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Comment by LeonB | Hacker News Reader

Here's a really lightweight game I made, written in vanilla javascript, no frameworks, no graphics (just Emoji).

For 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!

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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.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/loca...

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.

Thanks for the advice!

Have you made money from your products? How it go? Also are you working full time? Just curious.

Thanks

I am working full time, and my products make modest profits. I’m also a parent so that’s another full time job right there. ;)

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 ;-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14661813

Will do, thanks

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.

I've seen these skills fire several times, but I'm not sure what the rules are.

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?

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.

Kudos! I love the simple style and mechanics, I haven't played much but will give it a proper go when I get home.

This was a great time.

I had a story come back with bugs multiple times until I forced the Founder to triage, dev AND test themselves! :D

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