Crustacean Tycoon — Devlog

The orchestrator landed earlier this week: an auto-buy layer that sits on top of the manager system and picks the next best business to purchase based on payoff per second. Ink management got reworked alongside it — the resource curve needed to breathe a little more at mid-game so the orchestrator wasn't just burning cash on the cheapest row.

Business rows got a proper visual pass. Each one now has an agent sprite that animates on cycle completion, which was a much bigger lift than I expected — the terminal aesthetic doesn't leave a lot of room for decorative pixels, so the sprites had to read clearly at the small row height without breaking the green-on-black palette.

Audio went in last. Bus layout, sound manager autoload, and SFX hooked into the signals GameState already emits — purchase, cycle complete, prestige. Nothing ambient yet, just reactive beeps and clicks, but it does a lot to make the loop feel responsive.

Auto-save on application close was the small fix that had the biggest day-to-day impact. Browsers closing mid-cycle without flushing state was eating runs during playtests.

Two weeks into this one and it finally feels like a game. The core loop is in: tap a business to earn, buy more units to scale payout, hire a manager to auto-cycle. Ten businesses from CSV Parser up through Strategic Planner, each scaling base_cost * 1.15^owned with milestone doublers at 25, 50, 100, 200, 300, 400 units.

Prestige math landed this week. You reset cash, businesses, managers, and upgrades in exchange for a permanent multiplier based on floor(sqrt(lifetime_cash / 1e12)). The confirmation overlay shows your current multiplier next to the new one before you pull the trigger, which made the decision feel way less scary in playtests.

The upgrade system shipped alongside prestige — 14 flat multipliers (10 per-business x3, 4 global), unlocked by owned count or lifetime cash thresholds. Stats overlay now tracks lifetime cash, total prestiges, and session time.

Offline earnings cap at 24 hours and surface in a welcome-back overlay when you reopen the tab. Save-on-every-purchase writes JSON to user://save.json, which is plenty for a web build.

Also added the CRT shader I've been wanting since day one. F1 toggles it. The VT323 font and green-on-black terminal aesthetic were never in doubt, but the scanlines really sell it.