A week or two ago, prompted by an email from a friend, I made this version, very quickly. A few days ago I switched to using TypeScript (but still no frameworks) and found that TypeScript is amazing.
To play the game, you "find a new project" (for $100 of in-game currency), then assign it to your only employee ("the Founder"). Once you've worked on a few projects you can hire staff. A store becomes available where you can buy further skills and items.
It shows you some basic aspects of software development in a bespoke devshop. Interplay between different roles, how self-managing teams operate etc. I've had a blast writing it!
Sounds like a fun serious/educational game. I'll check it out.
There was a list of serious/educational games that I once submitted to HN [1]. Maybe you should contact the author to see if it can be added.
Edit: that was more fun than I expected. At later levels it feels a bit like a grind, but for just for a couple of days of work I find it a fantastic achievement. You kept me hooked for about 25 minutes ;-)
To avoid the grind: If you give your people multiple of the self-start skill they will do more work with less clicking on your part. Also observation skill is similar, means they can do multiple in a row without any intervention.
For the Observation Training, your worker seems to work X tasks in a row when you manually click them to assign a task, where X is their "Observation Training" level.
So that automates their work if you assign it to them manually.
The self-starter training seems to take effect when you've not manually assigned a task to them. They will search for a single task to complete X times in a row, with a slight delay between each task, where X is equal to their "Self-Starter Training" level.
When their tasks are started automatically via this skill, the "Observation training" seems to be ignored.
Great job! How is it take you 10 years to take the step to do it? Any idea about how to overcome that? I question this because I have some ideas but later on I never find the time / motivation to deal with it.
I’ve done a lot of other things in the meantime :), such as putting out profitable projects and books etc.
The original vision for this game was a fully animated iOS game. It only became worth doing when I suddenly had a way to make it ultra-lightweight, no graphics at all.
So my advice is to find the minimum. Less than an Mvp. Halve your idea. Then halve it again.
Took me a few tries to get the flow, maybe hiding irrelevant workers (and highlighting the appropriate workers) when you click on a task might help make it slightly more obvious. It's also easy to forget who works on what tasks, maybe organizing those later on might also be worthwhile.
This is a great game, could eventually turn into an "idle clicker" if you so desire. Good job! I'm a fan of vanilla JS solutions.
Also: if you want to preserve some state: localStorage might be the api you want, cookies are a mess.
That's really cool! I think my one complaint is that its unclear how some of the 'self starter' items are operating - sometimes they just sit there with stuff they can be doing on the board
You can give someone multiple self-starters. Say you give someone 3 of them. That means that after they’ve been assigned a task manually (once) they will then go back to their desk and after a little pause, spontaneously go back and look for work to do. They’ll do this 3 times (since they have a self start level of 3). Then they’ll rest until they’re manually assigned to a task again, at which point they’ll again do up to 3 extra tasks. And so on.
There’s no “infinite self starter” item you can buy for them.
Observation means that as soon as they complete a card they immediately look for a card of the same sort.
With self starter there is a delay before they look for it (which can actually be good) and if they have multiple skills they’ll first look for cards to test, then for cards to dev, then for cards to “ba”.
Does Observation chain in to Self Starter, then? For example, if there are 2 dev tasks and 2 test tasks and I assign my founder to test, will he test 1, use observer to go back and do the 2nd, use self starter to pick up the 1st dev task, and then use observer again to finish the 2nd dev task?
The genius of Universal Paperclips [0] is that it teaches you the unintuitive ways that exponential systems work. Things seem to move very slowly, then they explode very very quickly. (Assuming that’s the paper clip game mentioned by GP!)
It reminds me of paperclips too. I opened it just to check it out. It was so simple that every few clicks I could discover a new few-clicks, and the next thing I know I've been clicking away for a couple of hours.
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Dev_Story. If you were able to have people automatically grab tasks that would be awesome (which I see is already on your backlog). I got to level 8, but the clicking quickly got unruly
Incredibly fun game! Thought I would spend maybe 5 minutes checking it out and eventually turned into 30! You should definitely turn this into a mobile game, it can easily pass the time.
Few things:
- It gets really confusing when I have 3 different specializations named Renee
- It makes sense that when you get more team members, you have to scroll to see them, parallels actual work where you can't really give full oversight to large teams
- Because there is an option to get a large team, you should add project managers that can take some team members and auto-perform their work
> you should add project managers that can take some team members and auto-perform their work
Though it's not yet implemented[0], it seems that feature is purchasable per person:
> ️Observation Training - When a person finishes a card, train them to look for another card. If trained multiple times, they will look for multiple cards.
I cannot press the help button. I can Tab my way to it and hit enter to get to the link, but mouse is not working. Chrome on OS X, no blockers, and no errors in console.
Please hire a dev (lol) to make this a mobile game. Hopefully before someone else steals your idea and releases a shitty clone. (sorry to be a Debbie Downer)
This is a well made, fun little game. I accidentally sunk 20 minutes or so into it before I realized where the time had gone (just like real scrum meetings!)
Great work! Maybe extending the keybinding would help with playability? Something like assigning workers to letters for shortcuts. That would make the pairing of tasks to workers more efficient and faster to play. :)
Amazing, really loving this! One thing I’d change is that prices keep increasing, a chair should remain the same, keyboard too. No need to have “inflation” on everything. And skills such as self starter should have price per person as levels increase
97 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 31.7 ms ] threadFor 10 years I've been meaning to make this. (It was even mentioned on Hacker News back when I first wrote about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=967641)
A week or two ago, prompted by an email from a friend, I made this version, very quickly. A few days ago I switched to using TypeScript (but still no frameworks) and found that TypeScript is amazing.
To play the game, you "find a new project" (for $100 of in-game currency), then assign it to your only employee ("the Founder"). Once you've worked on a few projects you can hire staff. A store becomes available where you can buy further skills and items.
It shows you some basic aspects of software development in a bespoke devshop. Interplay between different roles, how self-managing teams operate etc. I've had a blast writing it!
There was a list of serious/educational games that I once submitted to HN [1]. Maybe you should contact the author to see if it can be added.
Edit: that was more fun than I expected. At later levels it feels a bit like a grind, but for just for a couple of days of work I find it a fantastic achievement. You kept me hooked for about 25 minutes ;-)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14661813
Do they self-start any time they could complete an open task? Do they self-start only when there is new work available as soon as they finish?
So that automates their work if you assign it to them manually.
The self-starter training seems to take effect when you've not manually assigned a task to them. They will search for a single task to complete X times in a row, with a slight delay between each task, where X is equal to their "Self-Starter Training" level.
When their tasks are started automatically via this skill, the "Observation training" seems to be ignored.
The original vision for this game was a fully animated iOS game. It only became worth doing when I suddenly had a way to make it ultra-lightweight, no graphics at all.
So my advice is to find the minimum. Less than an Mvp. Halve your idea. Then halve it again.
Thanks
This is a great game, could eventually turn into an "idle clicker" if you so desire. Good job! I'm a fan of vanilla JS solutions.
Also: if you want to preserve some state: localStorage might be the api you want, cookies are a mess.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/loca...
I had a story come back with bugs multiple times until I forced the Founder to triage, dev AND test themselves! :D
You can give someone multiple self-starters. Say you give someone 3 of them. That means that after they’ve been assigned a task manually (once) they will then go back to their desk and after a little pause, spontaneously go back and look for work to do. They’ll do this 3 times (since they have a self start level of 3). Then they’ll rest until they’re manually assigned to a task again, at which point they’ll again do up to 3 extra tasks. And so on.
There’s no “infinite self starter” item you can buy for them.
With self starter there is a delay before they look for it (which can actually be good) and if they have multiple skills they’ll first look for cards to test, then for cards to dev, then for cards to “ba”.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips
A more straight up click based one w/o much of a graphical component would probably be AdVenture Capitalist or the like.
Few things:
- It gets really confusing when I have 3 different specializations named Renee
- It makes sense that when you get more team members, you have to scroll to see them, parallels actual work where you can't really give full oversight to large teams
- Because there is an option to get a large team, you should add project managers that can take some team members and auto-perform their work
On iOS, btw, if you use “add to homepage” it will act like an app. (Full screen; high res icon)
But my kids want me to make it a proper iOS app with animation.
Though it's not yet implemented[0], it seems that feature is purchasable per person:
> ️Observation Training - When a person finishes a card, train them to look for another card. If trained multiple times, they will look for multiple cards.
0: https://github.com/secretGeek/devShop#walkthrough
I cannot press the help button. I can Tab my way to it and hit enter to get to the link, but mouse is not working. Chrome on OS X, no blockers, and no errors in console.
Please hire a dev (lol) to make this a mobile game. Hopefully before someone else steals your idea and releases a shitty clone. (sorry to be a Debbie Downer)
After $4k in earnings, only Tester is happy..
I didn't realize there can be less frantic clicking by using the observer or self-starter skills.
I saved the screenshot before I was done clicking https://imgur.com/erAxNzF
Great game.
If you flesh this out with a bit more content, i think this is an easy $10-20 purchase on steam.
Well done.