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wehere1
been loving francis' work for a while, glad to see this here
tinbad
Really easy to just click away and before you know it an hour has passed. If you're into this type of thing check out Game Dev Story from Kairosoft (same but you're building a game company).
jmduke
Yup, and all of Kairosoft's games are basically variations on that same gameplay loop. I also really enjoyed Dungeon Village.
kordless
By the argument it's really easy to blow time, shouldn't there be a way to see if the time was useful to the person donating the time?
donpdonp
So far, the game is a lot more nuanced and involved than I was expecting. TheSims meets HackerNews. Very well done!
djsumdog
I think it's hilarious.

Not just all the design work that went into it, but how it just pokes fun at the entire post-dot-com start-up era culture.

qwertyuiop924
Despite HN's rep as the epicenter of the startup culture, I think it's somewhat telling that most anything mocking said culture makes it to the front page.

Either my opinion of startup culture (ie: screw it) is way more common than I think, or people here know how to laugh at themselves. Either is fine with me.

freehunter
Every few days there is some self-aware rundown of startup or hacker type stuff that gets pretty wide attention here. I recently saw something maybe last week that was "what it's like to use JavaScript in 2017" that got spread pretty widely. It was a fictional conversation between a modern code hacker and an old school Netscape JavaScript guy and it was definitely not favorable to the state of JavaScript today.

You gotta be able to poke fun at yourself.

qwertyuiop924
Oddly, JS is hell now, despite the fact that a lot of the additions to JS have been strictly for the better, and those that aren't are easily ignored.

This is largely due to the JS ecosystem, which pushes shinyness over actual good design.

ryan-c
Requires WebGL for some reason?
haldean
It's a 3D game, I think that's fair.
leggomylibro
I really like the art style: http://thefounder.biz/art/

The 'social networks' icon is particularly cool, with the facespace/mybook-y page on one side and what look like vim windows on the other.

More to the point, I really enjoy this type of art in both 2D and 3D, which typically uses flat shading and strives to eliminate unnecessary detail.

jdormit
Agreed! One of my biggest gripes with 1-dev games is that the art is usually lacking. Low-poly, stylized models like these manage to feel artistic rather than cheap, while remaining attainable for side-project-sized games.
Xeoncross
Enjoyed the game so far, but I can't get very far because I can't use the products I build.

Every time I start the Catan-like market takeover game I move +1 times and then my blue piece disappears. OS X 10.11 with Chrome 55.

RubenSandwich
Same problem. I updated to Chrome 56 and so far it's working fine now.
shurcooL
This seems very high quality and interesting from the first 10 minutes. It's neat how well it maps to reality despite being a simplification.
imdsm
Needs to run in background...
0xCMP
I wish uBlock would be able to discriminate as to where it blocks WebGL. All these things on HN with Three.js fail in my chrome because WebGL is completely blocked.

edit: Turn out it wasn't any of my blockers... it was turned off in Chrome. Hardware acceleration support needed to be enabled. Why it was off is not clear to me.

https://superuser.com/questions/836832/how-can-i-enable-webg...

lacampbell
I tried all of that and it still doesn't work. In chrome://gpu/ I have "WebGL: Hardware accelerated".
alanh
How do you level up employee skills? There was mention that this was possible during the walkthrough
conorcleary
I felt bad cause I couldn't find where to give senior employees raises.
lisper
Very cool! Unfortunately, it didn't work for me. I got to the point of founding the company and then it hung with a steady stream of:

ReferenceError: Can't find variable: performance

mcrowson
Starts off easy, but quickly escalates in complexity and time sensitive issues. The time and resource constraints make this a much more realistic than relaxing game.
naboavida
Real cool. Just a tip: don't do game logic on the front-end, I guess most readers on HN know what Dev Tools is :)
Bartweiss
Heh, I'm actually 100% ok with that for single-player games. The people who don't want to cheat won't, and other people can skip ahead to hold their interest.
bryogenic
Got a full office and 2nd site but the simulation progress on tasks seems hung. :(

    Uncaught TypeError: this[cond.type] is not a function
        at Object.satisfied (Condition.js:21)
        ...
        at Clock.weekly (Clock.js:160)
Meegul
Just had this happen to me at the 3rd office! Pretty frustrating because I was having a great time!
sean_appleby
I also had this error after getting the second office. The game itself is great though.
exolymph
Tweet @frnsys! He is very responsive.
tdalaa
Wow, quite surprised how much I enjoyed this. Sucked up 20 minutes.. Fun! :-)
importantbrian
So far this is a really cool concept. There goes my productivity.
jmcdiesel
I enjoyed this even though it wasnt at all fun...

maybe thats the point?

tschellenbach
this is awesome, you should turn it into a polished game and release on mobile :)
phumbe
Superb! But I might have to look at the code for calculating the Board's mood. $3.2M in cash and a profit goal of $1.3M makes me unfortunately wary of spending on large research/special projects or hiring additional staff.
recursive
Runs super slowly at times on my machine.
canadian_voter
Wow! Much more nuanced, deep and balanced than I was expecting.

I'm having a damned hard time hiring enough marketing talent, but otherwise things are going swimmingly! :)

Edit: x5.93 from hype -- Revenue Projections: $3,122,597 !!

Time to go on a hiring spree and upgrade to Butter Coffee!

sparky_
Very amusing. Well built web game, surprisingly responsive for running in a browser. Amazing what WebGL does these days!