The games
How a deterministic Rust engine, a thousand illustrations and nearly a century of British tax law turn into one very deep game.
How a deterministic Rust engine, a thousand illustrations and nearly a century of British tax law turn into one very deep game.
- Why a British business simulation is different. Most business simulations are American, and the rules that make British business hard are missing from them. Rates, VAT, employment law and the bank manager.
- How we build Business Baron. A deterministic Rust engine, a tax code taken from real legislation, and a hundred and sixteen invented businesses. Here is how the simulation is actually assembled, and what we cut.
- The same seed gives the same game, every time. A player sent us a save and a seed. We ran it, watched the same haulage firm fail at the same month for the same reason, and fixed it that afternoon. That is what determinism buys.
- The research behind a business you can lose. Getting the 1979 VAT rate right is easy. Deciding what a village pub took on a wet Tuesday in 1984 is the actual work, and it is where we are honest about guessing.
- One game, one Britain. There is one game, and there will not be others. What is free, what £19.99 adds, what the four tracks are, and where the other five ideas went.
- Free to play, and not a demo. The free version of Business Baron is the real game with five business types and no clock. Paying opens more businesses. It does not change the simulation.
- Inside the engine that runs Business Baron. One Rust library, a dependency list you can read in a second, and a month that advances in fifty-nine ordered steps. The interface is allowed to know none of it.
- How do you test a game with forty years in it. The bug appeared in simulated 1993, in about one game in four hundred, and only if you had bought a second site. Finding it took a machine, not a tester.
- How the artwork gets made. A game with more than two hundred business types across 91 towns and nearly a century needs more pictures than a small studio can draw. Here is how we made about eleven hundred of them, and what we still drew.
- Seventeen tracks that must not be noticed. A soundtrack for a game people leave running for six hours has one job: to still be bearable in hour five. Seventeen tracks, and none of them wants your attention.
- Why the tax code is in a game. A slider you drag from 10% to 30% is not a decision. A threshold you can be one invoice away from crossing is, and that is the whole argument.
- Making a dense game readable. Nine numbers, four of them red, on a screen you have to read in fifteen seconds. Dense games are exactly the ones where accessibility is not decoration.
- Modding, and why we publish the formats. A player rebuilt our 1970s corporation tax table because we had one year wrong. That was easier for both of us than a bug report, which is rather the point.