Alpha Shipped. The Unicorn Race Has Teeth.

The Prototype milestone gave us a skeleton. Alpha gives it a spine.

We shipped a lot this sprint. Let me account for it.

The Bugs We Fixed (And Why They Mattered)

Bug 1: The Revenue Paradox

Every startup sim has this problem and most of them ignore it. If you start with £0 revenue and your growth formula is revenue *= (1 + growthRate), then 0 × anything = 0. Forever. The player builds a company and wonders why nothing is happening. The answer is: your formula is a zero trap.

Fix: every idea now generates a small organic seed each month based on market size and trendiness. The formula becomes (revenue + organicSeed) * (1 + growthRate). Tiny. Effective. Honest.

Bug 2: The Groundhog Event

With three events in the catalogue and a 40% monthly trigger chance, you’d see the same event two months in a row with alarming regularity. Players would get “A Well-Funded Competitor Just Launched” in month 3, then again in month 4. Same title. Same choices. Same outcome. Immersion: gone.

Fix: LastEventId tracking. The last-fired event is filtered from the pool the following month. The event needs to be at least a little bit of a surprise.

Bug 3: Balance Was Brutal

£10k starting cash with £5k/month fixed costs. Median player had two months before collapse. They hadn’t even read the first event. Starting cash is now £25k. Fixed costs are £2,500 (realistic for a lean founding team with no salary). The game now gives you enough runway to make decisions before punishing you for them.

The Novel Additions

Founder Archetypes

This is the headline feature. Before you name your company, you choose who you are. Not a tutorial prompt. Not a cosmetic label. A personality that changes the simulation.

Four archetypes. All viable. None optimal.

The Visionary — Investors throw money at you before you’ve built anything. Hype doesn’t decay; it grows. But the team is quietly losing faith in the gap between the roadmap and reality. Play the fundraising game hard. Exit before the cracks show.

The Operator — Nobody writes think-pieces about you. Your burn is 20% lower. Your team’s morale is stable because you actually manage people. VCs find you “impressive but unsexy.” You’ll win on fundamentals when everyone else has run out of hype.

The Hustler — Your sales motion is terrifying. Revenue growth is 40% above baseline. You’ve closed three enterprise contracts and the product doesn’t fully work yet. The team respects you. They also fear you slightly. Morale is a lagging indicator. Deal with it eventually.

The Chaos Agent — Outside the cube. Way, way outside the cube. Events fire 60% more often. Every outcome is amplified by 1.5x — the good ones and the bad ones. Your highest exits will be legendary. Your collapses will be spectacular. There is no middle ground. That’s fine.

Pivot Mechanic

One per run. Expensive. Sometimes the right call.

Pivoting costs you 20% of your cash, 30% of your revenue, half your hype, and 20 points of team morale. The team is confused. Two of your investors replied immediately after you notified them. That might be good or bad.

The pivot UI is honest about the cost. You see the warning. You see the available ideas. You choose. You live with it.

Fifteen Events

The catalogue went from 3 events to 15. The rule we applied: if this event could appear in any other startup simulator, it’s not good enough for ours.

Some highlights:

• “Your CTO open-sourced the codebase over the weekend.” You find out on Monday from a Hacker News front page notification.
• “You walked into the wrong pitch meeting.” It went well. The fund is completely wrong for your stage and sector. They offered a term sheet anyway.
• “A customer switched back to their spreadsheet.” They emailed to let you know. They seem happy about it.
• “The journalist’s article was mostly accurate.” The part that wasn’t accurate is the quote attributed to you. You didn’t say that. The journalist insists you said that.

All of them have two choices. All choices have real mechanical consequences. None of them are “Option A: +5 hype. Option B: -5 hype.” The outcomes are specific. The flavour text is honest. The game doesn’t patronise you.

The Numbers

What’s Next

Alpha is playable. The bones are sound. The next milestone goes deeper on content and the meta layer.

Short list:

• Economic climate system (Bull / Bear / Mania / Crisis — affects all financial calculations)
• Prestige loop polish (carry-over cash from exits into new runs)
• IPO exit path (2x multiplier, highest variance)
• More events — particularly more that interact with archetype (a Chaos Agent getting a “regulatory notice” should be a different experience than a Visionary getting one)
• Advisor system (persistent unlocks that modify specific mechanics per run)

The game already does things no other startup sim does. That’s the mandate. We’ll keep going.

— CEO, Encubed Games “Cubed thinking. Uncubed imagination.”