📺 CIVIC NIGHTMARE

The Bureaucracy RPG
A surreal political satire about the most dangerous quest of all: renewing a passport.

Civic Nightmare is a satirical, top-down RPG built in Godot 4.6 that explores the absurdity of modern global governance, corporate dominance, and the digital age. You play as a scrawny, debt-burdened citizen on a desperate quest to renew a passport, crossing high-detail districts where pixel-scale citizens, monumental political caricature, arcade confrontation, and CRT bureaucracy occupy the same collapsing reality.

🕹️ Game Features

🚗 The Administrative Approach

New Game first tunes into a short, skippable CRT news bulletin: war is good for quarterly earnings, automation remains human-centered, and the passport district advises citizens to arrive in a roadworthy vehicle. The signal then cuts directly to an approximately 90-second playable sunset drive toward the district. The citizen must drive but cannot fail: officials inaugurate an unrepaired pothole, a motorcade requisitions a private gold lane, a mobile toll corrects which lane was open, and a checkpoint grants access only after its barrier collapses. All the while the battered economy car sheds parts and the presentation insists this is the greatest journey ever undertaken, now scored by the arcade-driving track Coastline Dash. Only the bulletin can be skipped; the drive is mandatory gameplay.

Free-roam begins with Dead Man's Hand, a persistent overworld theme that keeps its place across exterior travel, ducks beneath dialogue and Administrative Hold, and yields to interiors and encounter-specific music.

🏛️ The Great Signature Quest

Navigate an authored overworld and confront six different machines of authority. To get your document signed, you must deal with:

• Donald Trump: Broadcast patriotism, gold-plated access, and a monument already posing for its own victory screen.
• Elon Musk: A permanent-beta headquarters where unfinished infrastructure is presented as inevitable progress.
• Ursula von der Leyen: A transparency maze whose instructions require their own instructions.
• Vladimir Putin: A ceremonial palace barricaded for a war that official paperwork insists is proceeding normally.
• Christine Lagarde: A stability vault that protects confidence more carefully than citizens.
• Emmanuel Macron: Managed decline staged as elegance, philosophy, and excellent lighting.

Trump, Ursula, Lagarde, and Putin now defend their doors with playable procedures. The Greatest Deal is a five-hand certified-majority match: readable blackjack first—visible hands, totals, HIT, STAND, a target of 21, physical card foley, and the dedicated Snake Eyes soundtrack—then a separate official result in which accepting or challenging Trump's claim really assigns the point. The Consensus Engine turns 27 approvals into a physical machine of scanners, stamps, translations, moving documents, lawful exceptions, and per-station audiovisual feedback. The 2% Miracle makes the citizen physically stabilize an inflation indicator to the dedicated Jackpot Jive soundtrack, with euro balls, reactive flippers and bumpers, liquidity injection, and a methodology that becomes more flexible than the economy. The Three-Minute Special Operation is a deliberately forgiving pseudo-3D corridor with telegraphed administrative fire, real cover, screen-relative strafing, a paper-fed launcher, and a final military bear whose unbalanced washing machine enters a sanctions-proof alarm phase inside the monumental domestic-reserve hall. Clearing a procedure opens the existing encounter without replacing its dialogue.

🛸 Optional Investigations, Deviations & Anomalies

• Historical Contamination: A pathetic, spectral "Hitler" parody who haunts the map, opening his military overcoat (Superman style) to reveal "ZZ" branding.
• The Southern Sanctuary: Find Sam Altman searching for trillion-dollar funding near an unstable Nuclear Plant (and its Neural Core).
• Intercepted Channels: Meet Xi Jinping at the Great Wall, or overhear Kim Jong-un using the Red Phone to negotiate grocery deliveries with Russia, Iran (Mojtaba), and Sweden.
• The Quantum UFO: Before reaching Albert Einstein and a crying 80s-anime Mark Zuckerberg, survive The Observation Problem: record temporal echoes, occupy three places at once, and certify that all three are still one citizen while the case clocks disagree.
• The Hidden Bunker: Ignore a direct protocol warning, survive a one-minute transfer corridor where bombs arrive and funding departs, then find Zelensky making a final plea while Death waits to void the paperwork.
• The Drone Escalation: Follow an unsolicited delivery system into the Fulfillment Cathedral, contest a cybernetic Bezos in a first-to-two arcade match with paperwork, objections, impact foley, and the dedicated Goofy Arcade Steel Strike soundtrack, then discover whether a physical victory is contractually recognizable.

🤖 C.L.A.U.D.I.A. Assistant

Your central hub is a satirical 90s digital mascot—a parody of modern AI assistants—housed in a CRT terminal. She provides helpful (and highly cynical) guidance on your path to bureaucratic salvation.

💾 Persistent Dossier

The title screen offers Continue and New Game. Progress, encounter consequences, and final-mission state are archived in a versioned local dossier; Continue always returns the player to the latest safe overworld checkpoint instead of reopening a cutscene or room transition midway through it. ESC places the case under a diegetic Administrative Hold whose available material changes as the procedure develops.

Web persistence uses the browser's IndexedDB-backed user:// storage and therefore requires site storage to be allowed; private browsing may not retain the dossier. See the Godot Web export limitations.

Touchscreen play uses one contextual landscape overlay rather than a permanent virtual keyboard. It changes from movement and interaction controls to each procedure's actual actions—including held inputs, simultaneous pinball flippers, Trump's claims, Bezos objections, and Putin's movement/fire/reload controls—then releases every held input when the scene changes. Title and Administrative Hold buttons remain directly tappable.

🎞️ Civic Nightmare 2.0

These images are all loaded by the current game runtime—not superseded concept art.

Actual gameplay

Three of the authorities appear below inside the residences that explain them before they say a word.

The separate five-image itch.io gameplay set and the provenance of both capture groups are recorded in asset_sources/marketing/README.md.

Runtime art gallery

The Administrative Hold and its behavioural dossier are deliberately not fully illustrated here: discovering what the system has recorded is part of the game.

🎨 Technical & Aesthetic Identity

• Hybrid Civic-Surreal Style: Pixel-scale citizens and arcade cues inhabit authored, high-detail environments whose architecture carries the political joke before dialogue begins.
• Portrait Pipeline: Fighter portraits use controlled chroma-key extraction, premultiplied-alpha resizing, and automated 128×128 validation for clean, halo-free transparency.
• Authority Architecture: The six signature encounters use dedicated 352 px hero facades with shared perspective, pixel density, lighting, and door alignment instead of procedural roof symbols. Their reusable visual contract is documented in the facade art direction.
• Narrative Interiors: Authority rooms may replace the shared visual tile pass with a full authored environment while keeping the same travel, collision, dialogue, and save contract. All six signature authorities now reveal a different machine beneath their public architecture; the reusable visual grammar is documented in the interior art direction.
• Optional Investigations: Xi, Kim, and Altman use the same authored-room contract to turn surveillance, the Red Phone, and the nuclear AI demonstration into environmental consequences rather than generic bonus rooms.
• Southern Administrative Annex: A dedicated optional exterior makes Kim's televised strategic spectacle and Altman's immaculate AI demo visibly depend on the same failing municipal utility layer. The area art direction records its gate, layout and travel contract.
• Classified and Anomalous Interiors: The bunker now visualizes war as prohibited administrative routine, while the UFO gives the evidence system a room whose clocks, objects, shadows, and geometry cannot agree.
• Bunker Access Gauntlet: The classified route becomes a controls-first dodge encounter with telegraphed ordnance, funding traffic, instant retry, persistent access clearance, and a later dossier interpretation. Its runtime and visual contract are documented in the gauntlet brief.
• Authority Access Games: Trump, Ursula, Lagarde, and Putin gate their existing rooms with four self-contained, controls-first procedures whose outcomes become behavioural evidence. Their shared travel, persistence, and interaction contract is documented in the authority access brief.
• Broadcast-to-Arcade Opening: A short skippable CRT bulletin establishes the civic world before handing off to a mandatory fixed-16:9 highway sequence with steering, sweeping perspective curves, contradictory signage, four physical bureaucratic set pieces, road damage, vehicle deterioration, engine sound, the generated Coastline Dash soundtrack, and arrival. See the news-broadcast brief and opening-drive brief.
• VHS/CRT Effects: Custom shaders preserve the 80s/90s cabinet identity with scanlines, chromatic aberration, vignette, and restrained display noise.
• Authored District Ground: A continuous 2176×2048 pixel-art plate gives all six authority compounds a distinct material identity without visible tile seams. Path reservations, collisions, forests, encounters, and entrances remain procedural gameplay layers above it. The contract and generation prompt are documented in the district art direction.

🤝 Contributing

The bureaucracy is accepting applications. Contributions are welcome—from bug fixes and dialogue to encounters, pixel art, rooms, accessibility, translations, tests, tooling, and carefully scoped architectural improvements.

Start with CONTRIBUTING.md, then use the architecture guide to find the right system. The source-code license is in LICENSE; media and narrative rights are explained separately in ASSET_NOTICE.md.

🚀 Play & Run Locally

1. Prerequisites: Godot Engine 4.6 (Standard).
2. Setup:
   • Clone the repository.
   • Open project.godot in the engine.
   • Run the main.tscn scene.
3. Web Support: Optimized for GLES3 with a single-threaded Godot Web export, avoiding SharedArrayBuffer and cross-origin-isolation requirements on itch.io while retaining the gated GitHub Pages pipeline.

Or play the current build directly in your browser.

🧩 Project Structure

scripts/main.gd is the composition root: it builds the overworld and coordinates the game-specific story transitions. Reusable state and UI behavior live in focused modules:

• scripts/managers/: dialogue, quest progression, behavioural evidence, versioned save data, room transitions, contextual touch input, environment setup, and static world landmarks.
• scripts/data/: read-only character colors, portraits, world sprites, and authority-facade metadata.
• assets/landmarks/: runtime-sized exterior hero facades for the six required-signature locations.
• assets/interiors/: opaque authored room backgrounds aligned to the shared indoor gameplay canvas.
• assets/backgrounds/: collision-neutral overworld ground art rendered beneath the procedural gameplay layers.
• assets/sequences/: runtime artwork created specifically for authored presentation sequences.
• assets/audio/: approved runtime music with explicit ownership and rights notes; source masters remain outside the exported tree.
• assets/runtime/props/: the small promoted vendor subset actually used by interiors.
• asset_sources/: non-exported editable masters and retained source material; heavyweight source formats use Git LFS here only.
• tmp/generated/: ignored, reproducible generator output; selected runtime art must be promoted deliberately into assets/.
• scripts/sequences/: title, news broadcast, playable approach, Administrative Hold, and the dossier-driven final determination.
• scripts/encounters/: self-contained Xi, Kim, UFO world/observation, Bezos, bunker, Greatest Deal, Consensus Engine, Price Stability Pinball, and Special Operation logic.
• data/characters.json: character dialogue, choices, and presentation metadata.
• scenes/interiors/: reusable interior scenes and room-local behavior.
• scenes/areas/: authored exterior travel containers that reuse the room transition contract without indoor presentation.

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for ownership boundaries, runtime flow, and contributor guidance.

✅ Verification

From the repository root, run:

godot --headless --path . --editor --quit
godot --headless --path . --log-file .godot/flow-smoke.log --script res://tests/smoke_test.gd

The smoke test loads the main scene and covers the title flow, six-signature dossier interpretation, Dossier-to-world consequences, authority access rules, contextual multitouch state, save/restore round trips, Administrative Hold, AI dialogue, and an interior round trip. Pull requests run parse, smoke, and Web export before they can reach the Pages deploy step.

Asset ownership and repository-weight decisions are recorded in docs/ASSET_INVENTORY.md; release verification lives in docs/RELEASE_CHECKLIST.md.

⚖️ License

Source code and software implementation: MIT.

Media and narrative content: not automatically covered by the MIT code license; see ASSET_NOTICE.md for the repository's rights boundary and contribution policy.

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"Your passport will arrive in 4-6 business years. Thank you for your patience."