AI Tycoon

An interactive tycoon-style simulation rendered with React 19, Three.js, and @react-three/cannon for physics. The player starts as Victorin Elsoñador — sole engineer, sole dreamer — and grows a small AI model company in the country of Notchance Parsimony. Each simulated tick, revenue, salaries, hardware maintenance, and rent are deducted from cash; staff productivity gradually raises the model’s quality; and random events fire from a fully deterministic, seeded event loop.

Try the demo → · Project page

Demo

The demo at /demos/ai-tycoon mounts the simulation as a single React 19 island inside an Astro 7 page. The screenshot above shows one tick of the engine: cash $24,590.25, two racks on the compute floor, a DECISION REQUIRED prompt from the Notchance Parsimony regulator (Defy or Comply, 10-rep penalty for compliance), Victorin’s motivational speech bubble, and the last ten events scrolling in the event log at the bottom.

The HUD on the left tracks eight meters — Cash, Day / month, GPU (compute tier), Workers (office + remote), Subs, Revenue, Morale, Reputation, and Quality — and updates every tick. The right rail is the Operations panel: it lists hire-office (+$800 / tick), hire-remote (+$400 / tick), and the next Compute Floor upgrade with its live price. Below it sits the simulation speed selector (Pause / 0.25× / 0.5× / 1× / 2× / 4×).

What’s inside

Three endings, deterministic from one seed

Every run starts from a Mulberry32-seeded GameState. The same seed reproduces the same company name, the same event sequence, and the same outcome. There are three terminal endings:

Once an ending fires, the engine locks in state.ending and the EndScreen component takes over.

Eight event kinds

Every tick, the engine rolls one event from the seeded RNG. The kind affects different meters and sometimes spawns a sub-system (like the regulator NPC).

The event log at the bottom of the simulation shell keeps the last ten events visible at any speed, and auto-scrolls to the newest entry.

The regulator (NPC)

Government blocking events spawn a regulator character that walks into the office over 3 ticks (arriving), stands at the door (present), and walks back out after the player resolves the prompt (leaving). The DECISION REQUIRED panel sits above the office with a 3-second countdown; if the player ignores it, Victorin decides randomly and the outcome is logged as a founderDecision.

Defying the regulator has no immediate reputation cost — Victorin’s attitude toward Notchance Parsimony is canonical defiance, so complying is the only way to lose rep.

Six hardware tiers

hardwareTiers lists the full ladder from a solo laptop to a 32-GPU datacenter cluster. Each upgrade raises modelQualityCeiling by compute * 2, and every tier adds maintenance costs ($150 × (tier + 1) × 24 per simulated day).

The “GPU” meter in the HUD shows the current tier (0-5). Final upgrade cost is basePrice * hardwarePriceIndex * spikeMultiplier, so a hardware spike temporarily doubles the price for the next four ticks.

Staff: founder + up to 11 hires

The founder (Victorin Elsoñador, tier: talent, productivity: 0.7, salaryPerTick: 0) is always present. Hires come in two flavors — office (a 3D character on the floor, +$800 / tick) or remote (floats off-screen connected by dashed lines to a cloud, +$400 / tick). The cap is 12 total staff (founder + 11). Each hire is generated from a random officeRoles / remoteRoles entry and tagged with a normal, pro, or talent tier; the tier feeds into TIER_QUALITY_BONUS, which multiplies the per-tick model-quality growth.

Victorin’s autonomy

Every tick there’s a 5 % chance Victorin acts on his own. He will hire a new teammate (office or remote, 50/50) if there’s a free slot, or buy the next hardware tier if the company can afford it. Founder-driven events are logged as founderDecision with a separate message (“Victorin Elsoñador hired a new office teammate.”), so the event log always tells you whether a hire came from the player or from Victorin.

The office scene

A Three.js orthographic isometric camera renders the office floor with assets/isometricUrls, assets/furnitureUrls, and assets/characterUrls (Kenney Blocky Characters furniture kit assets). Each tick, characters walk to a new desk via officeMovement.ts, the server rack grows when hardware is upgraded, and remote workers stay connected to the cloud with dashed lines.

Architecture

• Astro 7 routes /demos/ai-tycoon and renders a single React 19 island (client:load) for the simulation engine, HUD, and Three.js canvas.
• Pure simulation core. demo/engine/ exposes stepTick, applyAction, and the event atoms from events.ts as pure functions over GameState — no mutation, no side-effects. Every action returns a brand-new state object.
• Deterministic RNG. engine/rng.ts ships a Mulberry32 PRNG (mulberry32) plus pickInt and pickOne helpers. Every atom that needs randomness takes an explicit rng parameter, so vitest specs can replay any tick from a fixed seed.
• State is useState-held, never lifted. index.tsx owns the single GameState via useState and mirrors it into a stateRef so the setInterval tick loop always reads the latest state without re-creating timers. The interval is recreated only when paused, ending, or weekSpeedMs change.
• Three.js scene graph is built with @react-three/fiber, physics comes from @react-three/cannon (gravity + mass on box characters), and all sprite assets are loaded from the Kenney furniture kit URLs in demo/assets/.
• Tailwind 4 (Vite plugin) styles the HUD, decision panel, end screen, and event log with CSS custom-property tokens defined in src/styles/global.css.
• TypeScript strict across the engine, components, and tests. applyAction uses an exhaustive _exhaustive: never check on the Action discriminated union, so any new action kind is a compile-time error until its reducer arm exists.

Trade-offs

• No save / no resume. The seed is regenerated on every page load (nextSimulationSeed(current.seed) on mount). The sim is meant to be replayed, not persisted.
• Three.js + cannon add weight. The full demo bundle (Three.js, cannon-es, Kenney sprites) is heavier than the resume-generator demo. It only loads on /demos/ai-tycoon, not on the rest of the site.
• Worker salaries are paid even when paused is not true — pausing halts stepTick, so salaries and rent stop accruing. Victorin’s autonomy RNG is also paused.
• Determinism costs replayability. Same seed → same game. Players who want to branch from a particular moment have to fork the seed manually.
• @react-three/cannon box physics is intentionally simple (gravity + mass, no joints). Characters look like they’re standing on the floor; they don’t collide with each other.

Try the demo

sersofts.org/demos/ai-tycoon on the live site. The demo works on desktop and tablet; phones get the simulation shell but the embedded overlay is tuned for ≥ 760 px viewports. Click + in the HUD to expand any meter, hit Pause to freeze the simulation, and try Defy on the first regulator prompt to see Victorin’s preferred path.

Files of note

• demo/engine/sim.ts — stepTick, applyAction, stepCashFlow, stepModelQuality, and all the per-tick sub-reducers. The Action discriminated union lives here.
• demo/engine/endings.ts — checkBankrupt, checkIndustryFailed, checkChampion, and the streak thresholds (BANKRUPT_STREAK_THRESHOLD = 8, INDUSTRY_FAILED_STREAK_THRESHOLD = 16, CHAMPION_MIN_TICK = 120).
• demo/engine/events.ts — sampleNextEvent and per-kind reducers (applyMotivationalSpeech, applyBadReview, applyHardwareSpike, applyCommunityLove, applyInvestor, applyCompetitorRelease, scheduleGovBlock).
• demo/engine/rng.ts — mulberry32, pickInt, pickOne.
• demo/engine/initialState.ts — createInitialState(seed); the canonical starting GameState.
• demo/index.tsx — top-level island, owns the useState / stateRef pair and the setInterval tick loop.
• demo/components/Scene.tsx — Three.js orthographic isometric scene + physics + the HUD overlay shell.
• demo/components/HUD.tsx — left-rail meters (cash, day, GPU, workers, subs, revenue, morale, reputation, quality).
• demo/components/DecisionPanel.tsx — right-rail operations panel (hire-office, hire-remote, compute floor upgrade).
• demo/components/DecisionPrompt.tsx — regulator decision panel with the Defy / Comply buttons.
• demo/components/EndScreen.tsx — bankrupt / industry-failed / champion overlays with a Restart button that re-seeds.
• demo/components/EventFeed.tsx — last ten events with auto-scroll.
• demo/data/hardwareTiers.ts — six-tier ladder, base prices, compute multipliers.
• demo/data/companyNames.ts — WoW-flavored name pool (Sylvanas, Ironforge, Frostmourne, …) with category badges.
• demo/data/founderAutonomy.ts — 5 % per-tick probability Victorin acts on his own.
• tests/unit/ — vitest specs for stepTick, endings, and event reducers.
• tests/e2e/ — Playwright specs for demo hydration, the operations panel, and the GPU upgrade adding a rack.