The Ladder

A turn-based career simulation game that runs entirely in the browser. You start at the bottom of an organisation and play turns — a day at a time — making choices that move your money, your skills and your standing with the people around you. There is no win state and no game over: a bad run means worse options, not an ending, and you can stop whenever you like and read the retrospective.

The engine knows nothing about offices, mailrooms or bosses. A setting is a content pack — characters, events, choices, stat names and tuning, all data. Two ship: Corporate Ladder, a modern office and a mailroom, and The Frontier, a freight yard at the end of a stage line. They share every line of engine code and no content at all.

Status

Engine, interface and two content packs, all built and tested, and played in a real browser.

Piece	State
Path-addressed state, conditions, effects	done
Seeded RNG, save/resume	done
Event selection, option gating	done
Turn loop, per-turn upkeep	done
Content validator + reachability tests	done
Corporate Ladder pack — 31 events, two tiers	done
Turn screen, retrospective, feedback widget	done
Local-storage save, file export/import	done
Single-file build	done
Calendar, scheduled wages and rent	done
Promotion from the mailroom to Dispatch	done
Repetition analytics (npm run analyze)	done
Version and build shown on screen	done
Keyboard play (Enter / Tab)	done
Second content pack — The Frontier, 29 events, two tiers	done
Setting picker, one save slot per pack	done
Pack conformance suite (every pack, every check)	done
Played in a real browser	Corporate Ladder yes, first playtest 2026-09-09; The Frontier not yet

The first playtest confirmed the interface, saves and the exported log all work in a real browser. Its findings — an unexplained daily drain, no sense of the week, and an economy nobody could get ahead in — are what the calendar and the retuned economy are for.

Note that the development machine has no browser that can render a page, so the UI tests drive the real modules against a minimal fake DOM. That covers wiring, not layout: styling and dark mode are only ever verified by a human opening it.

Playing it

npm run serve     # then open http://localhost:8080

The game plays from the keyboard: Enter takes the focused option, Enter again moves to the next day, and Tab / Shift+Tab pick a different option. The top of every screen names the game, the pack, your current title, and the build — 0.3.0 · dev when running from source, and the commit it came from when built.

A server is needed during development because browsers refuse ES module imports over file://. If port 8080 is taken, run python3 -m http.server <port> instead.

To hand the game to someone else:

npm run build     # writes dist/theladder.html

That is one self-contained file with the stylesheet and every module inlined. It plays by double-clicking it — no server, no network, nothing installed.

npm test          # 149 tests: engine, both packs, UI wiring, and the build

Tests are in three layers. test/conformance.test.js runs over every pack in the registry and asserts only what is true of a pack because it is a pack — validity, no dead content, the declared economic baseline, variety, replay from seed, a way out of every event. test/content.test.js and test/frontier.test.js hold each pack to its own tuning. The engine suite runs against a fixture pack, so tuning a setting can never break it.

To see what a playtest actually did — turns against distinct situations, how often each recurred, which locked gates players kept meeting, and anything they typed into the feedback box:

npm run analyze                 # the newest export in logs/
npm run analyze -- <file>       # a specific one

Drop exports into logs/. They are gitignored — a log is a record of what a real person did, including anything they typed into the feedback box.

There are no runtime dependencies and no build step for development. Node is used only to run the tests, the single-file build, and the log analyser.

Where things stand

The MVP is complete and has survived three playtests, and a second setting now exists to prove the engine/content split holds. Adding it required no engine change — and three interface changes, two of which were latent defects a second pack made visible (a single global save slot, and the one place the UI still named a setting). See DECISIONS.md #34.

Open questions, in the order they are likely to matter:

• The Frontier has never been played by a human. Its economy is asserted by the conformance suite and exercised by six archetypes, and that is exactly the evidence that was not enough the last two times. It needs a session before its numbers are believed.

• Standing costs money to keep, and the Frontier's version is unplayed. Each setting has a lifestyle tier bought on the second rung and charged for every cycle after, a standing penalty for lagging behind what the job expects, and a charge levied by standing itself that no purchase ever ends. Corporate Ladder's has had one 96-turn session: both purchases were found and taken, and the standing pressure worked, but the run arrived at the top with nothing left to spend on — which is where the never-stopping charge came from. The Frontier carries the same system at its own scale and has never been in front of anyone. See DECISIONS #36.

• Dispatch is eleven events against the mailroom's nineteen. It passes the variety guard, but it has had far less play than the mailroom. Waits on more playtesting.

• A third tier in either pack. Two rungs is what both settings have. The split is now proven across settings; it is not proven across a long ladder. Waits until the Frontier has been played.

Settled, and not open: Corporate Ladder's negotiation gate stays as it is, and the feedback widget stays as it is (DECISIONS #35). Money mattering late is built rather than open (DECISIONS #36).

Layout

src/engine/     the game engine — imports nothing from content/, or from src/ui/
  paths.js        dotted-path get/set over state
  conditions.js   generic predicates: { path, op, value }, all/any/not
  effects.js      generic mutations: add/set/push/remove, with clamping
  state.js        pack -> schema and initial state
  select.js       which event fires this turn, which options are available
  game.js         the turn loop
  rng.js          seeded, serializable RNG
  validate.js     load-time content checking
src/ui/         screens, formatting and the app controller
  app.js          the only module that knows there is more than one pack
  screens/        the turn screen, the retrospective, the setting picker
  format.js       state paths and conditions rendered as English
src/io/         local-storage save (one slot per pack), export/import, feedback log
content/
  index.js        the pack registry — the only list of settings
  corporateladder/  a modern office and a mailroom
  frontier/         a freight yard at the end of a stage line
tools/build.js  flattens everything into one self-contained HTML file
test/           engine tests against a fixture pack; conformance, per-pack, UI
docs/           DECISIONS.md — why things are the way they are
Planning/       the original design documents

The rule that keeps this honest: nothing in src/engine/ may import from content/. The engine names no stat, no character and no setting of its own.

How content works

A pack declares what state exists and what it starts at, the relationship stats every character carries, the characters, and the events. Everything else falls out of that.

export default {
  id: 'corporateladder',
  startingStage: 'mailroom',

  state: {
    'money': { initial: 1200, min: -5000, max: 1000000 },
    'skills.negotiation': { initial: 1, min: 0, max: 100 },
    'flags.took_loan': { initial: false },
  },

  // Expanded per character into relationships.<id>.<stat>, so adding a
  // character adds its relationship state automatically.
  relationshipStats: {
    likes_you: { initial: 50, min: 0, max: 100 },
    fears_you: { initial: 50, min: 0, max: 100 },
    wants_to_help_you: { initial: 50, min: 0, max: 100 },
  },

  characters: [
    { id: 'boss', name: '...', role_type: 'boss', description: '...' },
  ],

  events: [
    {
      id: 'mail_run',
      stage: 'mailroom',
      weight: 100,                 // relative likelihood among eligible events
      description: 'A cart of mail and two hours to move it.',
      options: [
        {
          id: 'hustle',
          label: 'Get it done fast.',
          requires: [{ path: 'skills.negotiation', op: '>=', value: 3 }],
          effects: [
            { path: 'money', op: 'add', value: 40 },
            { path: 'relationships.boss.likes_you', op: 'add', value: 3 },
          ],
        },
      ],
    },
  ],
};

An event may also carry once: true, a cooldown in turns, and requires conditions of its own. There is no separate notion of a random event: every turn draws from the whole eligible pool by weight.

Conditions may read engine bookkeeping (turn, stage, seen.<eventId>, lastSeen.<eventId>) as well as pack state. Effects may not write it.

A pack also declares upkeep — a list of { label, requires?, effects } applied at the end of a turn, after the choice. Adding every and offset makes an entry periodic rather than daily: Corporate Ladder pays wages on alternate Fridays ({ every: 14, offset: 4 }), charges rent every Monday, and adds a loan service charge that steps up as the debt grows.

A pack may also declare a calendar:

calendar: {
  cycleLength: 7,
  cycleName: 'Week',
  unitNames: ['Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday', 'Saturday', 'Sunday'],
},

The engine derives calendar.index, calendar.cycle and calendar.name from the turn number before each event is drawn, so content can require a Friday and the interface can title the turn. Declare no calendar and there is no week.

Run validatePack(pack) when loading in development — it catches undeclared paths, unknown characters, unusable ids, unreachable events and stages with no fallback event, all of which otherwise fail silently mid-playthrough.