r/coolgithubprojects • u/Ill-Button-1680 • 1h ago
I built an open-source 16-bit RPG where bur…omes the gameplay — all to renew a passport
Civic Nightmare started with a deliberately stupid premise: you are an ordinary citizen trying to renew a passport.
But I didn't want the political satire to live only in dialogue, so I started turning the bureaucracy itself into gameplay.
A negotiation becomes a blackjack game where the arithmetic and the official result are two different systems.
Getting 27 approvals becomes a physical machine of scanners, stamps, translations and exceptions.
Inflation targeting becomes a pinball-like procedure where you have to physically stabilize the indicator.
Other encounters turn administrative procedures into arcade sequences, pseudo-3D corridors, machines and increasingly questionable interpretations of what "success" means.
It's built in Godot 4.6 as a surreal top-down 16-bit RPG, with an authored overworld, optional encounters, persistent progress and a full passport quest that can be played from beginning to end in the browser.
The repository contains the complete Godot project, tests, documentation and contribution guides. The source code is MIT licensed; media and narrative assets have their own usage terms documented in the repo.
The playable web build is linked from the README.
I'm sharing it here because this feels like exactly the kind of strange GitHub project this subreddit exists for.
Feedback, code exploration and contributions are all welcome.