Skyline Co-op is like SimTower, but built around democratic socialism
Details
- External ID
- 49195297
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Skyline Co-op is like SimTower, but built around democratic socialism
- Website domain
- intergalacticrobots.app
- Launched
- Aug. 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 41
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8454301075268817
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- indie hacker passion projects
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- cooperative building simulation game
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The author explicitly created this indie 2D simulation game using Claude and web/Tauri technologies, proving it is fully vibe-codeable.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Sim Tower
Concerns raised: Drag functionality not working on Android/Waterfox, Early game progression is slow, Elevator demand is too high relative to capacity, Building floor before room/office is unintuitive, Stairs difficult to build vertically
Feature requests: Save/export game state for cross-device transfer and backups, Progressive Web App version, Multiple elevator cars in single shaft, Auto-build floors when creating rooms, More obvious volume control UI
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 166 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #38 of 167 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 281 days after the earliest competitor.
- A self-running space economy SIM in Rust and Bevy · hn · 2026-07-21 · 110 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- I left my FAANG job at 50 to build a sci-fi game · hn · 2025-11-07 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- AI agents play SimCity through a REST API · hn · 2026-02-09 · 216 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Startup Equity Adventure Game · hn · 2026-04-26 · 36 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- An interactive game of British Columbia · hn · 2026-07-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- I Built a Retro Survival RPG in Vanilla JavaScript · hn · 2026-05-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- I created a Mars colony RPG based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books · hn · 2026-02-08 · 307 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Microlandia, a brutally honest city builder · hn · 2025-12-03 · 144 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.