HEADCOUNT

A satirical top-down pixel-art office simulator set in a 1990s corporate office. You are a low-level employee. There are tasks. There is a favor economy. There will be a Performance Review on Friday.

Think Stardew Valley's daily loop meets Papers, Please's moral compromise, rendered entirely in beige.

Play it: https://headcount.ligand-ave.workers.dev — deploys automatically on every push to main. See Deploying.

Status: M6 — the workday runs 9-to-5 in about five and a half minutes, you have five meters and real work to do, four colleagues on real schedules, and neither the fax machine nor the printer is on your side. The boss can only catch you at Solitaire if he can actually see your screen. Friday's Performance Review is next. See DESIGN.md for the full spec, the milestone roadmap, and the running list of assumptions.

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Local development

Requires Node 20+.

npm install

npm run dev

Then open http://localhost:5173.

Script	What it does
npm run dev	Vite dev server with hot reload
npm run build	Typecheck, then build to dist/
npm test	Vitest — clock, day/week rollover, save round-trip and repair
npm run preview	Serve the production build locally
npm run typecheck	tsc --noEmit on its own

Controls

Key	Action
Arrows / WASD	Walk
Shift	Walk with purpose (nobody runs here)
E or Space	Use the fax machine, or look at whatever you are facing
Q W E / A S D	The fax machine's six function keys (at the machine)
0-9 / Enter / T / Esc	Dial · send · flip tray · give up
Enter / Space / Esc	Dismiss the end-of-day summary

Dev flags

Append to the URL:

• ?debug=1 — FPS, tile coords, clock minute, day, pause reasons and the seed
• ?seed=1234 — pin the RNG seed. This also makes it a scratch run: nothing is loaded, saved or cleared, so replaying a seed can't clobber a real week
• ?timescale=12 — burn through days fast. Requires ?debug=1
• L (with ?debug=1) — end the current day immediately

The seed is derived from the calendar date on first boot and then persisted, so a run stays replayable across sessions.

In dev builds the game is exposed as window.game, plus window.headcount.wipeSave() and window.headcount.dumpSave().

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Deploying

Pushing to main is the deploy. The repository is connected to Cloudflare, which runs npm run build and then npx wrangler deploy on every push; the live site follows main by a couple of minutes. Pushes to any other branch get their own preview URL and leave production alone.

The manual command still works and does the same thing without a push:

npm run build && npx wrangler deploy

Two things worth knowing:

• The build does not run the tests. tsc gates it (a type error never reaches the live site), but a failing test sails through — npm test before pushing to main is on you.
• If deploys silently stop, look for a "disconnected from your Git account" banner under Settings → Build in the dashboard. The fix is not the disconnect button; it is re-granting the Cloudflare Workers and Pages GitHub App access to this repository at https://github.com/settings/installations.

Full details, including caching and deploying without pushing, are in docs/HOSTING.md. No GitHub Actions workflow is needed.

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Repo layout

src/
  main.ts              Phaser game config and entry point
  config/balance.ts    EVERY tunable number. Designers live here.
  content/             Dialogue, summary and event text as JSON. Writers live here.
  sim/                 Clock, day/week state, pause stack, events. Pure logic.
  save/                Schema, coercion, storage backend, save service.
  scenes/              Boot, Office, DayEnd
  entities/            Player, and later the NPCs
  world/               ASCII office map, tile vocabulary, room bounds
  art/                 Palette and the procedural placeholder art
  ui/                  Windows 95 chrome, HUD, formatting, summary view-model
  util/                Seeded RNG and URL flags

src/sim and src/save import nothing from Phaser or the DOM, which is what makes them testable in plain node — and what keeps the rules about determinism enforceable rather than aspirational.

Two rules keep the project tunable by two people at once:

• No hard-coded balance numbers outside src/config/balance.ts.
• No player-facing prose outside src/content/.