Wow really like your work and will definitely be following this. It reminds me of games like Machinarium...a good mix of cute and weird, and lots of character.

I have been making steady progress with the game over the last couple of weeks. There have been two areas of focus:

1) I have implemented a random event system. Events can be things that affect the whole market (like a war or government policy) as well as things that affect you directly like a security attack. These events can affect various aspects of the customer funnel, i.e. visitors, signups and/or churn, and can last weeks or months. They are primarily communicated through the emails your receive as the player (see below). I have had to make some enhancements to how the email system and email templates work for this purpose.

2) Also just for my own sanity I started work on movement and interaction of employees in the office space. These interactions are purely cosmetic (i.e. they don't affect underlying stats) but they do make the game feel more like... well... a game! In short the employees will occasionally pick an item they want to interact with. Some basic path finding is used for them to reach that item, interact with it, and then return to their workstation where they will interact with their computer. I could only take this so far given the lack of art and animation, hence all the Mona Lisa images and still employees

You can read more details, as well as a few technical articles on my blog

Still working towards that an alpha release so I can get feedback. Finding it difficult to figure out where and how to draw that line...

I don't know what's happening here, but you have my attention. 

A couple of years ago I released a children's game on iPad. Having never done any real drawing before I knew animation was out of the question for me so here is what I opted out for in the cutscenes:

This is such a great concept. I can just imagine all sorts of obsurd/unreasonable obstacles you could throw in there. Pack of wolves, aliens abducting, etc etc

Question: how deterministic is the movement of the sheep? Are there any random and/or AI elements in their direction and speed?

Fantastic: love the vibrancy and energy the game oozes!

Curious (and this may be a dump question): certain elements of the animation look 3D, for example one character's sword seems to rotate on its edge during the idle animation. Are those hand drawn frames or is it something Spine allows you to do? Not sure if my question is clear.

Keep up the good work!

[Bug Representation:]

Here are some quick updates of the last week or so

Bug Representation:

• Bugs are now introduced as developers spend effort on any task. The rate is dependent on the skill level of the developer, so that higher skilled developers produce fewer bugs over time. I want this to ultimately allow some sort of balance between having more junior developers getting features out the door, and the high rate of bugs associated with that.
• Bugs are treated like any other tasks in the game product/sprint backlog system (like feature development or security), except it "Levels Down" instead of "Level Up" (if that makes sense). It affects sales and churn in a similar way too. Some markets will be more sensitive to bugs than others.
• I'm also toying with the idea of occasional "critical bugs" which have more devastating effects on the company.

Shopping Store:

• Some item types (like employee's computers) will now automatically upgrade when purchased, and apply to future employees too. These items will also be generally placed on the level at fixed anchor points automatically. Remember that I'm trying to make this game less about office micro management.
• For other items I have come up with a "anchor line" system where the player can place them along certain predefined lines in the level (on the floors or walls).

Fixed anchors for automatically positioned items, and line anchors for player customization (screenshot from Tiled).


Items automatically snap to anchors


I have also been looking for art styles that may work for the game. Here are a couple that have caught my eye:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/33540835/Winkreative-Monocle-magazine
https://www.behance.net/gallery/32589513/Vicoli
https://www.behance.net/gallery/30672125/Midnight-Girl

[As usual the following screenshots use placeholder art/UI/layout and will not appear as is in the final game:]

My urge to share progress is trumping my wisdom not to show poor placeholder art/UI. Hopefully it won't backfire on me.

This week I have been focusing on the investment "mini game" which is intended to make the funding process in the game more than just a necessary chore. Very briefly, it goes something like this:

• You get 3 randomized investors (there might be future mechanics so the player can influence what investors they attract)
• Player designs a 10 slide "pitch deck" consisting of slides about each of the 4 core areas in the game: Tech, Design, Sales and Marketing, and Operations.
• The slides are shown to the investors who, based on their personal affinity to each of those areas, will show different levels of interest (a graph is used to visualize that). The affinities will be displayed either as pure stats, or as textual profile. I'm still debating that one.
• If any investor reaches some minimum interest level, they will put in an offer based on their affinity and the company stats.
• The player can choose to counter the offer, but there is the potential of scaring off the investor and having them back out.

See this post for details.

As usual the following screenshots use placeholder art/UI/layout and will not appear as is in the final game:


View while the slides are being presented. The projector beam changes color according to the slides. I'll be doing more on this and actually show some slides on the screen.


After slides are shown investors either bale or put in an offer[/list]

I always wondered if our perception of color is the same or if our brains interpret them differently. I mean sure, we all agree that red and green are two different colors, but what if what I internally perceive as red is something you have never seen in your life...

And if that holds true, then it could extend to our perception of shapes, or other senses like hearing, or touch, etc etc.

</philosophy>

Made good progress this week. I have started to do some experimentation with a sprite shader that "colors" parts of sprites, essentially allowing me to create variations of the same employee characters. The results are mixed-to-positive. It may still be better to have the eventual artist just pre-render many color variations. This screenshot shows the black & white, and the color mask textures, and then 4 different variations of colors generated by the pixel shader (note, this is a test sprite and will not appear in the game):



Beyond this here are some other updates:

• The "run sprint" / game turn button is now a little more fun (see below | art is not finalized):
• Added email templates with variable substitution. One of the core game mechanics is your in-game mailbox.
• Added CEO creation/customization at the beginning of the game

See this post for full details

I think the graphics and the music gel together really well! Voted on steam

[OST - It's a Good Day to Code]

This week I took a bit of a "breadth first" approach to build several of the systems I have in mind for the game. The goal is to have 5 minutes of playable game within the next couple of weeks. You can follow my progress on Trello.

A few items I have worked on this week (more details in this post):

• Randomized candidate generation
• Started investigating personality modeling with HEXACO
• Initial build of the shopping store

Lastly I have been working on some music for the game. Here is a rough cut of one of the tracks ("rough" being the keyword):

OST - It's a Good Day to Code

I admit, for a second when I started the video I thought I was looking at some processed video. I think the movement of the sign more than anything was life-like. Good effort!

Wow the animations look great (the bursts of acceleration). There is definitely something about using sophisticated animation with a simplistic graphics style. One Finger Death Punch comes to mind 

This week I concentrated on getting a basic game loop going, as well as some experimentation with the visuals. I'm not pretty settled on the idea of a side view (rather than a top-down / isometric one) which gives me more direction as I look for an artist for the game. More details about my progress in this post

@Cranktrain: yeah absolutely intend for a visible office and staff going about their daily things. For the most part they'll be on auto-pilot.

At the risk of scaring people away here are some screenshots (all art is strictly placeholder!)

The office:


The "Product Backlog": items the player can be focusing on at any given point, which can be technology, design, sales and marketing, and operations


Playing with some weather effects which I hope will give the game more visual interest

Wow I had seen a mention of it on IndieDB but didn't realize they had progressed this much! Looks great. Will definitely vote for their greenlight submission!

This looks really cool! I have recently thinking about what sort of art style I can use for my startup simulation game to set it apart from every other sim game, and a side view of the building and characters was on my list of potentials. Then I came across this thread and definitely like the vibe (though I'll be going for more of a cartoony/hand-drawn look)

Looking forward to playing this!

It's interesting you mention that; a few people have said to me that they would be interested in the inter-personal/team dynamic aspects, so I think I do need to focus on that more. I certainly had some things in mind like:

• Team members will have a measure of happiness which affects their productivity. It can dependent on different things like salary, team size, office perks, etc (perhaps on other team members with clashing personalities as you mentioned?)
• Having a lot of members more junior team members will be cost efficient early on but will lead to higher bug rates and slow you down later on.
• There will be an overhead to having a larger team (i.e. mythical man month, etc)

Really like your ideas and will add it to my backlog (see what I did there? ). The tricky thing is going to be making sure I don't make the game too unapproachable for non-developers, and that it doesn't become too much micro-management.

This week I spent most of my time on an "tech tree" editor for the game, which generates a JSON file to be loaded in the game. I had planned for the player to be able to complete tasks from a huge list (development, marketing, sales, etc), some of which would unlock others. Ultimately though I decided to simplify the whole thing and just boil it down to a much smaller set of tasks that the player can focus on throughout the whole game.

I have described the whole process, as well as some Unity 3D tips in this blog post

Startup Freak is now Available on Steam!!


Startup Freak is a game that, for better or worse, puts you in the shoes of a budding entrepreneur:

• Come up with a genius (or terrible) software startup idea.
• Hire a talented (or… economical) team.
• Build out your product, focusing on features, tests, performance and security.
• Find investors and get funded.
• Manage infrastructure and data centers.
• Tune your product pricing.
• Exit with a huge pile of cash (or crash and burn. Most likely you’ll crash and burn).

I'm still prototyping the core game mechanics, while exploring ideas for the look and feel of the game. I'll be posting screenshots once I have something more concrete.

Steam // Itch.io // Discord // NewsLetter // Twitch

Some Screenshots: