Commie vs Zombies v0.2

What this is

A first-person shooter set in Novyy Mir, a socialist city that never got the collapse it was promised. Housing blocks with the lights still on, a commissary where the shelves are posted and counted, a library, a clinic that does not ask what you can pay, a collective farm outside the gate — and past the perimeter wall, the dead. You hold the line, you fetch what the city needs, you fix the tractor, and you talk to the people who live there, because they are the reason the wall is worth standing on.

It is not a neutral game and it is not pretending to be. The zombies are the easy enemy. The thing this game actually has an argument with is the logic that says a place stops deserving to exist the moment it stops turning a profit — that a hospital, a tram line, a block of flats are worth keeping only while somebody is making money out of them. Novyy Mir is a city where that logic lost. The rations are fair and posted where anyone can check them. The radio keeps broadcasting because someone volunteered for the shift. People defend the city because the city belongs to them, which is the entire difference between a home and an asset.

The people in it are not scenery either. Everyone has a name, a job and a place to be at a given hour: the painter at his easel, the clerk at the commissary counter, the barber who wants five labour vouchers for a heroic haircut, the kid who dropped his toy tank outside the gate when the sirens went. Conversations offer you a tone — patriotic, stern, cynical, compassionate — and the city remembers which one you took.

Built the stubborn way, in a text editor: low-poly, PS1-era, plain JavaScript modules with no build step, no engine licence, no launcher and no publisher. Every sound effect is generated in code as it plays. The one thing that is not synthesised is the People’s Radio, which broadcasts six real public-domain recordings, because a station that plays computer-generated music is not a station.

Screenshots

Ten captures from the running game, untouched. Click any of them for a closer look.

Details

Controls — keyboard and mouse

WASD to move, mouse to look (click once to capture the pointer). Shift sprints, Space jumps, C crouches. Left mouse fires, right mouse aims down the sights. R reloads, V is melee, Q or the scroll wheel changes weapon, H holsters, X inspects the weapon. E interacts and talks, F is the flashlight, B pushes the motorcycle and G is its horn, Tab opens the PDA of the People, Escape pauses. All sixteen of those are rebindable in Options.

Controls — controller

An Xbox or PlayStation pad works throughout, and the on-screen prompts relabel themselves to that pad — A/B/Y and the bumpers on an Xbox controller, the cross, circle and triangle on a DualSense. Plug it in or pair it over Bluetooth, press any button, and it takes over. Stick sensitivity and an off switch are in Options. This includes phones and tablets. A pad paired to an Android phone or an iPhone over Bluetooth drives the whole game — menus, dialogue, the mod bench, all of it — and the on-screen buttons get out of the way on their own when one is connected, so you are holding a console rather than a screen full of thumb controls. Turn that off in Options if you would rather keep both.

Controls — on a phone

Touch controls are built in and turn themselves on when a touchscreen is detected: a floating stick under your left thumb, drag anywhere on the right to aim, and a FIRE button under your right thumb. Aiming and shooting are separate controls on purpose: when firing was a tap on the same half of the screen you turn the camera with, the two fought each other. Every action the keyboard has has a button — FIRE, USE, JUMP, RELOAD, MELEE, AIM, SPRINT, CROUCH, PUSH, plus BAG, weapon switch, flashlight and the pause menu — and nothing is keyboard-only any more. The controls are round and compact so they cover as little of the game as they can. Button size, button opacity, look sensitivity, inverted look, vibration, and switches to put firing back on the right half of the screen if you preferred it that way, are all in Options, because a thumb on a 6-inch screen is not a mouse and the defaults cannot be right for every hand. On Android it goes fullscreen and locks to landscape; on iPhone the browser will not allow that, so it asks you to turn the phone sideways yourself. You do not have to use touch. Pair a controller over Bluetooth and it plays like a console; the on-screen buttons hide themselves while it is connected. It is genuinely playable either way — it is still a shooter, so a keyboard and mouse will always beat a thumb.

What changed in v0.2

The Workers' Council actually happens. The delegates used to be marked as being inside the Congress Hall while their bodies stood on the pavement outside it, and the session was four lines of text in an empty room. They are in the hall now, seated, with an audience of residents behind them — and it is a real session: ten beats, one speaker at a time, the speaker stepping forward while the room turns to watch. Roza wants the gun towers because the dead came at the south gate in step. Svetlana is rationing bandages and gets the bill for every breach. Pavel cannot man the towers with gunners sleeping nine to a room. Vera says a city that only builds wall raises children who cannot say what the wall is for. Then the argument stops and hands you the floor. What you say moves your standing with the people you back and away from the people you do not, it is quoted back at you when the vote is called, and building what you argued for — or voting against your own speech — is remembered.

Touch controls are a real control scheme now. There is a FIRE button: aiming and shooting used to be the same gesture on the same half of the screen, and they fought each other. The buttons are round and smaller so they cover less of the game. And the gun genuinely fires — the tap-shot was measured in seconds and was being dropped entirely at 20fps and below, which is exactly when you are most likely to be shooting at something.

Phones start on the highest graphics preset instead of a cautious guess, and drop back on their own if the frame rate will not hold. The fallback that was supposed to do that had never worked: its thresholds were written in seconds but were being counted in frames, so the worse your device was, the longer it waited.

Fixed: the main story no longer stops at the council meeting — the quest marker pointed at the wrong building and the meeting scene itself was unreachable behind a generic line. Quitting to the title screen on a phone drew a menu you could not scroll and could not rotate out of. A controller now hides the on-screen buttons, on phones too.

How finished is it?

Not very. This is a pre-alpha: playable end to end, a long way from done. Expect placeholder art beside finished art, quests that are thinner than the ones around them, balance that has not settled, and bugs. Saves are kept in your own browser and an update can invalidate one — do not treat a save here the way you would treat a save in a released game. What it is good for right now is exploring the city, talking to the people in it, and taking the mod bench apart.

Mod tools

Built in, and open from the title screen or the pause menu — the mod bench. Write and place quests, edit characters and their dialogue, retune weapons, vehicles and the world's numbers, and watch the running game change under you. It lays itself out for a narrow screen, so it works on a phone as well as a desktop. Everything you make stays in your browser; nothing is uploaded and there is no approval queue.

Feedback

Wanted, specifically. A pre-alpha is the part of a game's life where a complaint can still change the design rather than just the patch notes — so if something is confusing, unfair, broken, boring or just wrong, that is worth hearing. Say so on Leftbook.

What it runs on

Any current browser with WebGL2 — Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Edge or Safari — on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS. Integrated graphics are fine. There is no WebAssembly and no plug-in; it is ordinary JavaScript modules and one copy of three.js, served from this domain. Phones start on the highest graphics preset rather than a cautious guess at what the handset can take, and if the frame rate will not hold there the game steps the preset down a stop on its own and says so. Five presets, from MODERN down to a PS1-grade POTATO, and you can pick any of them by hand in Options at any time.

How long a session runs

A full day in Novyy Mir is twenty-four real minutes — one real second is one minute on the city clock — and the light, the shifts and the people's schedules move with it. Half an hour gets you a day, an errand or two and a turn at the wall. You can stop mid-sentence; it keeps your place.

Does it save?

Yes. Named save slots and an autosave, with a screenshot on each slot, held in your own browser's storage on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no save server to go down or get sold. Clearing this site's data in your browser deletes them, so treat a browser clean-up as deleting your saves.

Download size

Nothing to install. The whole game is about 112 MB across roughly 200 files, and most of that is character models and the six radio tracks, which arrive as the city needs them rather than all at once — the code itself is under 6 MB. Your browser caches it, so coming back is quick. On a metered connection, know that going in.

Does it need an account?

No. No sign-up, no login, no email field anywhere in the game.

Does it track you?

No. No analytics, no advertising, no third-party scripts, no cookies. The game could not phone home even if it wanted to: this domain's security headers only let it load files from itself, and there is not a single request to any other host in it.

Is it finished?

It is playable from start to end of what is written, and it is still being worked on. Things will get added; nothing you can already do is going behind a price.

Play it

That is the whole pitch. It is free, it opens in this tab, and it asks you for nothing first.

Support

This stays free

Commie vs Zombies is free, has no ads and does not track you. It is made by one person, between feeds and naps with a newborn. If you got an evening out of it, that is worth something.

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