GameDevTitan

A deep game-dev tycoon, built as a tribute to the games community. Run a studio from a garage to a legend across five decades of gaming, from the 1977 dawn era to the speculative future of 2028.

What it is

GameDevTitan is a single-player tycoon about the love of making games. You start in a garage, pick a genre, a theme, and a target console, hire a small team, and watch a project come together stage by stage: design, code, art, sound. You ship it, the press scores it, the money comes in (or it does not), and you do it again, a little bolder each time.

The fantasy is the arc every studio dreams about: garage to legend, and then the quiet question of "what was that all about". Eras roll forward and the world changes around your studio, from cartridges to CDs to online to whatever comes next. It is a love letter to game development, not a spreadsheet with a skin.

The engine is data-driven by design. Consoles, genres, themes, eras, critics, events, and platforms all live in data/*.json, so the simulation is content first and code second.

Features

• A full studio loop. Choose a project, staff it, run a flowing real-time development sim, release, get reviewed, earn, reinvest. Time flows on its own and you steer the speed.
• Seven playable eras. The studio room and the market both shift as the years pass: dawn, 8-bit, 16-bit, CD, online, modern, and future. The room re-skins to match the era.
• A living press. Four critic archetypes with moods, genre affinities, and quotable verdicts. Marketing and promo copy can move the needle.
• Depth that stays readable. Reputation, fanbase, hype, franchise fatigue, retro waves, a greed/morality track, soft-bankruptcy crisis handling, and a hardware lab in the late game. The rules that decide outcomes are kept visible to the player rather than hidden in formulas.
• A narrative finale. The endgame turns into a layered, Stanley-Parable-flavoured finale with voiced narration and multiple endings.
• Headless first. The whole loop runs without a window, so the balance can be swept across seeds and the simulation can be checked deterministically.

Run it

You need Godot 4.6 (the standard build, GDScript, no C#).

With graphics

1. Open project.godot in Godot 4.6.
2. Press F5.

Headless (no window)

The game routes command-line flags to its simulation and test entry points. Use your Godot binary in place of godot below:

# A full loop, headless, as a smoke test
godot --headless --path . -- --test

# One realistic playthrough
godot --headless --path . -- --sim

# Balance sweep across 10 seeds (deterministic, bit-for-bit reproducible)
godot --headless --path . -- --sweep

# The six finale endings, end to end
godot --headless --path . -- --finale-e2e

On macOS the binary lives at /Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot.

Note: the in-game text is in Russian. The codebase, comments, and docs are in English.

Project layout

project.godot          Godot 4.6 config (GL Compatibility, 1920x1080, min 1280x720)
data/                  Data-driven content: consoles, genres, themes, eras, critics, events, platforms
scripts/
  core/                Autoloads: GameState, ContentLoader, TimeManager, SaveManager, theme
  managers/            The simulation: projects, team, hiring, events, reputation, critics, economy, crisis, platforms, marketing
  models/              Plain data classes (Project, Employee, ReleasedGame)
  finale/              The narrative endgame: Narrator, MetaLayer, ending beats
  ui/                  Screens, modals, the registry-based studio room, the single feedback pipe
  theme/               Colors, spacing, theme builder
scenes/                Main scene and UI scenes
sim/                   headless_run.gd (one playthrough) and balance_sweep.gd (seed matrix)
tests/                 ~28 headless and visual smoke tests
assets/                Generated art, music, voice, and sfx (plus the Python tools that produced them)

Tech notes

• GDScript only, for stable headless runs and exports.
• GL Compatibility renderer, so it runs on modest hardware.
• Architecture is "engine plus data": gameplay content lives in data/*.json, the code is the simulation around it.
• Resource and audio loading is kept single-threaded on purpose (Godot loading is not thread-safe).
• The simulation is deterministic under a fixed seed, which is what makes the balance sweep meaningful.

Status

This is a personal project in active development, currently in Phase 1. It is playable end to end and the core systems are in, but it is a work in progress, not a finished release. Milestone 1 is closed (focus model, eras, upgrades, balance) and milestone 2 (human developers and deeper studio life) is underway.

Built with Claude Code

GameDevTitan is solo-developed with Claude Code driving the implementation. The full development history, 200+ commits, is preserved in this repository rather than squashed, so the way the game was built is part of what you can read here.

License

MIT © 2026 Anton Karpov

Author

Built by Anton Karpov. Website: karpovanton.com