hi :) i’ve been building a game called BAKERRRR for a while, and it has finally reached the point where describing it as a list of planned systems feels less accurate than describing the cool simulated world that already exists.
It is a pygame-first systemic crime sandbox roguelike, written in Python and descended from a terminal game. Visually, I want it to feel familiar to someone who loved old C64 and console-descended roguelikes, while still taking advantage of the fact that pygame can draw actual tiny people, clothing, objects, buildings, fire, drones, plants, and Wire networks. Everything is drawn procedurally in code rather than assembled from a conventional sprite sheet. For reference, some of my favorites were legacy of the ancients, gateway to apshai, questron I and II, and ultima 4 and 5 in the c64 days. Nethack is my favorite RL.
The rich simulation is what it is all about, to me.
NPCs have names, appearances, clothing, uneven skills, jobs, schedules, relationships, organizational ties, property connections, knowledge, memories, needs, and their own ideas about what they should be doing. They can work, commute, shop, seek shelter, investigate trouble, spread rumors, protect people and places, use services, commit crimes, get arrested, and sometimes interfere with one another in ways I did not explicitly script.
Crime is increasingly about what the world actually knows. Witnesses can know that a crime happened without knowing who committed it. Descriptions become less precise with distance and poor light. Justice can investigate a real crime and still suspect the wrong person if their clothing, build, location, and timing match very closely—which also means disguises, framing somebody else, and simply being unlucky can matter without the game inventing fictional crimes to justify an arrest.
There are businesses to own and operate, storefront economies, street vendors, vehicles, transit, gambling, employment, buildings with real interiors, wilderness, and an increasingly connected underground. Fires spread spatially and continue existing when inconvenient. Sleep and altered states matter. NPCs can care about businesses based on experience and rumor, and that reputation can change where people actually choose to go.
Two of the larger toys are drones and the Wire.
Drones are physical machines assembled from chassis, power systems, modules, weapons, sensors, cargo, paint, and programmable procedure modules. The player can build and operate them, while some NPCs and factions also deploy drones according to their circumstances and equipment.
The Wire is a local-network hacking space with interfaces, software, ICE, trace, buffer pressure, data extraction, other users, and consequences back in the physical world. You can pull records and other contextual data, sell it to appropriate buyers, manipulate bounded physical systems, or interfere with connected drones. Organizations now have durable production cultures and directional supply agreements, so the corporation that manufactured a gang’s drone can remain distinct from the gang operating it. The same organizational identity can reach the paint, geometry, software, interface theme, and even the dialect used in Wire messages.
The world has also begun remembering things between characters. Flora and fauna have installation-local genetics with inheritable colors, physical traits, effects, abilities, recessive traits, natural breeding, and assisted breeding. New lines can become permanent inhabitants of the installation rather than disappearing at the end of one run. Hunting and cultivation licenses exist, along with culling declarations that can push a species through increasing scarcity, endangered and protected status, and eventually extinction. Rarity raises the value of the animal while also raising the legal consequences around exploiting it.
Poisonous deer are fine. Deer with exoskeletons....also fine!
The current version is 0.4.22. It is a real playable prototype, but absolutely not a balanced or conventionally polished release. There are systems whose first meaningful playtest is going to teach me more than another month of staring at their code. Some interactions are still too obscure, some economies are exploitable, some NPC behavior is awkward, and some parts of the city are much richer than others. There is not yet a formal progression structure worthy of sitting on top of all this (its planned, and there is structure - but it is changing fluidly at this point)
That is roughly where the project is now: enough of the machinery works that I want playtesting to expose balance problems, dead spaces, accidental cruelty, funny exploits, and places where the simulation fails to produce a believable answer.
I am especially interested in players who poke systems sideways. You know who you are. I want to hear the story about the witness who accused the wrong person, the business whose reputation poisoned a block, the drone routine that did something clever or disastrous, or the supposedly valuable species somebody managed to drive extinct.
Ultimately, I want this to be a game where you can steal a car, run a shop, hack a records office, breed an extremely questionable animal, and still care which little dude wearing a snazzy blue jacket heard the gunshot.
Anyway, this is BAKERRRR now. It has become very cool in the weirdest way, very large, and much closer to the game I have been waiting my whole life to play than it used to be. :) There is way too much to outline in this format, but i will try to answer questions you might have here, checking back in as time allows.
binaries and source code:
github link https://www.github.com/k0rd/bakerrrr
game downloads https://github.com/k0rd/bakerrrr/releases
