Start your own business with no boss in charge of you, deciding your own holidays, and following your own dreams in simulation game Startup Panic.
You start off the game with a familiar, helpful friend (who looks a lot like that old paperclip character from Word that used to pop-up and annoy you). Clearly, this business is off to a good start if that is your partner in crime. You currently are your only employee, and you don’t have much to show from your job, so you need to start by making a website.
Each time you do a task, it will take some of your seed money, as well as a lot of your time. The demo version of Startup Panic gives you 4 months to try out your business as a simple start. You’ll need to make the most of your time. Once your website is set up, you will start getting very simple contracts. This is where you need to start really balancing your work.
When it comes to accepting contracts, you will be able to slide a few different options to decide what to focus on for the job, aesthetics, tech, or usability. Depending on how well you do, your client will either be happy with you, pay you, and rate you well, or will pay you barely anything for the time you spent. Failing jobs is also bad for your company’s rating, worth, and your own happiness.
You can’t spend all your time working for clients, either. You need to continue to update and revise your website. Bills go out each month, so having enough cash to not be in the negative, as well as to still work on your own site, will become a challenge. The game itself doesn’t give much feedback into why you have failed at creating a feature or client’s task, so it is a lot of guesswork at first.
You also need to take care of yourself. Jobs seem to take longer, with your character angrily stomping around their room instead of working. This is a sign of being overworked, and means that you need to send them on a paid vacation to help them feel more motivated. Overworking will not help anyone in this company.
With time, hopefully you can employ more people, get a good rating, and actually make project on your site. Or maybe you will sell out to some bigger company because that is much easier. It’s all up to you.
A demo for Startup Panic is available for free on Itch.io.
About The Author
Hello, I’m from Algorocks, the developer of Startup Panic. Thank you for writing about our game. We are a small team, so your article really means a lot to us.
Yes, we understand about the frustration about the difficulty and we take this feedback seriously. We’re planning on fixing it and hopefully it will get better with the next update. 🙂
Hi Algorocks, the biggest problem, which I have is when I wanna revision a Feature, there is no information, that tells me, how much workforce I invested the first time in it, just what the rating was. I should get the information, how much workforce I invested and the rating.
Post mortem is also pretty useless, it just tells me, what the rating was, but in words.