The Founder: A Dystopian Business Simulator | Hacker News Reader

The Founder: A Dystopian Business Simulator

thefounder.biz

503 pointsjmduke89 comments

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

Well done, sir.

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)

I had this too.

Just had this happen to me at the 3rd office! Pretty frustrating because I was having a great time!

I also had this error after getting the second office. The game itself is great though.

Tweet @frnsys! He is very responsive.

I'm especially amused that as far as I can tell there are NO profitable uses for the Blockchain. :)

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.

Just like in real life!

But don't worry: if you invest in our smart contracts system, we'll make some money this time for sure!

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.

Thank you for sharing it here on HN!

Reading this, at several points I could barely tell if you were talking about the game or real life...

I know that this probably not the best place to report bugs, but I just saw this:

"[object Object]'s satellite launch screwed up and"...

Last update: I finished the game at $1.2 Trillion. Thanks for sharing, and congrats on making a great game!

For those curious, the source code is here: https://github.com/frnsys/the_founder

So far, the game is a lot more nuanced and involved than I was expecting. TheSims meets HackerNews. Very well done!

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.

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.

You gotta be able to poke fun at yourself.

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.

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).

Yup, and all of Kairosoft's games are basically variations on that same gameplay loop. I also really enjoyed Dungeon Village.

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?

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'm not sure why that's happening either. Is the point that startups just lose lawsuits against patent trolls not matter how hard they try?

That's probably true, but also sad.

No it's just that you are not hiring enough. You have to put employees with high marketing skill on it. I was able to repel 3 lawsuits without issue.

Ah, interesting.

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.

Blockchain doesn't successfully go with anything. How appropriate.

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!

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...

Spoilers: https://github.com/frnsys/the_founder/blob/master/data/produ... has all the good product combinations.

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.

I just started clicking and 5 minutes in I got an alert dialog that said, "Wasting company time"

I thought, well this is ironic...

Wait, from the game, or from your job?

Yes.

IIRC that is the message you see when you (the founder) have not currently assigned any tasks to your employees at all.

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.

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.

They are using Phaser.JS as the game engine. Great engine. I gave a talk here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qaPxEzMp9a9c5J-mMuEa...

FRAMEWORK. It's a Framework, not really an Engine persay.

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.

How do you level up employee skills? There was mention that this was possible during the walkthrough

I felt bad cause I couldn't find where to give senior employees raises.

Realism

Where can I hire a PM so I don't have to micro manage my employees?

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.

Same problem. I updated to Chrome 56 and so far it's working fine now.

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

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...

I tried all of that and it still doesn't work. In chrome://gpu/ I have "WebGL: Hardware accelerated".

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.

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

performance is a web API supported in all modern browsers. Are you using an outdated browser, perhaps?

http://caniuse.com/#feat=high-resolution-time

Yes, that was the problem. Thanks.

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.

Pivot into the Indian baked-goods sector.

Upvoted for an unleavened response.

The Indian flat bread reference?

You deserve a raise.

Also got this error somewhere around $1B in profits!

This game was a great way to spend a transatlantic flight though, bugs aside!

Towards the end of the game several of my stats bugged out to NaN and I was unable to keep playing.

The three things affected were my Cash, Hype and Hate meters.

I was crushing it...

Cute game, but it crashed in combat after playing for a bit:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'moves' of null at Board.onDragStartPiece (http://thefounder.biz/play/bundle.js:247249:71)

Worth noting: the play button is initially off the right edge of the screen on an iPad.

I hit the bottom thinking this was a teaser for a work in progress, since the only link on the page was for art.

After reading about people playing, I went back and searched and still couldn't find a button to play the game.

It's not mobile friendly at all. Playing it on a tablet vs a desktop browser are two completely different experiences.

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.

Well, there goes my entire day.

Checked HN before going to bed. Played for 2 hours till 1:30. Great game.

So far this is a really cool concept. There goes my productivity.

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.

Just managed to earn $711.98b before the AI replaced me. Is this a trap or the successful ending of the game? Also, what are your high scores?

How on earth does one do research? I can't see a load of products and verticals, and pretty much all my existing products are maxed out.

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 :)

I see you've unlocked the Insider Trading Bonus.

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.

Is it possible to save your progress?

Go on settings (gear on bottom right) then click save.

built a colony on mars and replaced my workforce with robots. eat my dust Elon Musk.

and then the NaN error. bummer

this is awesome, you should turn it into a polished game and release on mobile :)

Wow, quite surprised how much I enjoyed this. Sucked up 20 minutes.. Fun! :-)

If only reality was so straight forward...

Runs super slowly at times on my machine.

Makes me think of Game Dev Tycoon.

Requires WebGL for some reason?

It's a 3D game, I think that's fair.

How the heck do I pause it?

I enjoyed this even though it wasnt at all fun...

maybe thats the point?

Needs to run in background...

been loving francis' work for a while, glad to see this here

what was this built with? I just love the UI...this is exactly what I'm looking for.

Github link was posted as a comment by another user a few hours before you asked. :)

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