The bosses are from apocalyptic bandit faction so it would need to be somewhat realistic. So far I have grenade throwing, riot shields, healing drones and attack drones.

I'm open to ideas!

small devlog from my civilization sim. every person runs their own little pipeline each tick (perceive, decide, act, body upkeep, learning, family stuff), so the cost grows with how many people are near each other, not just how many exist.

the worst case i bench on purpose: run a normal world to tick 9000, then drop 3,000 extra people in 60 clusters around the busiest spot. a tick goes from about 3.5 ms to somewhere between 300 and 600 ms.

the part i actually wanted to write about is measuring it, because wall clock time lied to me constantly on a busy laptop:

• count instructions retired and cycles from hardware counters instead of timing it, and compare against a baseline binary built from the same base commit
• take the minimum of several runs, and interleave the a and b runs so background load hits both
• fewer instructions isn't enough, cycles have to drop too. code layout alone can move cycles a few percent, so anything under about 3% i treat as noise
• for the crowd case, measure the run to tick 9020 with the spawn and subtract the run to tick 9000 without it, so you only count the crowd

when you profile, inclusive time per function is where to look first. most of the cost is spread over the per-person pipeline, not one hot leaf you can fix in an afternoon.

how do you all bench worst-case crowds in your own games? do you build a synthetic stress scene like this, or record a real save that got slow?

the sim runs in the browser: https://thehumanbox.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=devblogs

code and the full notes (docs/DEVELOPMENT.md), mit: https://github.com/1homsi/thehumanbox

Standing around the ping-pong table during a lunch break, waiting for our turn, we noticed that ping-pong has the exact same chaos as office life. You take hits, react on the fly, try to survive, and hope to finish the match before you lose your mind. It also really felt like workplace drama was being solved with paddles in hand. After all, what’s the difference between smashing a ball at 120km/h while laughing in your opponent’s face and answering a passive aggressive email with a super polite “As per my previous email”? None.

So we thought: why not make a game out of it? It felt like such a relatable and a funny-satirical theme.

That’s how the idea for Silicon Spin was born.

We wanted to swap fantasy spells for startup buzzwords. We sat down to brainstorm and created our very first card: Caffeine Rush. It's an Intern card with huge attack power, almost zero control, and an effect that instantly drains your opponent's stamina. Turning real office pain into card mechanics just felt right.

We also realized pretty fast that standard ping-pong rules didn't work. Corporate people have tight 15 minute breaks between calls, so we shortened matches down to 2–4 minutes. Jump in, play a fast game, and try to climb the corporate ladder one floor at a time, with paddles in hand.

To bring it all together, we went with 2D pixel art. We wanted that retro Game Boy feel mixed with glass office towers, old printers, and huge monitors.

Turning a joke over coffee into a real project has been a crazy, fun ride so far, and it really feels like a shared experience not just for our team, but probably for a lot of people out there.

Today we're sharing the idea and the beginning, but we're planning to keep sharing our dev updates here: the good, the bad, and the completely broken balance moments.

If you're building something out of a random everyday moment, how did your idea start?

I’ve been building MnemoBuddy, a desktop pet that quizzes me on PDFs, saved text and video transcripts.

The basic idea was simple enough: give a little desktop companion something useful to do. The development ended up covering quite a few separate problems.

I had to work on how it remembers study material, how the pets move between monitors, and how to handle API keys, fallbacks and AI costs. I also added multiple pets and a Council Mode along the way.

I put the development story and a study test into this video:
https://youtu.be/WBA7hXrG-Rg

One design question I’m still interested in is how much personality a tool like this should have. The pet is part of the appeal, but it also needs to let you get on with whatever you’re doing.