You can now get Hopepunk City on Steam, at this address. You may need to sign in to Steam ad do the age check thing to see it. The price is $9, a dollar less than my other games, and for the first week it’s an additional 15% off ($7.65). It coincides with the Steam Visual Novel fest, which only Something’s in the Air Redux qualifies, so it will be on sale that week too. Date Ariane Remastered and Ariane in Paradise will be part of the Steam Spring Festival sale later this month.

The Strange Origins of Hopepunk City

Hopepunk City was developed during the 2020-2021 pandemic, when I spent a lot of time at home, working from home and giving myself projects at home. Hopepunk City was the result of this. While all my other games focused on being a game with romance and humor, Hopepunk City got political and topical because at the time I didn’t care.

I felt like I needed to make a game with ideas I was feeling then, and I didn’t care that it made my game possibly off putting, I was being distracted and creative because I needed to be.

I made a page about my influences that inspired the game. Many of the essays and videos posted there are worth watching still, to give me hope.

The Strange Legacy of Hopepunk City

Hopepunk City is my least selling game. I figured it would be, it’s such a strange game. It represents the end of the Ariane and Rachel saga with endings where you the player end up with Ariane, or you the player end up with Rachel, or Ariane and Rachel fix their issues and reconcile thanks to your help, and you end up friends with everybody. Or you die at the end.

The game taught me a lot about 3D art, and all the games before it look dated. Last year I committed to switching from Poser to Daz Studio to render with, and remade Ariane in Paradise. I will not be doing the same to Hopepunk City. It will be a relic of that time.

And then it became relevant again

I had plan to leave the game on Itch only, because its themes were feeling more and more dated as America recovered, and then in a very suspicious election, America took a hard right turn, and I was feeling the same things that made me write Hopepunk City to begin with.

That’s when I decided Hopepunk City needed a bigger audience, and Steam was the best way to get there. So I submitted it to Steam, and they approved it at the beginning of February, and I decided to release it in March.

It’s such an odd game, with a “censored” mode, they/them pronouns for everybody, and an imagined alternate future I imagined to be satirical.

And then it became REALLY relevant.

With all the mess that is going on in the United States where I live, I’m loosely keeping track of what is happening and what their motivations are for doing it. There is an article called “The Plot Against America” that explains some of it and a You Tube Video called “DARK GOTHIC MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America” that explains the other parts.

The tl;dr or eli5 version is this: An internet troll named Curtis Yarvin believes that the US is collapsing because democracy is too slow to fix everything. He believes we can fix our problems with sketchy technology like cryptocurrency, blockchain, and artificial impersonation, but first we have to get rid of democracy to implement his plan, and we need to do it as soon as possible before it’s “too late”.

It’s a shit facist-libertarian philosophy that is filled with so many technical problems, and doesn’t account for the needs of the public, which is the MOST IMPORTANT function of government.

Yarvin wants to divide the US into “network states” or mini nations, just like Hopepunk City. Yarvin wants us to replace democracy with AI systems that the elite control, just like Hopepunk City. Yarvin wants to replace the police with a panopticon that is watching everybody all the time, just like Hopepunk City. And Yarvin wants new forms of currency, just like Hopepunk City.

I had no idea who Yarvin even was when I wrote the story, didn’t really learn about him until I heard his story on Behind the Bastards.

As stupid as these ideas are, he has convinced a slew of rich billionaire tech people like Elon Musk. Peter Thiel, and his fluffer JD Vance, Marc Andreessen, Brian Armstrong, Ben Horowitz, and David Sacks. You should consider Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos at least allied with these fascist oligarchs, too.

The thing is I wrote Hopepunk City to explain how an emergency government could be made if it needed to be. As far as I can tell the AI they are entering in all the government computers is designed to make the rich richer, not to provide the needs for the general public.

Also, let me make it clear that I DON’T ENDORSE the world of Hopepunk City. America is much better off together. I said as much in the epilogue. I literally looked at all of this from many angles, I had to to give voice to the characters in the game. Even the three main women in the game all differ in opinion on most of these issues.

Why it will never work the way THEY want it

I do believe that an expert system to balance taxes, basic income, job income, and prices is doable, but I’m afraid the makers of such an expert system will make it so they get all the money. That’s why I included a human council to approve all of MUM’s decisions before they can be implemented.

Today’s AI systems are mistake prone and are not ready to replace anybody except “clippie” on Microsoft Word. Document editing using AI is pretty good, document writing with AI is just bad! Imagine the mess of replacing government employees with AI.

The idea to replace fiat money with crypto money has never proven to be any good either. Paying for stuff using crypto now take a lot of time to verify, and uses a ton of electricity, and it will take longer if more people are doing it. Imagine grocery stores where every customer takes a half an hour to buy anything.

Technology is not ready for any of this yet, so why accelerate society and force everybody to accept it? All it’s going to do is either 1.) accelerate killing the planet with an increased carbon footprint, or 2.) encourage terrorism with home brewed tesla coils setting off EMP pulses at server farms.

I made a YouTube Playlist called Techno Feudalism and Kakistocracy that explains this stuff better. Kakistocracy is rule by the foolish, which is probably more accurate than Oligarchy that everyone wants to call it. Neither are Democracy.