Studio simulator
Game production students learn to make games, but rarely feel the business pressure around them. In this simulation, each team runs a studio: it hires staff, pays salaries, weathers market events and invests in rival studios, week by week through the semester.
- Type
- Personal
- Status
- In use
- When
- 2025 to now
- Role
- Design and engineering
- Next.js 15
- React 19
- Firebase Auth
- Firestore
- React Hook Form
- Zod
- DigitalOcean Spaces
- Netlify
Decisions worth a look
- It runs in production with live student data during the semester, so every schema change is additive and backwards compatible, following written migration guidelines.
- Each class runs in its own game instance, isolated from the others and archived at the end of term.
- The instructor can roll back any weekly event, so a mistake becomes a lesson rather than a lost grade.
- Hireable employees come with generated resumes and stats by role and seniority, from junior programmers to senior audio designers.
- Document quality (market research, pitch, game plan) feeds the production multipliers, so planning has a visible effect on results.
What a week looks like
- Salaries are paid and production advances based on each studio's team and its documents.
- A market event lands, and every studio feels it differently.
- Students hire, fire and assign staff, and invest network points in other studios.
- The instructor reviews the results and can roll anything back before it counts.
Why build it
Static gamification (badges, points, leaderboards) doesn't teach production. A living economy does: decisions have knock-on effects across budget, staffing, production and investment, the way they do in a real studio.