What follows is a frantic in-game year of technical revisions to your existing features. You don’t have a say in this, but are entered into a contract whereby your technology must be capable of handling the enormous traffic demands of a live concert and if it isn’t, her management company will litigate you to death, causing a dreaded Game Over screen. In it, a Korean pop star decides to use your social platform to launch her album.
Startup Panic’s narrative takes some pretty wild twists, and one relatively early scripted encounter basically serves as a litmus test for players. It’s a game of remarkable scope, much more so than its art style would suggest.īut the best laid plans of Internet CEOs are often thwarted when they get punched in the face by fists lurking under doilies (more of this metaphor earlier). Later on, you’ll be hiring teams to run marketing campaigns in global markets, and fielding calls from angel investors. The expenditure of doing this may wipe out your war chest, but a roster of shit hot developers, artists, and marketers will be key to taking your project to The Next Level which, once reached, will require more staff to keep afloat and an even bigger office to house them, repeating the cycle anew.
Soon, you must move to a proper office and hire some bodies. Of course, you can’t do this all by yourself. To do this, you must keep adding features, but also develop them to a high enough standard that they get (and keep) high scores in the categories of technology, usability and aesthetics. Your website’s userbase is its lifeblood, and the point of the game is to expand it in order to increase revenue and market share. It’s basic Myspace era stuff at first: posting. Once you have some cash, you can start adding basic functions to your Website Or App, which you select from a big feature roadmap reminiscent of the skill tree of an RPG. Odd jobs are in plentiful supply, at least in the early stages of the game, so you can always resort to it if your reserves are running low. You have to spend money to make money, so you start off by publishing a simple landing page for your Big Idea and then doing some contract work to fund its development. The basic economic pushpulls of business are adequately simulated.
As a statement of intent, it’s a solid opening, setting out Startup Panic’s stall straight away as being a cute and charming doily draped over a clenched fist that can and will repeatedly accelerate into your face if you give it half a chance (more of this metaphor later). The Microsoft Paperclip From The 90s (or a legally distinct version thereof) shows up to give you some advice and set the tone with welcome meta-humour. Soon, you’re a bedroom coder with a Big Idea and four-thousand dollars burning a hole in your pocket. READ MORE: ‘Rainbow Six Extraction’ review: a compelling alien shooter from the bones of ‘Siege’Ī brief introductory cutscene shows you dramatically quitting your job.Startup Panic, tinyBuild’s foray into the cutesy wait-em-up biz sim genre – think Game Dev Story and you’ve largely got the gist – conveys this emotional continuum of fright to shite rather well. When things are going badly, it’s the Interesting Times curse in microcosm.
When things are going well, it’s boring like any other job. The experience of running a business sits somewhere on a spectrum between “harrowing” and “tedious”.
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