Civilization and SimCity addict here. After 7+ hours of play, pushing out over 1,200 products, putting on hundreds of events for hype value, hiring good engineers and designers, hiring robots, making every product design possible, firing said good engineers and designers, researching everything, expanding to every location, acquiring all the competition, decommissioning the robots, attaining $1.1trillion in revenue, then achieving corporate nirvana by purchasing The Foundry AI, I get this nice little kick in the pants: http://i.imgur.com/4LF3rjx.png
Hehe, there aren't.. I looked in the source code. Another aside is that getting the Blockchain technology opens you up for the hackers that steal $10M, so it's really just a big loss.
I am embarrassed to say that I burned 3 hours on this. Very nice job so far. I would still be playing it, but it crashed the tab due to Chrome running out of memory (16GB RAM on my laptop!!!).
A few observations:
1. I was very much having to micromanage the employees. It gets tedious. It would be nice to be able to put employees into teams and queue up projects.
2. Emergencies were interesting. It was impossible to handle the patent trolls early on, & I lost to them 4 times. It took a while (probably about an hour), but it was eventually possible to earn enough money to get back into the red.
3. It would be nice to have some way to keep track of the good and "trash" product combinations.
4. The marketshare sub-game was interesting, but it did get old after a while. I wanted to put it on autopilot, but I could normally get 3X what the "employee" could. After a while, when you are developing many products simultaneously, it really impedes the main game play.
5. It is difficult to compare employees because their information is very much spread out when trying to assign people to a task. It looks nice for screenshots, but is cumbersome for normal gameplay.
6. There is A LOT of mouse movement required for repetitive tasks. Going through the motions of starting a project (a product), choosing the product type pairs, selecting who should work on the development, and clicking start, requires you to move all around the screen. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over...
7. If I have multiple developers, all working on multiple projects, and my servers get attacked, it would be nice to be able to temporarily pull everyone over to the server job (or the patent troll job, etc...) and have them automatically go back when the emergency is over.
8. Your screens need back buttons. When trying to find someone to hire, for example, I may look in several different places. Each time I need to go back, I have to close the entire Hiring screen, and it never failed that a product would finish at exactly that moment, and I would have to go through the product launch and marketshare subgame before being able to continue looking for a new hire.
There are a few more little bugs or improvements that could be made, but by now it probably sounds like I'm nitpicking, so I'll stop.
Overall, I really enjoyed the game! I can see that a lot of planning and labor went into the game design and mechanics. I would enjoy playing this again sometime.
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.
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.
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).
Wow, every 20 minutes or so I was beaten in the head with a patent lawsuit (that throwing every single one of my best engineers on it would lose, shocker!) and every 10 minutes my servers were attacked, which again my best engineers couldn't stop.
I'm currently -$3mill although for a short time I had the most poppin' social ad network there is.
Awesome game. With a wiki or some manual it'd be an absolute blast. Imagine if the group that made Shenzen IO teamed up with this guy?
edit: Wait, Shenzhen is just Zach Barth.. Ok, team up with this guy, please.
I kept going hitting the recruit option and looking for someone with a law background, but that was likely too specific a skill for the game to acknowledge.
When playing the marketing minigame, sometimes my pieces just disappear from their space. This leaves me no choice but to hit end turn, click through the "you've still got actions" alert and continue until time runs out. Very annoying. No idea what's making this happen...
Once you get to a certain size, just do repeating products and have an employee do them: yes, you can do better by playing the mini game yourself but you can launch ten times more products by not playing it.
At first, only spend on new things once you've already hit your profit goal for the year. Also, spend as much as you can to get your profit to only slightly above the goal, so the goal next year isn't inflated (hm, perverse incentives?)
Hire employees with high marketing skills to ward off patent trolls and other problems. Once you have spare employees, have recurring promos as well. Can always pull employees off the recurring for emergencies then put them back on after.
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.
I am curious about Phaser, although I could never get the hang of frameworks or engines beyond the simplest, as I have an unhealthy urge to understand everything.
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.
I was all excited to make my first multi-billion dollar acquisition when suddenly a project showed profits of $NaN, an error that cascaded through the interface, eventually turning nearly all values to NaN. The board became very upset about our profits of $NaN.
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.
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.
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.
Well done, sir.