Radical Capital

Master capitalism to fund its destruction. Your success is what strangles you.

Radical Capital is a capitalism roguelike for mobile. You play the money genius of a radical movement, sent to win the stock market so you can fund the revolution that ends it.

Inspiration

This one is personal. I am KmikeyM, the world's first publicly traded person. I sold shares of myself and have made real decisions by shareholder vote ever since, so I have spent years inside the exact tension this game is built on: what happens when you turn yourself, and your principles, into a financial instrument, and who you become once the market has a vote in your life. I was also executive producer of Blippo+, a surreal interactive game with no economy in it at all. Radical Capital is its inverse, a game where the economy is the whole soul.

That history left me circling one design question: what if a game's message lived in its mechanics instead of its cutscenes? Universal Paperclips made us feel the cold logic of an optimizer eating the world. Frostpunk made the management decision itself the moral indictment. Disco Elysium rendered politics as personality. We wanted a systems game where the central irony, that mastering capitalism to fund a revolution slowly turns you into a capitalist, was something you felt in the numbers rather than something a character explained.

The seed was a single button. When the heat from your organizing climbs to lethal, you can pay off law enforcement to make it vanish. It works instantly. It also costs you 30% of your movement's commitment. The safe, run-preserving play is to gut the soul of the thing you are building. That one tap is the whole game, and everything else was designed backward from it.

How we designed it

Radical Capital runs on two loops of equal weight, an XCOM-style split between a fast tactical layer and a slow strategic one:

• The Market. A live, volatile market. You allocate capital across six sectors, commit, then sweat a ticker as events resolve your bets into profit or loss. This is the only source of money.
• The Movement. You spend that money to recruit members, manufacture buzz, run direct actions, and climb a 13-rung ladder from a campus club to a nationwide party.

Three resources, Money, Cause, and Heat, are always one bad turn from collapse, and the whole design is the friction between them. We kept the economy legible with a few simple, tunable rules:

$$\text{recruits} = \left\lfloor \frac{\text{Buzz}}{10} \right\rfloor \qquad \text{upkeep} = \left\lceil \frac{\text{attendees}}{8} \right\rceil \times \$5$$

Unfed members quit. Overcrowded venues raise heat. Every action states its full cost before you tap it, so the tension is always a visible trade, never a hidden one.

We built the submission the way you would build the game: from a single source of truth. One design bible held every formula, name, and number, and the four artifacts (the design document, the player journey map, the production plan, and the visual concept package) all derived from it. That discipline is why the 30% sellout cost, the $\lceil \text{attendees}/8 \rceil$ upkeep, and the 13-rung ladder read identically across every document.

The visual identity is its own argument: an agitprop propaganda poster (the warm, hand-printed movement) colliding with a red-phosphor trading terminal (the cold, watching market). Switching tabs is switching worlds, and the player feels it before reading a number. Every mockup is original work, built in code in the same stylesheet as the documents so the whole package reads as one game.

What we learned

The biggest lesson became the law that organizes the entire design. We call it the recovery-valve rule. When we stress-tested the movement loop, we hit a heat death-spiral: a player could get cornered with no affordable way out. The fix taught us the principle: every pressure needs a paid recovery valve, and it should cost money. Money is the universal release valve, which is precisely why the trading layer has to exist. The cheap valve is attrition; the expensive valve charges a different resource, so it is never a no-brainer.

We also learned the two loops have to feed each other, not just run side by side. Climbing the Movement ladder unlocks powers in the Market (a city-council seat opens an insider sector, a Senate seat lets you move a market), while the Market funds the next climb. Both run on the same dollar, so "grind the market or build the movement?" is the question you answer every single turn.

Challenges

• Keeping the thesis in the MVP. Our first production plan cut the trading layer down to a slider. We caught that the part we called "half the fun" was also the part we had deferred, and rebuilt the scope so both loops are core to the minimum viable product.
• Coherence across four documents. Four artifacts can quietly disagree about what the game is. We ran an adversarial review pass over all four, hunting for any seam where the numbers, scope, or framing diverged, and reconciled every one.
• Designing the choice, not the escalator. Coupling the two ladders risked becoming a power-fantasy treadmill. We made every rung raise the ceiling and the floor: each unlock comes with a matching new financial burden, so getting bigger never gets safer.
• Not preaching. A satirical anti-capitalist game can tip into a didactic message game. We kept the writing to stating costs and consequences, and let the mechanics make the argument.

What's next

The core is the two loops, the squeeze, and the sellout. From there: rival AI movements competing on the same ladder, a schism system where selling out too often splits your movement, and a shared daily market event with a leaderboard that ranks not who won, but who won cleanest. The score everyone argues about should be the same one the game already keeps: who reached the top with the least blood on their hands.

Built With

• css
• custom-ui-gizmo
• horizon-desktop-editor
• html
• meta-horizon-worlds
• typescript