STARTUP PANIC GAME STRATEGY SERIES

But the payout – that is, the increase in morale – can be large if you’re willing to drop that much cash. You can also choose to go fish or go on another major vacation, which will send you away for the longest amount of time.Įach of these spends your company money, costing $100, $400, and $1000 respectively. In the demo, there are some vacation destinations that you can choose from such as getting a hair cut, which somehow requires being away from the office for one week. A menu will pop up and interrupt your gaming experience to make this suggestion. When you find that your player character is losing motivation, they may ask to go on vacation. After that, I tanked my projects and my contracts, and watched as my player got more upset. This makes them less motivated to work, and in turn they’ll keep doing a terrible job. When you fail a project or a contract in the game, your employees’ morale crashes. This is where my downward spiral into startup hell began. I guess it didn’t, because suddenly, I failed the next job I took on, even though it was supposed to be an easy one. But even when I was doing well, I don’t know if my strategy was necessarily working. I took on the obviously easy jobs and tried to cater to my clients’ needs. If I came across something that required implementing HTML, I tried increasing my tech to get a better result. At first, this all seemed simple enough. When I came across a job that was geared more towards ad design, I increased my aesthetic. The higher your scores are for each of these aspects, the more money you make, and the more clients you’ll attract. With each project and contract you take on, you have three key aspects to strive for: tech, usability, and aesthetic. When I ran low on cash, I went on to do a little contract work. I started off by building onto my website by adding user profiles, building text ads and improving other features. If you happened to do this poorly, you have the opportunity to redo it in the future.Īfter learning the basic skills, I was excited to delve into the game. As you can see, this person scored high on the tech, usability and aesthetic portion. This shows the final outcome for your company’s landing page. The tutorial does an excellent job of walking you through everything so that you’re not overwhelmed. On the employee tab, you can review your employee’s stats, skills, and send them on vacation. On the project tab, you can pursue contract work and also spend time refining your company’s website.

STARTUP PANIC GAME STRATEGY SERIES

At the top of your screen, a series of gray boxes will indicate the date, how much cash you have on hand, how many users have joined your website and what your company value is. There are a lot of menus and things to look at, but it’s all easy to understand. You program code, design websites and pursue contract work in order to keep your business afloat. You start off in your house, and spend your days typing away on your computer.

In Startup Panic, you play as a new graduate pursuing their greatest dream, which is to run their own company. Even as you play through the game’s tutorial led by the annoyingly helpful Clippy from Microsoft Office, you’ll think, “Wow, this is so charming.” But while the aesthetic of the game is cutesy and nice to look at, the actual gameplay aspects leave much to be desired. It reminded me of a sleeker, pixelated version of Game Dev Tycoon. When you boot up Startup Panic, the first thing you’ll notice is its bright, whimsical color scheme and cutesy attributes.

Startup panic game strategy