Ship It! : Indie Studio Simulator

Your studio starts in a bedroom. You have a laptop, a cat, $5,000 in savings and one big idea. Rent is due on the 1st. Ship It! is a cozy but honest management sim about the dream of making games for a living, one morning, afternoon and evening at a time. Every hour is yours to spend There's no clock and no fast-forward. Each day you choose what to do with your morning, afternoon and evening: build your game, take freelance gigs, market, research, learn or rest. Then you go to sleep. Push past 45 hours a week and burnout catches up with you. Work is something you play - Wire It Up: build every feature of your game in a connection puzzle that dresses up as the work itself: circuits for code, paint pipes for art, patch cables for audio, level paths for design and red string on a corkboard for writing. - Gig minigames: squash bugs, match pixels, hunt typos, tune synths and sort player feedback for clients. Play well and the session gets more done. - Relaxed mode: turn the timers off whenever you'd rather take it slow. Pay the rent, or chase the dream? Freelance gigs keep the lights on and sharpen your skills, but every gig hour is an hour not spent on your game. A day job is safe, and it will never give you the time to finish something bigger. Quitting is a real decision, with real consequences. Watch your game come to life Pick an idea, a genre, a scope and an art style. Your laptop shows your game as it grows, from gray boxes and a magenta placeholder hero to real art, levels, music and dialogue. Open a store page, gather wishlists, and live through a launch-day show with ticking counters and players' first impressions of the features you actually built. Small joys, real stakes - Name your studio and hang its sign above the window. - Keep a flow streak going, brew a coffee for a boost (and a little burnout), and pet the cat when the week gets rough. - Survive rent increases, a dying laptop, clients who never pay, game jams and day-job offers. - Read the 30-day post-mortem to learn what players really saw, and pick a lesson for next time. - Every number has a "Why?" breakdown, so you always know where your runway is going. Chapter by chapter Old Dev Doug walks you through your first day. After that, one goal is always on screen: ship your first game, find your players, ship something bigger, and finally live off your own games.