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Adventure Communist is a game by Hyper Hippo, and by all accounts I shouldn’t know what it is. However, a few years ago, after testing positive for Covid (probable false positive) and stuck in a hotel room for 10 days with nothing but a phone, bad cable television, and no symptoms I started downloading any and every game that looks interesting.

After being released, I stopped playing them all… except Adventure Communist. What is it about making numbers bigger? Even after making a clone of the game, ¯\(ツ)/¯

What I enjoyed about making the clone is implementing game systems I’ve come to know well as a player. As a software engineer, I like to think about how they were implemented, maybe that’s what keeps me coming back?

A perfect example are the huge numbers. They don’t fit into into normal data types. My guess was the number is spilt up, perhaps with an exponent. Digging into big number libraries it was nice to see I was in the ball park. With this clone I put off adding a big number library until it was needed, and I never got there. Godot’s int is a 64 bit signed integer which is about 9.22 quintillion. This version maxes out at rank 4, and after letting it run a while the largest number was about 1.4 quintillion (should have kept it running).

It’s more than just big numbers, the modification management system was fun to implement. It turned me on to managers in game development. I try not to optimize early, but this one taught me a manager before it gets complicated, may not count as over-engineering.

Cloning a game is a great way to learn new ticks and gain game dev skill. There are a lot of parts to game development, so practice comes slow. It’s boring to implement what others have done, so there is a tweaked version called Bureaucrats. The main difference are names, minor number tweaks, and reward changes. What’s cool about it is it’s a json file. I imagine that’s how Adventure Communists creates events (smaller themed versions of the regular game). Of course they use art to bring it all together. For this project art was not a focus. No doubt the have tools to make creating back end data easier, that would be a fun tool to implement. I imagine it with graphs to see which resources limit purchases over time.

This is my first game that’s not open. I wanted to see how it was to build and deploy from internal pipelines. If anyone has any interest I’d be happy to open source it.

It’s the game loop. That’s why I keep coming back. It’s simple, but optimizable. Click here, then here, upgrade that, unlock this, hold off on spending science that because it might be the next mission objective. Good job Hyper Hippo–you’ve kept me interested for years.

Another observation, art is super important. Not only for the obvious “hey this thing you made is super ugly”, but conveying information. In place of icon the clone uses full text, which makes for a cluttered screen.