What it was
Communism: The Game was a game where you stood in line for bread.
As with all our game idea, this one started with a bad joke. When we started the Hats, one of our founding principles was to make decisions that were fun instead of smart. This is why our official team name is The Men Who Wear Many Hats. (Which is way too long to be practical (and it doesn’t even match our domain name)
Communism: The Game was to start with a splash screen, triumphantly showing the communist ideal in the same fashion as a propaganda poster.
Then, when you started the game, all you could do was move right, in a bread line that never ended. In an effort to make the game more deep we had considered letting you say, “comrade,” to passers by. Also, there would be a high score table.
The only reason we actually considered making this not-really-a-game was because it was to be our first. We had just formed and had only two ideas. The other idea was too big (and still is.) So we decided to attempt a simple project in Flash, to get our feet wet.
Why it didn’t happen
As the humor wore off and the frustrations of a new and foreign pipeline settled in, we decided to scrap it. I struggled to use Flash in such a fashion that Ben and Mike could use what I had assembled. I don’t think we ever figured that out. For Organ Trail, I didn’t even touch the pipeline. I don’t even know what the development environment looked like.I just handed off assets and designs. This isn’t really an ideal process either, which is why we have switched to Unity for our current project.
Another failing was that Communism: The Game would have required some decent art, since that’s all you would be seeing. I am not really an artist, so everything I tried to put together didn’t meet the standards I was setting for the group.
The end result was that we shifted focus to a new game that required little to no art but would still teach us what we needed to know about making a game in Flash. That’s where The Name Game came from.
Similarly, from my college days, I had become quite verbose in Game Maker. I awoke one night during a fevered dream and decided I could recreate Voltorb Flip (a minigame from Pokemon) in a few hours. I did so in 4. Since I had all the design and assets, I asked Mike to port it to Flash as a learning experience. And that’s where Zero Flip came from.
In case you have become frightfully worried that we wont be making games based on terrible jokes; check out Blind Samurai. Which, I might add, I really want to re-make and expand on with Unity. Maybe I will make it an actual game some day.
Cheers.