Full Stack Story
Points go up, nothing ships
You've been promoted to Tech Lead. Same salary. Pitch projects, staff them, ship them past the CAB and four reviewers, and support everything you ship, forever. The VP grades the slide deck. The users' score isn't counted. Tech debt is invisible to everyone except you and the office plant.
Badging in...
How it works
Pitch a project: a what (Customer Portal, Chatbot, Data Lake...) and a why (Cost Savings, Exec Pet Project, AI-Powered...). Some combinations land with the VP, some don't. You find out by shipping them, like Game Dev Story's genres, and what you learn carries into your next career.
Your team builds it. Code drives progress and features, Debug drives stability, Deck makes slides, Comp does paperwork. Everyone makes bugs. When the build's done, testing burns bugs down until you hit Ship it. The Change Advisory Board meets Tuesdays.
Steer it, and get steered. Set the project's focus (features, hardening, paperwork, the deck) and change it any time. Each mandate has a focus the VP secretly wants; spend most of the project on it and the VP scores you higher. The VP will also change your focus for you, usually mid-sprint. At 25%, 50% and 75% of the build, somebody has to present to the architecture board, survive the security review and work the integration weekend. You pick who, and their stats decide how it goes.
Every bug fixed is tribal knowledge. Testing is where you learn how the system really works, and that knowledge (TK) is the one thing here that compounds. Spend it on know-how for the current project (recycle last year's deck, write the runbook, reuse that one library) or on brown-bag sessions that raise someone's stats. Test longer and you learn more, but the deadline doesn't move.
The bar rises. A launch earns trust by beating expectations, and expectations move toward whatever you last delivered. Leadership has a short memory both ways: every quarter, trust drifts back toward the middle.
Use it or lose it. Launches pay the budget, payroll drains it, and people get raises as they level up. At fiscal year end Finance sweeps anything above three months of payroll, so spend it: send people to conferences, or buy things on the Office tab (more desks, second monitors, an espresso machine, a ping-pong table).
Four reviewers grade the launch. The VP grades the deck. Compliance grades the paperwork. The users grade whether it works, and their score isn't counted. Ops grades their sleep.
Everything you ship stays. It sits in the server rack and pages you. Bugs you shipped and tech debt both raise the odds. A refactor sprint pays debt down and delivers nothing anyone can see, and the quarterly review will ask what you delivered.
Meetings just happen. They eat days and burn you out, but they're where political capital comes from. Spend PC on BOFH cards: pad the estimate, throw a reply-all grenade, take strategic PTO, put a server under your desk.
You have five years. Trust hits zero and you're laid off. Your burnout hits 100 and you leave for a startup. Make it to the end and you get an ending, and one of them is a bad one.
Space pauses, 1-3 set the speed, N starts a project. Hover (or tap) anything with a dotted underline to see what it does. The Lifer chimes in with tips the first time things happen; turn that off next to New career. Progress saves in this browser.
A love letter to Kairosoft's Game Dev Story, with every name, character and event invented. Any resemblance to your employer is your employer's fault.