Burnout

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  Illustration

Inspiration

Every management game lets you build the perfect system. We wanted to build the one where the system is people — brilliant, fragile, petty people who have bad weeks and hold grudges and quit without warning. The inspiration was Darkest Dungeon's character depth, The Office's dark comedy, and the very real feeling of watching a team burn out one payday at a time.

What it does

Burnout is a darkly comic management sim where you run a software studio month by month, trying to reach your scenario's ending (IPO, acquisition, or shipping the impossible project) without going bankrupt or losing your reputation as a boss entirely. Every month is a 30-tile board you roll through — each tile fires an event that forces a human decision: give the raise or hold the line, protect the weekend or approve the crunch. Your employees remember everything.

How we built it

We designed around two questions: what if a management sim had Darkest Dungeon-level character simulation, and what if the whole thing was snackable on a phone? The board structure solves the second — each month has a clear start, a tense middle, and a payday climax. The employee stat system (morale, stress, quirks, relationships, loyalty) solves the first.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing two failure states that both feel fair was the hardest design problem. Bankruptcy is legible — cash hits zero. Reputation collapse is slower and subtler, and we had to tune how quickly cruelty compounds before the difficulty felt fair rather than opaque.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The core insight — that a management sim's real subject is people, not systems — unlocked everything else. Once we committed to that, every mechanic followed: the employee stat block needed depth because people are complex; the monthly board needed a payday climax because people need deadlines; the two failure states needed to be human (bankruptcy and reputation) because in real companies, that is how studios actually die.We're proud that the design feels inevitable in hindsight, even though it took real work to find.

What we learned

Comedy is the most underused tool in management games. Dark consequences land harder when they arrive with a punchline. The die roll also taught us that a single tactile beat of randomness can make a fully turn-based game feel alive without sacrificing strategic depth.

What's next for Burnout

A full scenario arc (The Garage → The Turnaround → The Exit), deeper Office War mechanics (factions, sabotage, romance), and a Board layer that can oust you mid-run. The prototype proves the core loop — the full version grows the cast and the chaos.

Built With

• unity