Tech Debt The Game Update 3/2/2026

I have been obsessively working on Tech Debt - The Video Game, and it's been paying off.

The biggest update in this release is breaking the “Product Road Map,” which is sort of like a dungeon map, or if you are familiar with the game Faster Than Light (AKA: FTL) its very similar to their mapping system.

This breaks the game into short 5-day “Sprints” (Levels) which, after the first level, have semi-random modifiers applied to them. Each sprint will have a launch day at the end, which will also have its own unique modifiers applied to it. This should make the game much more re-playable as you unlock new modifier/reward combinations.

For example, you might have a modifier on the amount of traffic you will encounter or the rate at which your infrastructure accrues “tech debt”.

Speaking of tech debt, the more tech debt you have, the higher the likelihood that negative events will happen, like bugs spawning or XSS script attacks.

The good news is that the core game loop is coming together nicely, and it actually feels like you are playing a game and not just a simulation.

The bad news is that I have completely neglected the UI while I focused on the core game loop. So there are a lot of under-the-hood game stats that are being displayed in a text format that is not pretty or easy to understand. I hope to fix this soon, but the programmers/stat geeks might find it interesting.

I also had to remove the Tutorial temporarily as it needs to be updated to work with the new Sprint system.

On the plus side, during the last playtest, I noticed that the game was more stable. Though there were a few times it froze, I think I fixed most of them. You should be able to get to the end of Sprint 2 before you run out of content.

My goal is to keep going hard on the core development through the end of March and have something that is much more stable and flushed out for a possible launch on Steam.

I have commissioned some Steam page art. The image for this is just some AI-generated stuff I used to communicate the ideas to the artist and will NOT be used in the end product.

If anyone is willing to jump on a call and let me watch you run through a play test, let me know.

~Cheers

Matt