
The Founder: A Dystopian Business Simulator - jmduke
http://thefounder.biz/
======
mehrshad
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](http://i.imgur.com/4LF3rjx.png)

Well done, sir.

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bryogenic
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)

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

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

~~~
kuzmin
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.

------
coreyp_1
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!

~~~
em500
Reading this, at several points I could barely tell if you were talking about
the game or real life...

------
jack_jennings
For those curious, the source code is here:
[https://github.com/frnsys/the_founder](https://github.com/frnsys/the_founder)

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

~~~
djsumdog
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.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
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.

~~~
freehunter
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.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
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.

------
tinbad
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).

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

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swozey
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.

~~~
L_Rahman
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.

~~~
ajankovic
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.

~~~
L_Rahman
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.

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

------
canadian_voter
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!

------
Anaxphone
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...

------
ikeboy
Spoilers:
[https://github.com/frnsys/the_founder/blob/master/data/produ...](https://github.com/frnsys/the_founder/blob/master/data/productRecipes.json)
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.

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

I thought, well this is ironic...

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Wait, from the game, or from your job?

~~~
alanh
Yes.

------
leggomylibro
I really like the art style:
[http://thefounder.biz/art/](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.

~~~
jdormit
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.

------
BucketSort
They are using Phaser.JS as the game engine. Great engine. I gave a talk here:
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qaPxEzMp9a9c5J-mMuEa...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qaPxEzMp9a9c5J-mMuEafy4wece0FB6qvJ6L543SI-c/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
qwertyuiop924
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.

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

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

~~~
UK-AL
Realism

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

------
Xeoncross
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.

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

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

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0xCMP
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...](https://superuser.com/questions/836832/how-can-i-enable-webgl-in-my-
browser)

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

------
shurcooL
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.

------
lisper
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

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

_ [http://caniuse.com/#feat=high-resolution-
time](http://caniuse.com/#feat=high-resolution-time)

~~~
lisper
Yes, that was the problem. Thanks.

------
nstr10
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.

~~~
neuronexmachina
Pivot into the Indian baked-goods sector.

~~~
cyberferret
Upvoted for an unleavened response.

~~~
webmaven
You deserve a raise.

------
busterarm
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...

------
jmcgough
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](http://thefounder.biz/play/bundle.js:247249:71))

------
jasonkester
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.

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

------
phumbe
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.

------
blackaspen
Well, there goes my entire day.

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

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

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mcrowson
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.

------
FeeJai
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?

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antihero
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.

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naboavida
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 :)

~~~
Bartweiss
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.

------
taejavu
Is it possible to save your progress?

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

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

~~~
unk
and then the NaN error. bummer

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

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

------
jondubois
If only reality was so straight forward...

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recursive
Runs super slowly at times on my machine.

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SFJulie
Makes me think of Game Dev Tycoon.

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ryan-c
Requires WebGL for some reason?

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

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hapless
How the heck do I pause it?

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

maybe thats the point?

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imdsm
Needs to run in background...

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wehere1
been loving francis' work for a while, glad to see this here

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

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

