I would like to but I've never done that before. If it does okay then I'll hit up some local developers who have experience with that. Step 1 is just getting controller support in, though, which I want to do in the next few months.
clockworkbird
joined 3 days ago
Haha, yes! I played CS and was immediately hooked by the mechanics-driven narrative system. And he was kind enough to try it out and give me some pointers just before release.
Thank you so much! It takes about 10 hours to finish one playthrough, which is a nice length I think.
haha, I quite understand, there's lots of games and little time. Thank you for wishlisting it!
Spoilers incoming about the entire game, but especially the end.
spoiler
Sure, it's inspired by the Russian revolution (particularly Trotsky's account of the February revolution), but with the difference that this city is an industrial, western-style power more like Germany or Britain.
There's a factory worker faction (with internal divisions), a dockworker faction (susceptible to religious reactionary ideas) and a vanguard party faction (who are small but can be grown). Each faction has its own sidequests.
The workers are tired of the war and terrible conditions. Different factions meet and decide it's worth collaborating; these meetings are instigated by Markov, the leader of the vanguard party. This leads to 1) the "People's Assembly" (a city-wide soviet, inspired by accounts I've heard of the plenums in Serbia) and 2) a general strike. When the emperor calls in the troops to restore order, the people appeal to the soldiers, and the rank and file soldiers turn their guns on their officers. (Taken 1 to 1 from the February revolution.) Reactionary troops (inspired by the Black Hundreds and Freikorps) continue to fight for the emperor, but he's pushed back to the palace. Parliament can be stormed at this stage, which triggers large-scale political discussions about the future form of government. If you're able to advocate for worker democracy then parliament is dissolved in favour of a national People's Assembly ("All Power to the Soviet"). And the sequence where you storm the palace is very inspired by the climax of the movie "October: ten days that shook the world", a propagandist account of the storming of the Winter Palace.
If you succeed at advancing worker struggle and consciousness on these fronts, the Soviet takes power (led by a radical member of the factory faction, not by a member of the vanguard party). Parliament and the military can't do anything, because there are no soldiers left who will defend bourgeois democracy or the imperial regime.
The one glaring, irreconcilable issue with the game's political framing is that the fate of the city can be changed by the actions of the player character, who isn't even a political leader at the start of the game. This makes no sense in terms of material dialectics, but it's sort of necessary for the game to work and feel satisfying. I justify it to myself with the explanation that the player represents an expression of the will of the masses as a whole, and reflects more than just the consciousness of one person, but, eh, I can see why someone would disagree.
I agree, that would be an interesting game and a more accurate exploration of historical materialism in action. But I wanted to put you in the shoes of one person, down on their luck, scraping by, hunted by the authorities, as they get swept up in a movement way bigger than they are that lifts the whole city. I wanted to focus on the emotional aspect of those experiences; that's what makes this art rather than a simulation.