One crash, and you pick the day

A game about the AI bubble needs the bubble to pop. The only question was how often.

The old game crashed all the time. It had a price crash, shortages, random events and a pop. Every one of them hit a build the player made by hand, and most of them changed numbers you couldn’t even see. If you play building games, you build for hours. Few things hurt more than losing that build to something you didn’t choose.

So now the game has one crash, at the end, and you decide when it comes. Nothing resets, and there’s no dice roll.

The IPO is something you buy at the end of the research tree. You buy it when you’re ready. A bell rings, and your company gets a price on the top bar. Nothing in the game spends that price. It’s just a story the market tells about you.

Then the bubble pops. For ten minutes, the internet sends half as many requests. Your company’s price falls, your whole build goes gray, and a countdown starts. The timeline in the corner reacts the way timelines do.

down 60% since the bell. the bell is fine, though

i said it was a bubble. nobody liked the post. please like this post

To survive the pop, you keep answering. Answer at least nine in ten of the requests that still come in. At first the rule was to stay in profit, but by then it was too easy, so I changed it. Now the test is the thing the game is about. Keep answering while half your traffic disappears and the market panics around you.

If you fail, you keep everything you built. When the pop ends, you can buy the IPO and try again.

insiders say they’ll list again ‘when the timing is right’. so, soon

If you make it through, the market changes its mind, and the timeline does too (upgrading them from ‘bubble’ to ‘business’. less fun for everyone). Then you can build AGI.

Fail the pop enough times, and the ending remembers.

They listed so many times the exchange gave them a bell of their own. It is slightly cracked.

The ten minutes, the half and the nine in ten are all first guesses. Playtests will show if the pop is hard enough, and I’ll change them if it isn’t.

Next time, building AGI, and what it says first.