bad AI so they are as likely to shoot bystanders as the perp.
>>35600>You could have a spectrum between like a horror game where you just hide (like Amnesia I guess) and a game where you can actually fight back. Yea, that's what I was thinking. Not power-fantasy but not -complete powerlessness- like i imagine horror games tend to be.
>I think rather than "win conditions" you can just choose how you want to approach it. Yea, that is what i was trying to get at with the phrase, sorry, as in, a level can be completed multiple ways, through waiting it out, fighting and so on as mentioned.
>But depending on the scenario it's more or less viable to try to resist. I envision any real resistance relies on trickery, so ambushes, which could make it quite interesting in how you approach with much variation, for an example:
>you find a mop-and bucket, the mop gives you a wooden pole weapon, >you empty the water on the floor at a corner >you shout to catch the killers attention, <killer runs towards you, killer has a check to slip, >you pop out of a doorway or hiding spot and attempt to beat the incel freak with the wooden pole into unconsciousness, it was spectacular unsuccessful, the last thing you see before you die is a chinless greasy skinned thingnoticer.
>IMO it makes more sense for the scenarios to have a "roguelike" set up so you can't just retry the same thing over and over.Yep! Depending how it is layed out (personally i probably would not make it a 3D game) I think something that could be taken from rogue-likes are procedural generated maps to keep things fresh! I think it could also work well as a turn-based system too a la rogue-likes.
>>35603They should just vote on what sort of CITK-like they want to see, because everyone is discussing these big ideas in other genres and don't realize it's probably going to be shit kek
Let's see if leftypol can handle making a good game where you click buttons before beginning on their FPS immersive sim GTA clone
We need to know our means we will have to develop the game, to see what we should aim for. Higher means could make bigger games at our reach, like the school shooting idea, while lower means could make us have to constrain to smaller games (can still be funny) like gulag management simulator.
So, to know our means, artists, designers and programmers that want to help should stand up and say their experience, with what engine, how much time they could pledge and other stuff revelant to help.
I'll start:
I could handle the code, i have experience with Godot and Unreal Engine but i think that we might have to make our own game engine. I can also do a bit of designing, and i can lead if there's no one more experienced that's willing to put more time than me.
I have made multiple jam games, along with a bigger game in Unreal Engine 5 that's like Sea of Thieves with One Piece characteristics.
>>35605>One of the issues with this concept is it's basically an immersive sim type of game which are fairly technically demanding to develop since you have to build the environments and props to work right in a variety of situations. Combine with a roguelike and it's significantly more complex.Cataclysm DDA has a modding API
https://docs.cataclysmdda.org/MODDING.htmlThe amount of game systems it has might be a bit overkill but it certainly has the means to set up a school shooting as a scenario. We could target a certain version of the game and distribute it with the mods and a tileset or maybe write a custom launcher.
Also please vote (
https://strawpoll.com/kogjk0brKZ6) and/or make yourself known as a potential team member, we're not making much progress right now
>>35625I think we should just focus on getting something that has out of the box web compatibility so we can put it on itch so that as many people as possible can play it tbqh, not to mention making a bespoke engine has one person monopolizing the creative process until it's ready (no offense intended on this, but this is how it likely would play out if issues arise). The German SocDem simulator was made in an engine and that would be good for a starter game. If an engine absolutely has to be made then it would make sense to make a political simulator engine, because these games obviously do well and I think the SPD game had to settle for an ad-hoc use of a story engine.
>>35626This poll doesn't even include several of the very good suggestions made earlier in the thread, nor does it contain the CITK-like suggestion (which I'm sure was suggested by someone else before the poll was made anyway). It was also made early in discussions. Basically it should be boycotted and declared void because my suggestion isn't on the ballot and I'm Juan Guaido.
But I seriously point people towards my argument in
>>35611 - sure you may get 10 or even 20 votes but if people are not able to actively engage in the creative process then it will ultimately result in just a few people (through no fault of their own) being stuck doing most of the work and everyone else being idea guys. My proposition doesn't just democratize the creative process, it lets people actively engage in it. As a proposal it lets people submit content through leftypol posts rather than learning and registering to github, which programmers think is trivial information for some reason.
Hope this doesn't come across as too pushy as I made myself a really good dinner (it was sweet chili garlic prawn noodles btw) and had more than a few beers before writing it.
>>35633😘
If people decided on such a thing, I'm leaning towards a similar setting as Hidden Agenda as well. Latin America is pretty out of the common warmongering cultural sphere right now, and people are still sympathetic to the victims of Operation Condor, outside of the PSUV who have had the far left turn on them recently. Most other places will be accompanied by overly politicized nonsense and tribefaggotry. The second place pick is Africa but if you were to put it in the African coup belt you would eventually drag in people like Traore, and it's beneficial for us to keep him out of the western zeitgeist due to the issues of dealing with the Sahel insurgency (it's getting a little nasty).
This may sound ridiculous but MAGAcoms accidentally exposed a Maoist tech billionaire by not understanding the financial information they were digging up and accusing the PSL of being funded by Wall Street. So I think if you're going to make a political game to spread ideology it is beneficial to not put eyes on places that people shouldn't look.
Of course if you wanted to stay out of the coup belt we could make "DERG: An Ethiopian Game" but then you're just stuck with Traore from the cold war kek.
>>35634Alas I am too retarded to build a project and can only beat leetcode challenges, also my computer is a disposable 4GB RAM laptop run through a decade old TV.
>>35538How is Twine horrible for distribution? It spits out an html file which can then easily be transferred and read on any PC.
What's RSI? A casual web search yields me a lot of of presumably false hits such as
>The Relative Strength Index (RSI), developed by J. Welles Wilder, is a momentum oscillator that measures the speed and change of price movements. Solly if that came off as a bit confrontational, I'm a bit in your shoes except that I'm a noob. DE fanatic with an (mostly unrealized) interest in writing my own interactive fiction. The noobity is indeed the problem here: I don't know how to code and what little I've forced myself to learn has been pure misery, it just doesn't speak to me.
pic related: me doing sugarcube >>35643>What's RSI?Repetitive Strain Injury, the pain you feel when clicking through a 10+ choice twine game without a saving option or really any twine game for a couple of hours.
>It spits out an html file which can then easily be transferred and read on any PC.There are some twine programs like that and then there are those that dependd an incessant amount of outside resources that expire over the course of a year. Being so closely coupled to the web browser also means we will never get any software that fixes the interface of twine games, because the content IS the presentation.
>I don't know how to code and what little I've forced myself to learn has been pure misery, it just doesn't speak to me.Land Of Lisp has a section where you write a text adventure game. Maybe give Common Lisp a try.
>>35654Well imagine you're playing a manager of a gulag for Nazi prisoners of war.
You know the kind convicted of warcrimes.
With the added management level of still having to pay your prisoners wages.
>>35657It's the ease of implementation on my part. I can't speak for the other tankie.
There's genre of games like Hamurabi or Kingdoms that can easily be implemented as a command line game.
>>35656The game could start by saying the red army captured 200 soldiers in the battle of <pick random village name from a list>. Then there would be random "migration" events like in dwarffortress with some flavor text about the war or soviet politics.
>>35657The goal could be surviving as a successful POW camp where prisoners from smaller, less-efficient camps are sent to consolidate resources. We would have the period from 1943 to 1955 to work with.
>>35666ALGOL is every language with ALGOL-like syntax just like Lisp is every language with Lisp-like syntax. Seriously, Common Lisp beats every language higher-level than C or Fortran (
https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-comparing-languages.html) and the only realistic argument against it would be programmer familiarity, which is fair.
>>35677>have valueYou mean what the appeal is? It's not that difficult to design gameplay that draws people in, but there's some theory to it and it's an iterative process making what you've built work better. In terms of game design your first question (after you know what the concept will be) is what the primary game loop is, and what sub-loops or super-loops you will have.
E.g. Papers Please has a primary game loop of validating individual people's papers, sub-loops of checking each piece of information, and a super-loop of the daily schedule and making money to support your family.
>>35702Dope.
>>35664Be nice, I script my wolf3d Style engine with scheme
>>35729Is this an image for ants?
Some general blueprints advice:
You can collapse everything to functions and macros to reduce spaghetti. Also set everything to local variables so you don't have to spaghetti from one part of the function to 4 places on the opposite end.
>>35734Yeah what he said:
>>35735 Except I'm not a traditional programming expert at all.
I just typed some random letters into blueprints and picked one for this example.
>pic 1But less say I want to attach my character to something. I don't even have to know what the functions are. I can just even kind of guess what kind of words the function would be named. It gives me a list of all the possible functions that are valid for that class of blueprint. Ahh Attach actor to component, that sounds like what I need to do.
>pic 2This spawns in blueprints.
>pic 3Ahh rotation rule, hmm it's a dropdown, wait what do these options do? Hover over one. Tooltip. Ohhhhh that's what it does.
Whereas I type attach in Visual Studio(I don't have all those code helpers everyone uses for Unreal so I dunno how they work) nothing happens. With more searching than was comfortable I think I found what the equivalent C++ function is. It doesn't explain at all what the options for AttachmentRules are.
I dunno, like I said, I don't have a strong programming background but I can't make heads nor tails of doing the equivalent stuff I know how to do in blueprints. Maybe their documentation makes sense you.
>>35736In visual studio if you want completions you can type what you would usually put in "Target", which is called a class, then a "." to access it's "Methods". If the target is self, you do "this."
It's still better to understand how C++ works though lol
>>35738>It's still better to understand how C++ works though lolWell obviously. Blueprints is just dressing on the underlying C++ code. You asked why someone would use blueprints. You say that spaghetti is a headache I say all that visual studio stuff is a headache.
I dunno I see a lot of people who code in C++ who really do anything impressive programming wise. I've heard people who know C++ say that they have a hard time picking up Unreal C++. I hear all kinds of opinions on this matter. What I know is that C++ code is more performant and you can do things you can't do with blueprints. You can look "under the hood" of any class in unreal and see how things work. Like most people use the Character Movement Component and don't really know how all the variables and the underlying functions they apply to work. I could hardly find any posts talking about those many many functions inside it. I started trying to read the C++ code but it's so confusing for me to look it. Right now I'm just trying to just reinvent it my own way so it works exactly how I want. I'm gonna learn C++ one of these days.
>>35742It really does not take a lot of code to make a guy move around a scene.
>when [movekey] is pressed>player.velocity += speed * normalize(direction_vector)The rest is details. The reason you have almost 13k lines for something like that is because the engine is full of bells and whistles (which suckers devs into using it) to ensure the character can interact with any of these systems automatically. The movement rules by themselves aren't necessarily going to slow the game down (at least not at runtime), but the kitchen sink philosophy to engine design (and by extension development) is a big reason AAA games are such slop at the moment. You need a big team of people just to work on implementing all these features, when you could make the same basic game with PS2 graphics and instead pay people to make more game content.
Throw some ideas around for the logic of the gulag manager idea, as i'm beginning to code it, after having fixed a nasty bug.
>>35656Has some good ideas, but i was thinking their could be multiple prisonner types, all with their own inclinations. Inclinations would notably be between 4 state they can be in: Idle, working, as a dead body needing to be disposed of, and as a dispoed of dead body, and a "revolt" gauge.
Unique IPs: 46